Electric utility monopolies have captured headlines in recent years by sparking catastrophic wildfires and fomenting public corruption scandals in several states. "There are probably other things like this going on we just haven't found out about," remarks John Farrell, director of the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. We spoke with him about his recent article in the American Prospect, How private monopolies fuel climate disaster and public corruption.
Farrell speaks to how the investor-owned utility's interests in earning a return for its shareholders typically don't align with the interests of its customers or the environment. "You have concentrated ownership and power over the system in a way that's not terribly accountable to people," Farrell observes.
Farrell advocates municipalization, seeing publicly owned monopolies as an improvement over for-profit utility monopolies, particularly when it comes to cost of capital. But he also advocates for greater competition in electricity, and for adopting measures such as independent distribution system management and quarantining the monopoly from competitive markets. "When you create a competitive market, it really needs to be truly competitive. And the idea of letting the monopoly continue to participate is problematic," he says.
Electric utility monopolies have captured headlines in recent years by sparking catastrophic wildfires and fomenting public corruption scandals in several states. "There are probably other things like this going on we just haven't found out about," remarks John Farrell, director of the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. We spoke with him about his recent article in the American Prospect, How private monopolies fuel climate disaster and public corruption.
Farrell speaks to how the investor-owned utility's interests in earning a return for its shareholders typically don't align with the interests of its customers or the environment. "You have concentrated ownership and power over the system in a way that's not terribly accountable to people," Farrell observes.
Farrell advocates municipalization, seeing publicly owned monopolies as an improvement over for-profit utility monopolies, particularly when it comes to cost of capital. But he also advocates for greater competition in electricity, and for adopting measures such as independent distribution system management and quarantining the monopoly from competitive markets. "When you create a competitive market, it really needs to be truly competitive. And the idea of letting the monopoly continue to participate is problematic," he says.
EMP S3E19: John Farrell, Director of the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance
(transcript edited for clarity)
EMP: Welcome to the Energy Markets Podcast. Our conversation today is with John Farrell, director of the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. John, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
JF: Oh, it's my pleasure to be here.
EMP: So we reached out to you because of an opinion piece you wrote recently, which caught our attention, but we'll get into that in a bit. First, what is the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and then please explain what the Institute's Energy Democracy Project does.
JF: Yeah, well, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance has been around a long time actually. We're celebrating our 50th anniversary next year. And our broad aim and mission has been to help communities capture the most of their human and economic resources during that entire time. So we work across the economy, on energy, on waste, supporting independent businesses, on community-owned broadband. So all sorts of different areas of our economy that can be impacted locally and can have an impact locally. And the Energy Democracy Initiative, is just that, you know, one sector out of those many where we focus on how do we push back against corporate concentration and monopoly power, and how do we build more local power for decision making around the energy economy.
EMP: So your piece in the American Prospect popped up in my news feed. It's headlined, How private monopolies fuel climate disaster and public corruption. Don't hold back, John, tell us how you feel. (laughter) In it, you wrote, quote, “Nearly two thirds of Americans receive their electricity from for-profit corporations granted a monopoly over electricity distribution. In theory, state regulation protects the public from the excesses of these private companies. In practice, weak laws, poor oversight, and the swelling power of consolidation allow state-sponsored utility monopolies to cut corners and choke off competition in order to maximize profits.” You want to flesh that out for us?
JF: I think when you talk to most Americans about where they get their electricity, they'll tell you I know I pay an electric bill, but they're not going to know what kind of company it is that provides that service. And so one of the things I really wanted to outline in that piece was, for most people, if you live in a city, you're probably getting your electricity from what's called an investor-owned utility. So it's a private company or a publicly traded company that is owned by shareholders. And it has, generally speaking, the laws that govern its operation allow it to have a monopoly over who it serves. So you don't get to choose who your electric utility is, in many cases. And in particular, what I focus on as well is that, even if you live in a place like Texas or Ohio, where you can pick your electric utility, you're only picking the person who actually generates the electricity and sells it to you. You're not necessarily picking the one who owns the wires in the meters. Pretty much everywhere in our country, that's a monopoly and you never have a choice about who puts the meter on your house. And the thing that I think most people don't understand very well about it is that those private monopolies have certain incentives, of course, to maximize profit, like any private company. And while they're publicly regulated, those regulators are vastly outgunned in terms of making sure that they're protecting the public interest against what these companies are trying to do in their own self-interest. And so, without casting any shade, or, you know, demonizing the people who are working for these companies, they're all acting very rationally, I think. It's just that their rational behavior is not in our interest and is causing, you know, contributing to climate change, raising our rates really high and otherwise making our communities more difficult to live in.
