Clean-energy quest pits Google against utilities

ATLANTA – It was the sort of dry panel discussion that occurs at hundreds of industry conferences every year – until a Google representative decided it was time to unleash.

“This is personal for me,” Jamey Goldin, an energy regulation lawyer at Google, told those attending a May conference in Atlanta on renewable energy in the Southeast. He said he had grown up on a ridge overlooking Plant Bowen, a coal-fired power plant northwest of Atlanta owned by Georgia Power, the dominant electricity utility in the state, and then directed his comments at a lobbyist for the utility’s parent company, also on the panel: “Y’all got a lot of coal running up there, a lot of smoke going up in the air.”

Overturning the system that puts nearly all power generation in the Southeast in the hands of utilities like Georgia Power would “get a lot more renewable energy online and a lot of that dirty power offline,” Goldin added.

But the outburst was more than personal. It was part of a far-reaching campaign by Google to power its operations with increasing amounts of electricity from wind, solar and other generating sources that do not emit carbon.

Google, Meta, Microsoft and Apple, among others, have made eliminating their carbon emissions a prominent corporate goal – and have set not-too-distant deadlines to get there. Google wants to buy enough carbon-free electricity to power all its data centers and campuses around the world without interruption by the end of this decade.

The corporate quest to rapidly secure vast new amounts of renewable energy faces big challenges, however – not least in the Southeast, one of the country’s fastest-growing regions. And Google’s battle in the region, where it has a major concentration of data centers, raises a question that applies to the energy transition everywhere: Is what’s good for a few companies good for all?

At the heart of their campaign, Google and its tech giant allies want to dismantle a decades-old regulatory system in the Southeast that allows a handful of utilities to generate and sell the region’s electricity – and replace it with a market in which many companies can compete to do so.

Such markets exist in some form in much of the country, but the Southeastern utilities are staunchly defending the status quo. Senior utility executives contend that their system better insulates consumers from spikes in prices of commodities like natural gas, promotes reliability and supports the long-term investments needed to develop clean-power technologies.

“We absolutely are superior in every regard to those markets over time,” Thomas A. Fanning, CEO of Southern Company, Georgia Power’s parent company, said in an interview.

A revolution avoided

Most electricity in the United States was long generated and distributed by heavily regulated monopoly utilities in each state. But just before the start of this century, lawmakers and regulators, arguing that competition would bring efficiencies, made it possible to set up power markets and end the dominance of the utilities – a revolution that bypassed the Southeast.

Google and others contend that the markets have brought cost savings, innovation and the capital needed to increase clean power generation from wind and solar. The most recent move toward a form of power market, in a group of Western states, has saved nearly $3 billion since 2014, according to the market operator.

Self-interest also plays a role: In power markets, large companies can strike deals with independent producers that give them more leeway to bargain on price and secure more clean energy. Google entered a landmark deal last year to provide clean power to its data centers in Virginia, which is in a sprawling market called PJM.

Now supporters of the approach have an opportunity to usurp the utilities in the Southeast. South Carolina passed a law in 2020 to explore setting up a power market, a move considered remarkable because of the influence the utilities have in state capitals; similar legislation failed to advance in North Carolina last year.

Tom Davis, a Republican state senator in South Carolina who spearheaded the bill, said the current regulatory system financially rewarded utilities even when they messed up. “It’s not incentivizing them to go out there and try to find somebody who’s built a better mousetrap and can generate power more cheaply,” he said.

Setting up a power market within South Carolina is one option, but Caroline Golin, Google’s global head of energy market development and policy, went further at a legislative hearing in July, raising the possibility of South Carolina’s breaking out of the Southeast utility system and joining PJM.

“We can be a model for the rest of the region, and actually be a model for the rest of the country,” she said.

Markets and renewables

The big utilities in the Southeast are now building more solar projects, but those pushing for a market in the region say it’s not enough.

In the region, the proposed solar projects’ generating capacity is equivalent to just over one-fourth of total capacity, which is far below the 80% for PJM, according to an analysis by Tyler Norris, a senior executive at Cypress Creek Renewables, a solar company, and a special adviser in the Energy Department during the Obama administration.

“Project developers are attracted to open wholesale electricity markets with price transparency, independent oversight and the ability to trade with multiple potential customers,” Norris said.

To show how markets can stoke the growth of renewables, supporters sometimes point to Texas, whose power market, ERCOT, is one of the least regulated in the country. Last year, wind power accounted for nearly 23% of Texas’ generation, up from 8% in 2011.

Critics say the Texas market system led to much of the fragility that caused power outages during the winter storm that was responsible for more than 200 deaths in 2021. But others note that ERCOT was structurally isolated from neighboring power markets, preventing it from drawing power from those areas when plants in the ERCOT market froze up in the storm.

Some experts question the degree to which markets drive the growth of renewables, saying certain states’ geography and weather lend themselves to wind and solar power. With its vast and gusty unpopulated spaces, Texas is naturally set up for wind power.

“We happen to have seen more wind and solar in areas where markets have been deregulated,” said Severin Borenstein, a professor of business administration and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in the economics of renewable energy. “But I think that’s more of a geographic and political phenomenon than a market phenomenon.”

And in the Southeast there is evidence that government mandates can do more than markets to promote the growth of renewables.

In North Carolina, where lawmakers have long pushed the development of solar energy, the power source made up 7.6% of net generation last year, according to an analysis of Energy Information Administration data by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, well above the national average and double the share in neighboring Virginia, in a market.

“We expect North Carolina to continue to be a leading state for solar,” said Erin Culbert, a spokesperson for Duke Energy, which is a major utility operator in the Southeast.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.