How Big Utilities are Impeding Clean Energy, and What We Can Do About It

Corporate utilities dominate how electricity is generated, transmitted, and distributed or sold to the customer — resulting in both a lack of safety measures as well as costly, short-sided, and dirty energy investments. This affects all of us as we confront our climate crisis and disproportionately harms the communities of color and low-income households that live near dirty power plants and within warmer inner cities. The solution to concentration lies in embracing decentralized ownership and generation. Acting individually or collectively, we have a new opportunity to bypass concentrated power and build wealth by using local solar energy to power our lives. This report describes how state and local policy solutions can foster those community-based clean energy solutions. Efforts include broadening usage data access to ensure transparency, preventing conflicts of interest between utilities and regulatory commissions, and enforcing fair compensation and rate standards to cut into monopolies market dominance.