EMP: Yeah, you mentioned a few specific instances in the article. You talked about the bribery scandal that emerged out of Ohio and you talked about a situation in Florida. You want to elaborate on that for us?
JF: Yeah, so Ohio is, I mean, a particularly egregious case, although I would say about it as well is that, there are probably other things like this going on we just haven't found out about. But what happened in Ohio was a couple of utilities there had been restructured 20 years ago so that their power plants were actually facing some competition. And in that competitive market they were losing. And they wanted to basically claw back that competitive market and protect their power plants, which were no longer competitive. And so in order to do that they gave a bunch of money to a candidate for the State House, and gave him a bunch of money in order to support other candidates to support him winning his election, becoming House Speaker, helping to nominate and put in place a regulator that would oversee the utility that would be very friendly. They put, I think, somewhere on the order of $60 million was passed through illegally through various sort of shell companies and sort of dark money organizations to support this election scheme. And the result of it was that the Ohio Legislature, and then signed by the governor, passed a bill called House Bill 6, I think it was in 2021. And it essentially rolled back a bunch of legislation around clean energy and energy efficiency that was likely to make electricity less expensive in Ohio. And then it also created massive subsidies for these coal and nuclear plants that were no longer competitive on the open market to the tune of billions of dollars. And so Ohio residents will end up paying far, far, more for their electric bills in order to prop up these plants. And despite the fact that they got caught so that the utility has admitted fault, the House speaker has had to resign and is under investigation and, you know, facing a corruption trial. The Ohio Legislature still has not undone that legislation. And so Ohio residents are still suffering from the consequences of that corrupt activity.
EMP: And in Florida?
JF: So in Florida, I mean, there are actually numerous examples. The one I talked about in the article was that Florida Power & Light has often found a very favorable environment in the Legislature there for things that it wants, whether it's constraining the public regulator from exercising its full oversight or, for example, trying to push through legislation that would prohibit or severely constrain the ability of individual Florida homeowners to put solar on their rooftop. And so they were getting involved in elections down there. And what they were doing was helping to support candidates who had very similar names to incumbent Democratic elected officials to siphon off votes in some of these very competitive races in order to try to defeat them. And often these were legislators who were creating policy or considering policy that would hold the utility more accountable or protect consumers that the utility didn't like. These were so-called “ghost candidates” because they weren't very serious candidates. It was like they found some guy who just happened to have the last name Rodriguez, which was the same as the incumbent legislator, and they paid them some money to go ahead and register to be on the ballot, but they weren't a serious alternative to the incumbent candidate. They weren't a serious candidate for the office. And as a result, they were successful in at least a couple of cases in having those ghost candidates siphon off enough votes that the opponent to the incumbent won.
EMP: Well, we could go on there's lots of horror stories in this regard. But what is it that your group proposes to address these issues?
JF: So when we talk about ourselves as the Energy Democracy Initiative, we talk about energy democracy as both widely distributing the decision-making power over the energy system and widely distributing who produces the energy in the energy system. And so the problem with the investor-owned utility model is that it does neither of those things. You have concentrated ownership and power over the system in a way that's not terribly accountable to people. And they tend to resist the kinds of distributed generation of electricity like solar on rooftops or solar on churches, or, you know, solar on community centers, all of those kinds of things that can both help people cut their electric bills, can reduce pollution, can make buildings more resilient, especially if they're paired with batteries in the light of natural disasters. So our belief is that we need to seriously question whether or not this is a model that works anymore. And our argument is that it has failed, that we stood it up 100 years ago when there were elements in economic theory that suggested having monopolies actually made some sense. But we're not at that point anymore. We're at a point where there's robust innovation from every quarter in electricity and electricity markets from generating power to storing energy to controlling when you charge things like electric vehicles or appliances. How thermostats work. We have the sophisticated enough technology to aggregate together customers to act in groups in ways that can offer very effective services to the grid. And we don't need to mediate all of that through a monopoly company, especially one that has its own private shareholder interest that is distinct from the public interest. So we either have to dramatically fix and align the interests of the utility shareholder with the customer, which I think is possible, but challenging, because you have so much political power in the utility that is not interested in change because of its size, or we need to start breaking up the utility into smaller functions that make more sense. And I think in particular focusing on who owns the grid, who owns the wires, who owns the meters, who owns the infrastructure that allows us to do the innovation to deliver electricity services. And the problem is that keeping that in private hands means that we're going to have a lot of trouble tapping into the innovation and entrepreneurship that we're seeing already in the industry.
