The Energy Markets Podcast S2E12: The Southeast Alliance for Clean Energy's Maggie Shober discusses utilities' opposition to a competitive wholesale power market in the region that would better accommodate market entry by renewable energy resources
Maggie Shober is a utility analyst and clean-energy advocate with the Southeast Alliance for Clean Energy. She spends a great deal of her time working the IRP processes state-by-state for the various large utilities in the region, such as Duke, Florida Power & Light, Southern Co. and the Tennessee Valley Authority, to ensure that utility planning embraces clean-energy resources and other measures to limit carbon emissions and costs for consumers. But she clearly would prefer to see a FERC-regulated competitive wholesale power market in the region, which she believes would better allow integration of renewable energy resources by utilities in the Southeast. However, Shober notes, "There are very large, very powerful utilities in the region that are absolutely against it. And so it's going to be either somehow getting them on board, or dragging them kicking and screaming into a market." But she does see a glimmer of hope in the Carolinas, where policy makers are increasingly considering RTO development in the wake of billion-dollar boondoggles involving aborted nuclear power plant development efforts and coal ash disposal problems that have contributed to escalating electricity costs for consumers. "Where we've seen some of the biggest utility boondoggles in the region is where we've had movement on this," Shober observes. Developments at TVA are another arena in the Southeast where progress could be made toward lessening utilities' monopoly control over captive ratepayers. The city of Memphis, which operates one of the largest municipally owned utility systems in the country, is expected to make a decision by year's end whether to exit the TVA system in order to obtain cleaner and less-expensive electricity in the competitive market. Still, she is a realist, noting how TVA has been "politically protected" by "pretty powerful senators" in Congress.