It is a tiny,flickering signal of an expensive problem looming for tens of millions of Americans: the cost of electricity for households in this southern Pennsylvania town soared this year by 31 percent, or an average of $24 a month.
Like the nation’s highways and bridges, the network of transmission lines has not been maintained and expanded enough to meet growing demand, the United States Department of Energy says. In areas where there are not enough lines to transmit electricity from the most efficient generating stations, utilities must find other sources. Sometimes they have to buy from costlier power plants nearby, like drivers forced by highway bottlenecks onto slower side roads.
The problem already affects about 40 million people from metropolitan New York to Virginia as well as 18 million in Southern Califomia. Similar but smaller price increases will hit New England, the San Francisco Bay Area and the Seattle-Portland and Phoenix-Tucson corridors until new transmission lines are built.
These higher costs, known as congestion charges, added $5.7 million to the cost of electricity in Chambersburg this year, which the borough(区) has paid from a reserve fund rather than apply them directly to utility bills.
Over all, the Energy Department estimates, congestion charges in 2008 will add $8 billion or solabout $40 a person--to electricity costs on the Eastern grid(输电网), which serves almost 200 million people east of the Rockies except for Texas. The department did not make an estimate for the Western grids.
These congestion charges would raise electricity prices by about a nickel on the dollar if they were spread evenly, but in fact some customers pay far more and others pay nothing.
Sometimes there is disagreement on how to measure congestion charges. The Energy Department estimates these charges for New York residents in the New York City area at almost $90 each last year, while the operators of the electricity network for the state say the cost was about $8. The extra charges could continue for years, because building new transmission lines can take at least a decade.
The congested transmission network has frustrated the many that supported the opening of the electricity industry to competition a decade ago, hoping that prices would fall. Under the old system, regulated monopolies made and delivered power in their own area, with only small sales outside. The new system is intended to encourage a competitive business in which power is distributed over vast regional networks. But for electric prices to fall, the network must be able to move power from the lowest-cost plants to where it is needed, utility industry experts said.
"Fully competitive markets and the tremendous added value that could be provided to customers have been stalled" by a transmission network that is too small and was not designed for competitive markets, three executives of National Grid, an electricity distribution company, wrote last year in the Electricity Journal.
Which of the followings is the best title for the passage