EMP: So you mentioned the American Public Power Association and a municipalization effort under way in Maine. So do you see public power as the answer?
JF: I see public power as a crucial accountability tool just like President Roosevelt did during the New Deal. He called public power, or the ability to seek public power, as the birch rod in the cupboard to discipline an unruly electric utility. And it was particularly pointed at the time because electric utilities and the holding companies that they constructed in the 1920s actually helped contribute to the Great Depression because they got out of the business of electricity and into all sorts of unregulated and distinct industries that were unrelated to electricity. And people mistakenly thought that these were very trustworthy and stable stocks to invest in and when all of that came crashing down, the electric utility stocks were a big part of what caused the Great Depression. And so Roosevelt saw, among other things, which included some federal legislation that then passed in the ‘30s, to regulate these monopoly companies, saw it as really important as do we that we have that public option, as available. I think that public option is really essential.
EMP: So you would replace the investor-owned monopoly with a publicly owned monopoly?
JF: I think that's one option. So you have, for example, in Boulder, Colorado, there was a municipalization effort and they would have transformed the investor-owned utility – the portion of the investor-owned utility service area that served Boulder, the City of Boulder, into a public monopoly. And I think that would have been significantly better than what preceded it for sure. It wasn't successful at the end, even despite a long campaign. But there's a lot of evidence that publicly owned utilities have lower-cost service and higher reliability, which are two of the core functions of an electric utility. So yes, I think we would be better off. But that being said, I think we would be best off if the public ownership were just of the infrastructure. So you think about how we use roads, for example, or about transportation in general. The infrastructure is publicly owned so that we can have lots of competing and innovative uses of that service. So, you know, public streets can be used for ebikes and scooters and cars and buses and we all pay for that with our taxes to allow all of these different businesses to use that area, you know, for package delivery, for example. You have the Postal Service, DHL, FedEx UPS, and they all have nondiscriminatory access to use that infrastructure to deliver packages. And that's the kind of thing that we need in the electricity system is we need a neutral party in that role of running the system. And then we don't need a monopoly over the rest of those functions. We don't have to have the same entity that owns the wires be the one that generates the electricity. In fact, there's no reason to do that, because we have many, many ways to generate electricity at small scale and large scale. And we have lots of capital available to invest in that if it were the case that people weren't worried about being discriminated against by the incumbent utility having its own self-interest. So I would love to see us break apart those functions and have a much smaller, publicly owned or independent operator for the electricity system, and then have the other functions of that system – whether that's building power lines or power plants – be controlled by somebody else.
EMP: My personal opinion is there's not a lot of difference between publicly owned utilities, whether it's municipally owned utilities or cooperatives, and the investor-owned utilities when it comes to certain outcomes. They’re still monopolies. You still can't get outside of the monopoly and buy from a different provider. And the expense of buying out the investor-owned utility is just going to saddle the ratepayers with that debt. And I think that's why Boulder didn't, didn't happen. And it'll be interesting to watch the referendum in Maine on Pine Tree Power, but a lot of money is going to be spent on that. And I think when people realize just the enormous expense of buying that infrastructure, they might vote it down. But we'll see what happens.
JF: You know, I would push back a little bit on the cost issue because the truth is when you are buying the asset of the grid, you're also buying a revenue stream. So it kind of like to your point about, if it's still a monopoly, it means that nobody else is going to be competing with them to deliver services. So if I have to pay a billion dollars for the grid in Maine, I also am buying a bunch of captive customers who are going to have to buy services from me. And so that purchase price does matter. Don't get me wrong, like if you pay too much for it, it will make your electricity potentially more expensive. And unfortunately, that's another place where investor-owned utilities have proven really apt at playing the game. One of the few communities that has successfully switched from private to public power in the past 20 years – Winter Park, Florida – did so only because they already had a previously existing contract with the utility that defined what the appropriate purchase price was. And we do find otherwise in these situations that investor-owned utilities quote a price way above the actual value of the grid assets, as you would expect them to because they're looking out for their shareholders. So I think those transformations – there's no question that they would be complex and there's no question that they would be expensive. But I think they would also be affordable in the scope of, you know, you are buying captive customers that you will then serve. You are now in a situation with a public utility of having lower debt costs or lower cost of capital than an investor-owned utility. And I think you really can make a difference. But I do think that if you don't imbue that new utility with a sense of – a different sense of responsibility – to allow innovation and to allow participation from other participants on the grid system – to allow and encourage rooftop solar, to allow and encourage third parties to provide services – you're not going to capture the full opportunity that's available to you. And I would worry about that, in that, if it wasn't for the fact that in places like Maine where I've seen these campaigns, they seem to be very cognizant of that. So we'll see. I mean, it's super hard to make that transformation from private to public, for reasons that include the utility’s political power. But I do believe that communities would be better off even if it wouldn't be the ideal.
