What changed when deregulation began?
The large monopolies that previously existed were forced to split into smaller, specific entities. These new entities are completely independent of each other, and share no common employees, offices or computer systems. Typically they divided three ways, each new company did one of the following tasks: Generation (making the electricity in bulk), Transmission and Distribution (transporting the electricity from the generator to your home or business and Retail (buying the bulk electricity and selling to you as an individual- billing each customer for the power they use). Other companies formed at this time to compete for the retail portion of this process; allowing you the consumer to choose your power provider, without needing to worry about how the power gets to your home or the reliability of the service.
