As electricity bills have risen in recent years, some customers of Denton’s municipally owned electric company — and we do not except ourselves — have wondered about the city’s decision not to opt for deregulation, as a much ballyhooed 1999 state law allowed it to do. Recent developments tend to show that our city leaders may have made the right decision.

A front-page article in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal reports that far from lowering electric rates, as was predicted by its supporters, the deregulation of Texas’ electric power market has failed to stop higher rates at all. In fact, the Journal reported, Texas has gone from having some of the lowest electric rates in the country to having some of the highest.

Deregulation was supposed to bring prices down by offering choices to consumers. No longer would they be forced to buy electricity from a company granted a monopoly by a city or state government; they could choose to sign up with any of several power companies, which would then be encouraged by market forces to moderate their prices.

It hasn’t worked out that way. The price of natural gas has soared, and Texas electric rates are geared to that cost, even at coal-fired generating plants. The result is a rate that varies in Texas from 13 cents per kilowatt-hour to 27 cents. The national average is 10 cents. Seasonal spikes in demand can cause even higher rates for brief periods. On a hot day in May, the Journal reported, wholesale prices rose briefly to more than $4 a kilowatt-hour.

The 1999 legislation that deregulated the power industry in Texas allowed cities such as Denton that owned their own power companies to opt out of the deregulation process, and Denton chose to do so. It was not a surprising move. Why would a monopoly, even a publicly owned one, choose to voluntarily open itself up to competition?

But as the rates of Denton Municipal Electric have risen, and news reports have revealed a string of less-than-sterling management on the part of DME and its officials, some of us have been thinking we might like to have the option of shopping elsewhere for our electricity, if only as a protest against what appeared to be sloppy management on DME’s part.

Now it turns out that deregulation hasn’t resulted in the savings that its supporters predicted. The Journal reported that five retail companies that have marketed electric power to homeowners and small business have failed. Texas legislators are quoted as being alarmed at the result but unwilling to back off from the concept of deregulation.

Denton’s reluctance to jump on the bandwagon is looking pretty smart.