EMP: I think the problem is that the customers still remain captive. Now, earlier on you lumped Texas and Ohio into the same bucket. And one of the things we've been talking about on this podcast is the difference between the retail competitive structure in Texas and the one in Ohio and the dozen or so other states and the District of Columbia that have opened up the market, but it's not effective. Outside of Texas, they allow the utilities to remain providers of the electricity – of the commodity. And the antitrust regulators, the Justice Department and the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, have for decades urged regulators not to allow that to happen because then the utilities have the incentive to use their monopoly power to their advantage in these competitive markets, and you don't have that in Texas. It's what they call quarantining the monopoly. In Texas, the utilities are the wires companies, and then you have a plethora of competitive providers competing to get customers to sign up. And it seems to be working rather well. There's a lot of competition. There's a lot of innovation happening. We don't see that outcome in the other states. That seems to me a rather simple and more elegant solution to the problem, don't you think?
JF: I have to confess that it wasn't until I listened to one of your recent podcasts that I knew the distinction between Texas and the other states. And I completely agree that quarantining the monopoly – that when you create a competitive market, it really needs to be truly competitive. And the idea of letting the monopoly continue to participate is problematic. We see the same thing a few years ago, there were some utilities dabbling in providing rooftop solar themselves and trying to enter this market that's competitive. You have it now with electric vehicle charging, where you already have numerous, you know, companies, independent companies, providing the service and wanting to provide the service and utilities trying to, in the case of Minnesota, I think it was a $700 million proposal to use captive ratepayer money to do electric-vehicle charging. So we do find that very problematic that this idea of extending the monopoly or allowing the monopoly to participate in a competitive market, and I think participate is even the wrong word. Because it, you know, completely hides the fact that of course, they're going to have an advantage. They have name recognition. They have incumbency. They have staff and information that they might have internally that would advantage them. It's almost impossible for me to imagine how you effectively would allow them to participate in a way that wouldn't give them enormous advantages over competitors.
EMP: And not only that, but they are the ones that bill the customer. So the competitive provider gets a single line item on the bill. And how many customers actually look at their bill other than the bottom line, what they're going to pay that month? Your organization put out a report not long ago, a couple of years ago about utilities and rooftop solar. You know, we had the Edison Electric Institute, probably a decade ago now, put out a report warning about the death spiral for utilities from rooftop solar. And since then they have worked the issue really, really well to limit the ability of residential rooftop solar owners from reaping the benefits of net metering. We saw that most recently and perhaps most prominently in California. Do you want to elaborate on that for us?
