Hyperscalers Are the Grid's School Choice Moment
“This is school choice for the grid. It arrives a century late, and right on time.
At first, Consumer Regulated Electricity will function as a pressure valve. It will let the largest new loads go forward without dumping their costs and risks onto everyone else, and it will bring new supply online at a speed the monopoly cannot match. But the pressure valve is not the point. Given a few years, CRE becomes something the American power sector has not felt in a hundred years. It becomes competition. And competition, as every one of those parents learned, changes everything. A school behaves differently the moment families can leave. A utility will behave differently the moment its largest customers can generate, contract, or walk. The discipline reaches even the people who never go anywhere, because an institution that can lose you finally has a reason to earn you.
That is what is actually on the table. Not a better rate case. Not a friendlier hearing. The end of a century-old assumption that the relationship between an American and his electricity is something handed down rather than chosen. We are closer to that than most people realize, and the customers large enough to force it open have already arrived.”
