Hyperscalers Are the Grid's School Choice Moment
“When Covid sent parents looking for the way out, the way out was already there. Charters, private schools, vouchers, education savings accounts, homeschooling: underused, underfunded, waved off as fringe, but real, on the books, waiting. The pandemic did not invent the alternative. It drove the country through a door that had been standing open for years.
Electricity has no such door. A family could always, as a last resort, teach its own children at the table. A company cannot so easily leave its utility. It can generate its own power and cut the cord, but only the largest can afford the attempt, and even they find no market on the other side. No provider to choose. No alternative anyone else has already built. There is a homeschool option for electricity. There is no school choice. Not yet.
That is what Consumer Regulated Electricity is for. Its name is the argument. It lets a large user leave the monopoly grid entirely and take power instead from a privately financed utility, physically walled off from the public system, built to serve that customer and often several large customers together under direct contract. No public utility commission sets its rates. Because it never touches the interstate grid, it sits outside the federal machinery that governs the bulk power system as well. The oversight a commission is supposed to provide comes instead from the contract and from the customer's freedom to walk away. That is the whole meaning of the name. The consumer does the regulating. And because the entire system stands apart, its costs and its risks never land on your bill.”