JF: Yeah, I remember, not too long after that report came out from the Edison Electric Institute, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory did a study, basically looking at the actual data, because what utilities started to say almost immediately after that was, oh, all this rooftop solar is going to jack up your bill because these people aren't paying – they're not paying for infrastructure, kind of ignoring, of course, that they're generating electricity at that moment. But suffice to say the study that the national renewable laboratory did, essentially showed that even at very significant amounts of rooftop solar, it would have a pretty minimal impact on customer bills, but it would have a fairly significant impact on shareholder returns. And so I think it's incredibly evident that utilities are acting out of self-interest here when it comes to solar. And what disturbed me the most about California was the way that they were able to co-opt environmental organizations, organizations focused on things like low-income consumer advocacy to that argument, and essentially say, the problem you're having is from solar. And one of the things that I find so frustrating is that, you know, there are a lot of cost drivers in electricity. And California perhaps uniquely has things like gigantic wildfires liability that has impacted rates in recent years. Not only do you have to pay more on your bill to help ensure protection from wildfires, but you also have to endure what they call, in a remarkable success of marketing, public-safety power shutoffs, where the utility essentially stops offering you service for your own protection, which is extraordinary. So I'm very disturbed by where we're going in terms of utilities setting the stage for this. At whatever scale the rooftop industry is, utilities will tell you that it's a problem. And it certainly is a problem for them. But whether it's a problem for us is I think far more into the weeds. The last thing I just want to say about it too is, like, even if it's true that I as a rooftop solar customer, I'm somehow not paying enough into the system, or it’s perceived that I'm not paying enough in, or other people may have to pay more or something like that, which there's not very good evidence that that's the case for what it's worth. Even if that were true, there are lots of ways that we sort of cross-subsidize things in the electricity business where maybe industrial customers get lower rates because we are doing that to support economic development. Or maybe residential customers are given lower rates because you've got, you know, some really strong political motivation to offer them lower rates. We do a lot of things like that, already. And what's ironic to me about California – especially California – making this decision is the state is in the middle of talking about a climate emergency and has all of these very robust carbon-reduction goals, more so than just about any other state, and yet they've cut off compensation for rooftop solar – one of the best tools they had to cut carbon emissions by three-quarters – in the middle of that. So, to me, it just is really ironic that they're making a decision that is actually against everything else they're pushing for and deploying money to do in a way that just ends up supporting the utility monopoly.
EMP: Yeah, and I think that analysis only looks at the part of the glass that is empty, not the part that's full. They don't take into account the benefits that mass penetration of rooftop solar would provide to the grid in terms of reliability, in terms of costs and that sort of thing.
JF: I kept wondering whether there would be an opportunity to order Pacific Gas & Electric and the other utilities in California to essentially say, we're not going to change compensation for rooftop solar. But if you're worried that it's not balancing out in terms of the costs and benefits, go figure out how to make it more beneficial, like install energy storage in a way that makes, you know, to create microgrids to support areas of the grid that you would otherwise have to shut off in order to prevent issues with wildfires. Like, find ways to take advantage of it. Give incentives to west-facing solar panels that would provide electricity later in the day, closer to when there's peak energy demand. There's a lot of ways, I think, that they didn't really bother to think about because the utility, of course, was just hell-bent on stopping its competitors. And I don't think there was enough looking at how can we just capture more of the benefits of what's happening? All of these individuals out there putting their own capital into our electricity system, and now we're telling them don't do that. It just, it seems ridiculous.
EMP: There’s a concept called prosumer. Are you familiar with that?
JF: Yeah.
EMP: You mentioned microgrids. It seems to me that embracing kind of a prosumer approach and microgrids, you're creating a bottom-up type of structure rather than the top-down structure that we've had for the last century-and-a-half in this industry. Take for example, your municipalization drives. If folks behind Pine Tree and these other municipal efforts were to use the money – well, first you would need to quarantine the utility. And then if they were to use that money that they would otherwise use to purchase the utility’s assets, and instead pump that into subsidizing rooftop solar, batteries, EVs, etc. It seems to me there'd be a better outcome for the consumer, making them prosumers, than purchasing the utility’s assets and replacing the IOU monopoly with a publicly owned monopoly.
JF: What I would say is, if you solve the governance problem, if you solve the incentive problem of who operates the grid, I agree that that's the most important thing. And if it is public ownership, which I think is marginally better, even if it's a monopoly, or if it is independent ownership, we need to move in that direction. I agree that one of the things that is not guaranteed in a public power campaign is this support of the prosumer. You are just changing who's in charge. Now you may be changing it in a way that is more locally accountable – and for a group like mine, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, we think a municipally owned utility is superior to an investor-owned one, even if it's a monopoly. It reminds me of someone that my colleague once interviewed, on working on broadband issues, and he was talking to a mayor from a city in Louisiana about what he called the “strangle effect,” which is if you have a local utility, you can reach out and strangle someone, right? As opposed to if you're having a problem, whereas when it's a big investor-owned utility, it might have a multistate service territory, that might be a subsidiary of an international company, it's much harder to have your issues resolved and to hold that entity accountable. That all being said, though, I absolutely think that supporting the prosumer, supporting individuals and communities and being able to develop clean-energy systems, being able to reduce their energy burdens and to cut costs, being able to make those investments in a way that tries to undo some of the past harms, maybe focusing on communities where there's been disproportionate levels of localized pollution, you know, living near polluting power plants, that kind of thing. I absolutely think that that would be an amazing way to go. And it would, but what it would really take is a vision of not a utility just as an electric utility, but as thinking of it as like an Economic Development Authority, too. Because we have all of those systems would have all sorts of spillover effects in terms of jobs, in terms of reducing electric bills, in terms of resilience, that we don't normally calculate the value of in the energy system. Kind of back to your point before about seeing the glass as half empty when the utility talks about rooftop solar. There's a lot of glass-half-full opportunities there that we're not taking advantage of.
