Public utility commissions (or PUCs, as they’re still generally known) would ensure those for-profit utilities provided reliable and affordable service, and executives could use the rates charged to their customers to fund new infrastructure, like generation plants and power lines. In exchange for submitting to state-level regulation, highly concentrated investor-owned utilities-fierce competitors with public power providers-would receive a monopoly over massive service areas. is built on a bargain struck more than a century ago with a burgeoning class of robber barons. Specifically, they’re asking the agency to explore “unfair competitive actions that harm clean energy competitors, including consumers generating their own renewable electricity” and “unfair and deceptive acts, including corrupt dealings and voting interference, that enrich utilities and ultimately drive up consumer electricity rates and decrease consumer choice.”Įlectricity utility governance in the U.S. This week, 235 organizations-including nonprofits Solar United Neighbors, the Energy and Policy Institute, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Open Markets Institute, as well as a variety of consumer and anti-monopoly advocates, environmental groups, and rooftop solar companies-submitted a petition asking the Federal Trade Commission to open an investigation into investor-owned utilities’ anti-competitive practices and violations of consumer protections. grid is managed by companies that have had regulatory capture and rampant corruption baked into their business model. Given the magnitude of the task ahead, it’s understandable that people are asking questions about how electricity is governed.
Everything from home heating to transportation will need to move to the grid, as a system built to distribute electrons out from a central source transforms to accept them back from millions of rooftop solar arrays-all as it swiftly excises coal and gas and weathers the climate crisis those fuel sources have already created. The United States will be asking a lot of its electric grid over the coming decades.
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