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Opinion: Getting rid of competition is not the answer to power grid crisis

This op-ed appeared in the Hartford Courant on August 28, 2026

Opinion: Eliminating competition not answer to power grid crisis

America’s electric grid is in trouble. Demand is surging for the first time in a generation, driven by data centers and the electrification of everything from cars to home heating. Costs are rising. New power plants and transmission lines can’t get built fast enough. And the utilities responsible for the grid have largely responded by asking to be shielded from competition.

Rather than proposing solutions to the grid’s actual problems, many utilities are using this moment to roll back the reforms that forced them to compete in the first place.

This campaign is unfolding on several fronts. In New York and the mid-Atlantic, utilities are backing legislation that would let them own large-scale renewable generation for the first time in a quarter century, reversing reforms that pushed them out of the power-plant business in the 1990s. In the Midwest and Plains, incumbent transmission owners have asked regulators to prohibit competitive bidding for power lines. And across the country, utilities have blocked energy-efficiency programs and kept independent storage projects waiting in line for years to connect to the grid.

In each case, utilities are making the same argument: get rid of competition, and we’ll build faster and cheaper. There is little evidence for that claim, and a great deal against it.

The demands point in different directions. In New York, utilities want to return to a business—generating power—that the state opened to competition. In the Midwest, they want to keep rivals out of a business—building transmission—that they already control. The common thread is a desire to avoid market discipline while shifting risk to consumers.

The grid’s problems are real, but competition did not cause them. Permitting a new transmission line can take a decade. Supply chains for transformers and turbines are backlogged for years. And the process for connecting a new project to the grid—the“interconnection queue”—is a bureaucratic nightmare, with developers waiting years forstudies that should take months. These are genuine bottlenecks. But utilities manage thetransmission system and perform many interconnection studies, and the congestion they now cite as a reason to eliminate competition exists in part because they spent years opposing the transmission projects that would have relieved it.

Competition has lowered costs and spurred innovation. When New York required utilities to sell their power plants and let independent producers compete, wholesale power costs fell, hundreds of suppliers entered the market, and emissions dropped faster than in states where utilities kept their plants. National studies find that competitive wholesale markets deliver cheaper power and faster innovation than vertically integrated monopolies. Texas, home to the country’s most competitive electricity market, connects new resources faster than anywhere else, helping make it the national leader in wind, utility-scale solar, and battery storage.

There is no shortage of would-be builders. More than 2,000 gigawatts of proposed generation and storage are waiting in interconnection queues nationwide—roughly double the capacity ofevery power plant now operating in the United States. The problem is that the grid cannot get projects onto the system fast enough. More utility ownership will not fix that.

The deeper problem with utility ownership is who bears the losses when things go wrong. When an independent developer’s wind farm runs over budget or never gets finished, the developer absorbs the loss. When a regulated utility builds the same project, overruns are passed to captive customers. New York utilities’ own transmission projects reveal the systemic challenge. NYS Electric and Gas’s transmission upgrades exceeded its budget by $500 million and ConEdison’s East River Repowering Project ballooned from $406 million to$788 million. When an independent developer overshoots, investors lose money. When utilities overshoot, New York ratepayers foot the bill.

If competition lowers costs, why have electric bills not fallen? Because retail prices reflect many factors, including fuel costs, policy choices, and even weather. Some savings never reach the consumer because utilities recapture them. So competition did not fail; utilities benefit too much from the status quo.

Letting the companies that own the wires also own power plants makes this worse. A utility that controls transmission has every reason to make interconnection smooth for its own projects and slow for everyone else’s, and to steer grid investment toward lines that protect its assets rather than lower costs for customers.

New York’s regulators have reached the same conclusion repeatedly over the past two decades: utility-owned generation is anticompetitive, and it dulls the incentive to invest in the wires the grid actually needs.

The country needs to build an enormous amount of infrastructure quickly and cheaply, and competition is one of the best tools for doing that. This crisis is a reason to fix what is broken, not an excuse to get rid of what works.

Joshua Macey is a professor of law at Yale Law School. Macey teaches and writes about bankruptcy, environmental law, energy law, and the regulation of financial institutions.