EMP: The economic incentives are just not set up correctly to get the outcome that we need right now in a climate change world. The utilities, they want big investments, they want big projects with big money and big returns to their shareholders. And the things that are really vital today are small investments, whether or not it's rooftop solar, but even if we leave the utilities to their wires monopoly, there's not the incentive for them to adopt the grid-enhancing technologies that are low cost but provide a big bang for the consumer and not the shareholder.
JF: There's kind of an interesting natural experiment happening right now that I'm, you know, ironically, the piece that I wrote that you quoted from earlier, was in response to the wildfires in Maui where it appears that they were started by downed power lines owned by the investor-owned utility there. But Hawaii is the one state that has significantly changed the incentive structure for that investor-owned utility to be focused on performance, rather than just investing in infrastructure and then earning a return on those investments. And because it's the only state we will have this opportunity to see, for example, a divergence potentially between the behavior of Hawaiian Electric Co. or Pacific Gas & Electric, which is still operating under the more traditional structure of, like, it builds transmission lines, it gets a return on investment, it builds transformers, it gets a return on investment. So I'm really curious to see, I mean, I would prefer we just go with a system that quarantines monopolies and, you know, uplifts the opportunities from a competitive market in a way that is well-regulated and supportive of access for everyone. But I am curious to see if Hawaii finds some success in redirecting all of that energy and inertia in an investor-owned utility through a different incentive system. It's pretty new yet to, I think, to evaluate it effectively. But one of the reasons they did it was because they wanted the utility to effectively support the prosumer – to support those local rooftop solar arrays and to use those as part of its way of both reducing costs and reducing pollution, reducing climate-change pollution from the Hawaiian Electric system. So I'm very curious to see how that unfolds.
EMP: John, I've gone through my notes, as I do with all my guests. I'll turn it back to you. If there's anything we haven't discussed so far that you think we ought to address, please bring it up now.
JF: Yeah, I think, you know, we've talked somewhat or a fair amount on this sort of consumer side about electricity competition. And I think one of the things I want to really highlight that we didn't talk about is on the generation side. So obviously, if you're talking about rooftop solar, we are talking about people generating electricity. But one of the things that is sort of the most perverse about the way our system works now is that the grid that we all need to use and connect to in order to provide services to compete with the utility is not only owned and operated by them, but they are responsible for processing the requests that people have to connect to the grid. So when I wanted my rooftop solar array – when I wanted to put rooftop solar on my house, you know, I had to talk to the permitting department at my local city, and go through and get a building permit and they did a structural review and whatnot. And then I also had to ask the permission of my utility, and there are rules that the utility’s supposed to follow about how long it should take and how much I would be charged in order to get connected to the grid. And in my case, I was fortunate enough that I didn't run into any problems. But there are customers in Minnesota – one was told, for example, that it would cost a million dollars to get his rooftop solar project connected to the grid or it could take as much as 15 years for the utility to do the upgrades that will allow him to do so without paying a million dollars. And that to me is just an illustration of the problem we have of the utility being in control of the system when they have incentives to run it the wrong way. And there have been numerous examples in Minnesota alone, with Xcel Energy, especially with the community solar program here, where they have created new categories of projects that aren’t listed in the regulations where they just put them on hold. And they recently, for example, just arbitrarily lowered the capacity of every single power line in their territory by 20% in order to justify slowing down the installation of community and rooftop solar. And they say it's for reliability, but we actually had this fight 10 years ago in Hawaii and in California, where utilities were using these core sort of arbitrary things to push back against and protect their market share in ways that weren't really defended by the engineering evidence. So I just think it's so important that we understand that this is not just about who do you choose to buy your electricity from, but it's really even more so about who gets access to provide services to people? What will that mean for us as consumers if we can't get that? If those companies that those entrepreneurs can't get access to do so?
EMP: I wish you lots of luck and goodwill in your efforts going forward. And I appreciate you making the time to talk with us today.
JF: Thank you so much for having me, Bryan. It was a pleasure.
EMP: John Farrell, director of the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Thank you very much.
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