Governing the World’s Largest Machine

It is no exaggeration to say that electricity is the single most important public utility to this century’s energy transition. Despite electric power’s present and future importance, however, much of its relevant history, especially in the US, remains poorly understood, hampered by a focus on singular figures and early technical inventions. This panel, by contrast, considers electric power’s institutional history, encompassing the wide range of organizational bodies that govern what is sometimes called the world’s largest coast-to-coast machine. In the US today, a ridiculously complex array of overlapping institutions govern how electricity is generated, transmitted, and marketed. These include large private holding companies owning a dispersed network of operating utilities, locally controlled cooperatives, municipally owned power systems, large federal generation and regional transmission agencies, independent power producers, private transmission owners, distribution-only utilities, and more, not to mention the agencies that regulate the procurement of primary resources and technologies used to generate that electricity in the first place. This complex diversity, however, allows for comparative case studies to identify which institutional arrangements have worked effectively and under what circumstances. By reconsidering the history of cooperative and public power, Sandeep Vaheesan illuminates the ways in which these institutions did and did not live up to their lofty democratic goals and why. In a paper recasting the history of US commercial nuclear power, Ben Kodres-O’Brien reveals the tradeoffs of building and maintaining nuclear power plants under different regulatory regimes. Finally, in a paper on state capacity and the private sector, Johanna Bozuwa (with co-author Patrick Robbins) considers how the recent history of public ownership and private partnerships in the US, Uruguay, South Africa, and France can inform the political possibilities opened by the Inflation Reduction Act. The ultimate aim of the panel is to enhance discussion about the relation between institutional forms and technological systems in the US, and how those arrangements benefit—or do not—a public interest. The ongoing implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act, the regulatory responses of states and municipalities, and the widely-recognized need for permitting and siting reform make such questions all the more urgent.