216 



Mr. Drummond. One last thing, and it is an issue that has not 

 come up here in any of the panels that I have heard so far, and 

 that is the issue of retail wheeling. 



Mr. DeFazio. Is what? 



Mr. Drummond. Retail wheeling. 



Mr. DeFazio. Well I referred to it in my opening statement. I al- 

 luded to it. 



Mr. Drummond. I would suggest that whether or not you believe 

 retail wheeling is appropriate, whether or not it comes, it may in 

 fact force a lot of these changes even more quickly than we envi- 

 sioned, just because customers of the utilities will demand the sorts 

 of changes 



Mr. DeFazio. Right. I am not sure what Congress did in the En- 

 ergy Act as pertains to retail wheeling. I think that will be deter- 

 mined by FERC or further guidance from Congress. But I was al- 

 luding to that when I made the analogy to the phone system. You 

 know, the MCIs, the Sprints and that, very competitive, brought 

 down costs for a lot of folks. You get to another point, the individ- 

 ual consumers. You may be adding essentially built-in costs with 

 more diversity and bureaucracy and that. Retail wheeling, I have 

 some tremendous skepticism about getting up in the morning and 

 reading my computer printout and pushing the button for my pro- 

 vider for the day, you know, or whatever time of day I am given 

 the option. I am not sure that Congress has opened that door yet. 

 In my opinion, I do not think it was opened by that Act, but there 

 may be other opinions. 



I really want to thank you for the amount of time and the good 

 testimony. It was very helpful to me and we will have more oppor- 

 tunities to talk. 



We are now going to take a brief break for lunch so that we will 

 not keep the next panel unduly, so 20 minutes from whatever your 

 watch says, from now, we will convene the final panel. 



[Whereupon, at 12:55 p.m., the task force recessed, to reconvene 

 at 1:15 p.91., the same day.] 



