How Utilities Quietly Wrote America's Clean Energy Laws
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- Joshua Basseches published "Owning the Green Grid" with MIT Press, drawing on legislative texts from roughly 30 states to show how utility companies shaped Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) laws through privileged access to legislatures and public utility commissions.
- Basseches found that utility influence varied dramatically by state: in some, utilities acted as key enablers of renewable energy policy, while in others where they owned expensive fossil-fuel generation assets, they behaved more like oil and gas interests.
- The first RPS law was likely Iowa's in 1983, but the model didn't spread until the late 1990s when Arizona, Nevada, and Texas adopted their own laws, with California and many others following in the early 2000s.
- California's RPS now requires 60% renewable electricity by 2030 and 100% renewable or carbon-free sources by 2045, and several states have already exceeded their statutory targets.
- Texas adopted a pioneering RPS in 1999 despite being a Republican-dominated, major fossil-fuel-producing state, coupling the mandate with a utility restructuring that split electric companies into generators, transmission/distribution utilities, and retail electric providers — a move Basseches argues fractured incumbent interests and enabled the policy.
- Basseches argues that the RPS heyday has passed because wind and solar are now among the cheapest energy options, and he contends that state public utility commissions remain the dominant force in U.S. electricity policy despite major changes under President Donald Trump's administration.
- Basseches, who teaches at Tulane University, is moving this summer to Case Western Reserve University to take a similar role in environmental studies and public policy.
Why it matters: Basseches's research reframes the standard narrative of U.S. clean energy policy: renewables advanced not primarily through federal mandates or grassroots pressure, but through utility companies leveraging state-level regulatory access to write rules favorable to their own balance sheets. That finding matters because it suggests the same utility lobbying power that shaped the first wave of climate policy still operates in roughly 30 state capitols, and remains a bigger determinant of the energy transition's pace than White House actions.
