For more than a century, the interplay between personal, investor-owned electric resources and authorities regulators has shaped the energy industry in america. Provision of an essential service to mainly dependent consumers asked authorities oversight and a lot more advanced market involvement. The industry has sought to manage, co-opt, and profit from government regulation. In The Power Agents, Jeremiah Lambert maps this complicated interaction from your past due nineteenth about THE ENERGY Agents: The Struggle to Form and Control the ENERGY Industry century to the present day.

Lambert’s narrative targets seven important market players: Samuel Insull, the principal sector architect and perfect mover; David Lilienthal, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Specialist (TVA), who waged a desperate battle for market talk about; Don Hodel, who presided on the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) in its failed attempt to release a multiplant nuclear power program; Paul Joskow, the MIT economics teacher who foresaw a restructured and competitive electric power sector; Enron’s Ken Lay, master of political impact and market-rigging; Amory Lovins, a pioneer proponent of sustainable power; and Jim Rogers, head of Duke Energy, a giant coal-fired tool threatened by decarbonization. Lambert tells how Insull built an empire within a regulatory vacuum and how the federal government entered the power marketplace by making cheap hydropower obtainable through the TVA. He explains the failed overreach from the BPA, the rise of competitive power markets, Enron’s marketplace manipulation, Lovins’ radical eyesight of a decentralized industry driven by renewables, and Rogers’ amazing effort to influence cap-and-trade legislation.

Lambert shows the way the power sector has sought to make use of regulatory transformation to keep or secure market dominance and how rogue players have gamed imperfectly restructured electric power markets. Integrating rules and competition within this industry has proven a difficult experiment.