We’ve gotten a taste of Third World life thanks to some particularly nasty power outages, most recently the week-long blackout following Tropical Storm Irene.

But towns and cities fed up enough to go it alone in hopes of getting better service and electric rates by setting up their own mini power companies are finding their efforts blocked by a Beacon Hill power play.

A proposal that would revamp ancient regulations and streamline the process under which local communities can buy back their power lines and poles has been stuck in limbo on Beacon Hill for the past decade amid fierce lobbying by the big utility companies.

There are currently 41 town and city-owned power companies across the state. But all were started in the 1920s or earlier, with outdated and creaky regulations effectively barring any additional communities from making the jump.

And given the hundreds of thousands of dollars the big utilities have pumped into lobbying – and tens of thousands more in contributions targeted at key legislative decision makers – lawmakers on Beacon Hill don’t appear to be in a hurry to take action, according to the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.

“We have basically gotten the big stall,” said Paul Chernick, president of Resource Insight and utility industry expert who has spent ten years pushing municipal power bills.

No side show, this is a battle whose outcome could have an impact on consumers and businesses alike across the Bay State amid rising concerns about the reliability of our state’s electric grid.

A Shining Light

The latest sign that the big electric utilities most of us rely on could use a good jolt of healthy competition came in August with Tropical Storm Irene.

It took roughly a week for NStar and National Grid to get all the lights back, no matter that Irene, by the time it washed up here in Massachusetts, had been downgraded from a hurricane.

And the mass outages came with painful memories still fresh in many towns and cities across of the catastrophic 2008 ice storm, which left Fitchburg and other communities in the dark and cold for two weeks.

Faced with outrage over how the Irene outages were handled, state regulators are holding a series of hearings across the state, while Attorney General Martha Coakley has launched her own review.

Given the struggles the big utilities are clearly having getting the lights back on after bouts with bad weather, the idea that towns and cities could do the job better by setting up their mini power companies might seem utopian.

But advocates say Irene, if anything, proved the value of municipal power companies.

Amid all the outages triggered by Irene, towns with their own municipal power companies managed to get their lights back in a day at the most, and often in a matter of hours.

Wellesley, which has its own power company, had most of its lights back on the same day. Next door, in Natick, it took nearly a week for NStar to do the job.

The same pattern was replicated across the state.

Taunton, a municipal power town, was ablaze with light even as officials in nearby Bridgewater were fuming about the being stuck with a single repair crew. The lights were also back on in Mansfield, another muni-power town, long before some of its neighbors.

Other towns that stood out as beacons of light during the storm include Belmont, Concord, North Attleboro, Georgetown and Braintree – all communities with their own power companies.

Hollow Arguments

The key to success in those towns is nothing mysterious. These little power companies know their towns and flood the zone with repair crews when a storm hits.

By contrast, while the big utility companies boast of their vast corporate resources, a common complaint during and after the storm by fire chiefs and selectmen alike was that line crews were hard to find.

More impressively, muni-power towns generally boast lower electric rates to boot.

So what’s the holdup at the State House?

For one, lawmakers complain it’s all so complex and they need time to look at the latest municipal power bill.

But after a decade of proposals that have gone nowhere, hasn’t there been more than enough time to digest this issue? The details of casino legislation – or for that matter, health care reform – can be mind boggling, but that hasn’t stopped lawmakers from plunging ahead.

After all, we are talking about electric power lines, not cloud computing.

For their part, the power companies contend they want to be paid fairly if a bill passes and towns and cities move ahead and buy out their local power lines and poles. But the sky-high compensation numbers thrown out have no bearing on current market reality, muni-power backers contend.

Finally, the utilities contend towns could end up paying more for power after they spend all that money to buy their local electric grids.

Then why bother to lobby against the bill? After all, if it costs more in the end for communities to go the municipal power route, there are likely to be few if any takers at a time when local coffers are bare.

The arguments don’t add up. Unfortunately, the money spent on lobbying against the muni-power bill clearly does.