Debates over electricity policy usually have a common starting point: the “natural monopoly” of the transmission system, wherein the poles and wires that connect power plants to homes and businesses have exclusive franchises in a certain territory and charge regulated rates to access them.
The thinking is that without a monopoly franchise, no one would make the necessary capital expenditures to build and maintain the power lines and grid infrastructure necessary to connect the whole system, especially if they thought someone would build a new transmission line nearby. So while a government body oversees investment and prices, the utility itself is not subject to market-based competition.
But what if someone really did want to build their own wires?
“There are at least two of us who do not think that electricity is a natural monopoly,” Glen Lyons, the founder of Advocates for Consumer Regulated Electricity, told me.
The other one is Travis Fisher, an energy scholar at the Cato Institute, who corrected his friend and colleague.
“Between me, and Joseph Schumpeter, and Wayne Crews, and Glen Lyons, there’s at least four of us. Only three of us are alive,” Fisher said, referencing the Austrian economist Schumpeter, who died in 1950, and the libertarian scholar Crews, who was a critic of the restructuring of the electricity market in the 1990s.
Fisher and Lyons, however, are the team behind a proposal put out on Tuesday by the libertarian Cato Institute calling for “consumer-regulated electricity.” Instead of a transmission system with a monopoly franchise that independent generators can connect to and sell power to utilities in a process regulated by a combination of a public utility commission and regional transmission organization or independent system operators, CRE systems would be physically islanded electricity systems that customers would privately and voluntarily sign up for.
Crucially, CRE would not be regulated under existing federal law, and would have no connection to the existing grid, allowing for novel price structures and even physical set-ups, like running on different frequencies or even direct current, Fisher said.
They would also, Fisher and Lyons argue, help solve the dilemma haunting electricity policymakers: how to bring new load on the grid quickly without saddling existing ratepayers with the cost of paying for utility upgrades.
“If enabled, CRE utilities would generate, transmit, and sell electricity directly to customers under voluntary contracts, without interconnecting to the existing regulated grid or seeking permission from economic regulators at the state or federal level,” the Cato proposal reads.
This idea has a natural audience among political conservatives, as it’s essentially a bet that more entrepreneurship and less regulation will solve some of our biggest energy system problems. On the other hand, utilities tend to be a powerful force in conservative politics at both the state and federal levels, which is one reason why these kinds of ideas are still marginal.
But less marginal than they have been.
Consumer-regulated electricity is more than just another think tank white paper. It has also won the approval of the influential American Legislative Exchange Council, better known as ALEC, a conservative group that writes model legislation for state legislatures to adopt. Fisher proposed version of the consumer-regulated utilities plan to the network in December of last year, and ALEC approved it in January.
A few days after the group finalized the model policy to allow CRE at the state level, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton proposed his own version in the form of the DATA Act, which would “amend the Federal Power Act to exempt consumer-regulated electric utilities from Federal regulation.”
While the CRE proposal is a big conceptual departure from about a century of electricity regulation, the actual reform is modest. Fisher and Lyons propose a structure would apply solely to “sophisticated customers … who voluntarily contract for service and can manage their own risks,” i.e. big industrial users like data centers, not your home.
While this sounds like behind the meter generation, whereby large electricity users such as, say, xAI in Memphis, simply set up their own electricity plants, CRE goes further. The idea is to capture the self-regulation benefits of building your own power within a structure that still allows for the economies of scale of a grid. Or in the words of Cato’s proposal, CRE “would enable third-party utilities to serve many customers, resulting in lower costs, higher reliability, and a smaller environmental footprint compared to self-supply options.”
Fisher and Lyons argue that CRE would also have an advantage over so-called co-location, where data centers are built adjacent to generation and share interconnection with the grid, which still requires interacting with public utility commissions and utilities. The pair have also suggested that the Department of Energy and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission use its existing rulemaking process on data center interconnection to encourage states to pass the necessary laws to allow islanded utility systems.
While allowing totally private utility systems may be a radical — and certainly a libertarian — departure from the utility regulation system as it exists today, proposals are popping up on both the left and the right to try to reduce utility influence over the electricity system.
Tom Steyer, the hedge fund billionaire and climate investor who is running for governor of California, has said that he would “break up the utility monopolies to lower electric bills by 25%.” In a January press conference, Steyer clarified that he “wants to force utility companies to choose cheaper ways of wildfire-proofing their infrastructure and give customers other options for buying power, including making it easier to build neighborhood-level solar projects or allowing more communities to operate their own local grids,” according to CalMatters. California already has some degree of retail choice, although a more expansive version of a retail competition model infamously collapsed during the 2001 rolling blackouts.
To Fisher, while his and Lyons’ proposal is in some ways radical, it is also not a particularly big risk. If there’s truly no demand for private electricity networks, none will be built and nothing will change, even if there’s regulatory reform to allow for it. “I’m not surprised to see it get traction,” Fisher said of the plan, “just because there’s no downside, and the upside could be absolutely nothing — or it could be a breakthrough.”
