Municipal Electric Utilities Have a Crisis of Leadership
A six-month retrospective on this blog.
In the beginning, there was one Massachusetts-based Municipal Wholesale Electric Company. It was called, well, MMWEC. Its current form coalesced in the ‘70s as a pooling of analysts, capital, and political clout for a group of municipal electric utilities that at largest covered three or four towns and at smallest covered a rural village. These shops couldn’t stand up to Boston Edison or Northeast Utilities on their own, but together, they had a chance. MMWEC secured favor on Beacon Hill, a seat at the table of the coalescing New England Power Pool, and the capacity to issue tax-exempt bonds. They bought stakes in power plants, including the then-new Seabrook and Millstone nuclear stations, and eventually commissioned their own plant: Stonybrook.
United, the municipal utilities could stand up to the investor-owned utilities as those big dogs consolidated through the ‘80s and ‘90s. Divided, they stood to fall. And yet divide they did. Some great schism shook MMWEC in the late ‘90s. I’ve only heard echoes of why: “large” utilities versus small, east versus west, urban versus rural, spendthrift versus penny-pinching. But in 1998, Energy New England (ENE) broke away, bringing the larger, wealthier utilities with it.
The schism continues, as the leadership at these organizations nurse decades-old grudges. ENE utilities and MMWEC utilities barely talk to each other, much less coordinate. A year ago, ENE asked to integrate into MMWEC’s well-run demand response program. MMWEC said no, and told their software vendor not to work with ENE. That decision came from on-high, from people who have worked at these companies for ten-plus, twenty-plus years, some of whom were in the building for the original schism.
These people, and the municipal utility General Managers they represent, should see the writing on the walls. They’re disproportionately old, both in age and in tenure, and retiring in real time. They should be training up new blood, pulling in young staff, mentoring people like me to replace them. But they aren’t. Municipal General Managers build cliques around themselves, enact petty drama between each other, refuse to delegate responsibility down their org charts, and operate as distant enigmas from their staffs of under a hundred people. Innovation sprouts in pockets, scarcely shared, often smothered. These leaders are disproportionately proud of their low rates, smug in their inaction, resentful of change. The loudest exception was John Blair, General Manager at Ipswich Light. He considered the future, pioneering an “on-bill credit” financing vehicle for installing heat pumps in homes. It was probably the only program that could have gotten heat pumps at-scale into the homes of people who don’t have thirty grand lying around. He resigned in 2023 to work for a consulting firm, with only rumors intimating why he left.
These, sadly, are the people helming my industry for the past twenty years. It worked out okay as shale gas cratered the cost of wholesale electricity and limited solar buildout made decarbonization regulations feel pleasantly distant. Electric utilities didn’t actually need good leadership to muddle along.
But now we do. Solar panels and electric vehicles are injecting chaos into markets and control systems. The true costs of decarbonizing electricity are now dawning on people, but local regulatory authorities remain dishonest about that cost, pursuing ill-conceived ideas at best and downright lies to the public at worst. The Baby Boomers that disproportionately staffed these cushy pension-running jobs are now retiring at scale, and efforts to hire new staff have proven insufficient, especially for Gen Z. The Second Trump Administration is finally enacting a national transformation that frankly has been two decades in the making—but in the stupidest way possible. Neither gas generation nor nuclear buildout are proving the trusty fallbacks that anti-Greens think they are. ISO-NE is desperately trying to rebuild their internal markets despite a debilitating staff shortage that they have struggled to address. And in the near future, some customers will realize they can disconnect from the electric grid, and some domestic terrorist will realize they can disconnect everyone rather easily. These are all next-five-year problems—and yet basically no one is honest about the tradeoffs of their favorite long-term strategies.
These challenges warrant serious discussion—I’ve covered the above paragraph with links from this very blog. But increasingly, it seems like I’m the only one talking about them. I, a late-twenties, early-mid-career generalist qualitative analyst with no direct reports, no hiring authority, no budget authority, no grounds on which to speak, am the only public voice talking about the challenges that electric utilities will face in the next five years—at least, the only voice whose breath does not reek of ideological commitment.
Where are the leaders? Where are the Ezra Scattergoods and James E. Bakers? Where are the bigshots rejecting business-as-usual—not just fossils-as-usual, but also climate-policy-as-usual? Who’s going to tell the Sunrise Movement, 350, the Environmental Defense Fund, and so on, that the party’s over and it’s time to make hard concessions? Who’s going to implement grid policy that doesn’t depend on a miracle technology, or on 2% interest rates returning, or on Americans suddenly holding hands and singing “Black or White” in five-part harmonies?
The 2019 video game Control centers Jesse Faden, a freshly-appointed Director of a Federal Bureau of Control—the control of the paranormal. Faden’s assumption of the role is appropriately strange: minutes after entering the now-empty headquarters, she finds the outgoing Director in his office, in a pool of his own blood. Stepping over the body, she picks up a handgun bearing connection to an Astral Plane, and to the extra-dimensional Board of Directors within it. The Board’s requirements are…unconventional:
< Only the Director can wield >
< The Gun/Sword/Intentionally left blank >
< This is your Ritual/Challenge >
< You must choose to be the Chosen One >
The initial interview is a simple tutorial level. Faden does not choose to be Chosen until the third act. Caught in a < Prison/Nightmare/Counterfactual scenario >, Faden once again finds the outgoing Director in his office. He had let the hissing enemy in—or rather, he was its first victim. Faden takes his gun—her gun—and points it at his head. She learns who created the macabre tableau from the start of the story. It was Faden herself, taking control. She pulls the trigger.
I’m no leader—unlike some of my age cohort, I do not believe one becomes a “leader” simply by poasting their way into the UN (or a get-rich-quick scheme). My task—my Purpose—is to provide the truth for some true leader, and to prepare for the contingency where no leader rises—in which case I must grieve their absence and claim the sword for myself. In the interim, I will continue to provide analysis to the public and prepare myself for the day this blog gets me fired.
Thanks for reading Energy Crystals. I’ll maintain this schedule for at least another six months. We’ll see where we go from there.
This post and the information presented are intended for informational purposes only. The views expressed herein are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of their current or previous employers or any elected officials. The author makes no recommendations toward any electric utility, regulatory body, or other organization. While certain information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, the author has not independently verified this information, and its accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed. Accordingly, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made as to, and no reliance should be placed on, the fairness, accuracy, timeliness or completeness of this information. The author assumes no liability for this information and no obligation to update the information or analysis contained herein in the future.