Deadly wildfires started by poorly maintained power lines killed dozens of Californians. Power outages across Texas were attributed to the RTO’s failure to winterize and insulate its power generation sources and dozens of deaths in Texas were attributed to these power outages, including an 11-year-old boy whose mother filed a lawsuit blaming the RTO for the power outage that caused her 11-year-old son to freeze to death.

In states with unregulated power markets and RTOs, citizens have been hit with power bills of over $10,000 per month, even as they endure rolling blackouts. The Wall Street Journal reported Texans paid over $28 Billion dollars more for power through their RTO than they would have paid through a traditional public utility model.

Big Tech companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon – companies with a history of cutting off services to people they disagree with politically – can have a big role in supplying your home electricity through an RTO. A recent Forbes report showed that while residential customers paid more under an RTO model, the Tech Giants pushing RTOs in North Carolina paid less for their electricity.

Eliminating our North Carolina-headquartered traditional public utility companies and replacing them with an out-of-state RTO will cost thousands of North Carolinians their good-paying jobs.

To maximize profits, RTOs and power suppliers in deregulated markets often fail to properly maintain and winterize the power system. In California, the result was rolling blackouts and downed transmission lines that sparked horrific wildfires, billions of dollars of economic damage and dozens of deaths. In Texas, the result was frozen windmills, iced-over solar panels, gas supply outages and shutdown municipal water and sewer systems that caused billions in economic damage and numerous fatalities. Worst of all, Bloomberg News recently reported one of the financial backers of a company that supplies household power in Texas made a $220 million dollar windfall off the Artic Blast power crisis.