I shuddered as I covered the public hearing Thursday night on Evergy’s request for an electric rate increase — because I remember California.

Evergy is requesting a bold increase of 8.62% in its rates.

That’s $196.4 million spread across 735,000 customers of what used to be known as Westar Energy, until a 2018 merger with the former Kansas City Power & Light Co. changed it all into Evergy.

The rate increase request includes Wichita, Olathe, Topeka, Lawrence and a host of smaller cities including Manhattan, Pittsburg, Leavenworth, Hutchinson and Salina.

If it were to pass as proposed, the increase would be just over $13 a month for the average residential customer.

But that’s not what worries me. Rate cases are decided by the Kansas Corporation Commission after a court-like adversarial process between the utility lawyers and lawyers representing customers, and the utility almost never gets as much as it asks for.

What really sent a chill through my spine was when Wichita resident Lori Lawrence proposed getting rid of the regulated monopoly where the KCC sets Evergy’s rates, and replacing it with a competitive system where you can — supposedly — choose your electric company.

“One of the biggest problems with how we do our energy supply in Kansas is the regional monopoly issue that we are all faced with,” Lawrence said. “This lets Evergy, as we saw on the map, control half of our state, and we have no other options.

“The regional monopoly system needs to be disbanded,” Lawrence said.

“Kansas Corporation Commission, I’m speaking to you; legislators that might be in the room, I’m speaking to you: if we have a competitive rate system in our state, in our city, we would see lower rates because there would be competition.”

And people clapped for that.

I like Lori Lawrence. She’s the chair of the local Sierra Club and I agree with her on a lot of things.

But she’s wrong on this one — catastrophically wrong.

I was a California journalist when the state decided to switch most of its electric system from a regulated monopoly to competition — and it was one of the biggest economic disasters in state history.

It started in 1996, when the Legislature passed and Gov. Pete Wilson signed a bill to replace state regulation of power companies with consumer choice and competition, also known as “retail wheeling.”

Over the next few years, a handful of mammoth energy-trading conglomerates — led by the late and unlamented Enron Corp. — gained control of California’s power generation and manipulated prices and supply, raising rates through the roof and causing rolling blackouts and brownouts across the state.