Taking on the Dark Side: Public Power & the Regulation of Private Utilities [History]

Decades before the New York Power Authority (NYPA) delivered its first power in 1958, the company helped shape the future of American energy generation and distribution as far west as Washington State and to the southern reaches of the Tennessee Valley. NYPA's significance today remains much greater than the low-cost electricity that it generates from its St. Lawrence and Niagara hydropower plants (and 14 smaller facilities, some driven by natural gas and oil). The exquisite hydro plant in Figure 1 symbolizes the contribution of regulation and public power to the electric power industry. In Figure 2, the seeming insignificance of the dam, dividing sky from water, is symbolic of how regulation and public power helped balance the creative tension between public interest and private profit. Indeed, when New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) created the NYPA in the spring of 1931, he aimed to make it a yardstick to measure the early investor-owned utilities (IOUs) mostly controlled by J.P. Morgan's "holding companies," which dominated the nation's power providers.