A Small Step For Energy Democracy: An opportunity to comment on FTC/DOJ merger guidelines

Don't miss this opportunity to provide public comment on federal guidelines for corporate mergers of electric utilities.

The Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission have proposed new guidelines for corporate mergers, which are open for public comment through September 18, 2023.

It’s a wonky topic, but for a good history of merger rules in general see this piece from Matt Stoller, and for an excellent discussion of America’s electricity monopoly problem, see this report from ILSR’s John Farrell.

This topic is very relevant to energy democracy and a locally-owned clean energy transition. Comments in this DOJ/FTC docket will likely be dominated by the business world, and be mostly tech-focused.

Comments supporting greater democracy, local self-reliance, and consumer-owned utilities could be impactful, and could include these and other perspectives:
  1. There is special danger in state-granted monopolies, especially those owned by private investors, in a sector as absolutely critical to every household, business, institution, and community as electricity.
  2. This danger includes a clear history of abuse and corruption deriving from mergers and concentration in the electric utility space, including undue lobbying and political influence, vertical supply chain inefficiencies, and significant and unjust discrepancies in customer rates from one utility to another.
  3. Distributed energy resources (such as customer-owned solar and deep energy efficiency) increasingly represent a “competitive challenge” to the profitability of monopoly investor-owned electric utilities, which are have been using their state-granted monopoly power to actively quash such competition through rate, regulatory, and policy mechanisms.
  4. The DOJ/FTC should apply the absolute highest level of scrutiny and skepticism toward proposed mergers of private, investor-owned, monopoly electric companies, including:
  5. Actively investigating and pursuing – together with the FERC – all potential mechanisms that would reduce investor-owned utility anti-competitive practices against customers (DERS), and
  6. Actively investigating and pursuing all federal approaches that would remove obstacles to the development of new public power utilities, which represents one of the only true competitive forces to private electric companies.

Posted: July 25, 2023


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Andrew Johnson

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