In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri froze much of Texas’s electrical generation infrastructure, resulting in the grid operator imposing rolling blackouts on millions in freezing temperatures. The blackouts not only devastated home and water infrastructure; they also killed as many as seven hundred people. Many who survived were saddled with unthinkably high electricity bills, forcing the state to bail out customers. The costs were a product of simply leaving the market free to set prices. As one Texas Monthly article explained, “For the entirety of 2020, Texans paid $9.8 billion to keep the juice flowing. On February 16 alone, they spent roughly $10.3 billion.” Gas producers in particular reaped the gains, with one claiming the storm was “like hitting the jackpot.”¹ One particularly egregious actor was “Griddy,” an electricity retailer sold to customers as a way to access cheaper electricity on the deregulated wholesale market. Yet electricity shortages created no mechanism to prevent skyrocketing prices, and some customers received a monthly bill as high as $17,000.²

More recently, preexisting natural gas supply crunches were exacerbated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and natural gas prices in Europe were “about 10 times more than  . . .  a year ago” in August 2022.³ This was bad news for electricity markets designed with a “marginal pricing” system that tends to price all electricity in line with natural-gas-based generators. In late 2020 in the UK, the wholesale electricity spot price had risen tenfold from November 2020 to September 2022.⁴ The energy crisis in Europe has also highlighted the importance of “energy security” to modern political governance. While many analyze these dynamics in geopolitical terms of state rivalry, they also have dire consequences for ordinary working-class people: factories shutting down and workers furloughed for lack of natural gas, a pervasive industrial input, and homes experiencing freezing temperatures in an attempt to avoid skyrocketing bills.

On top of this market chaos, it is also clear that solving the climate crisis hinges on the electricity sector. All pathways to decarbonization go through cleaning up electricity and “electrify[ing most] everything” else that currently doesn’t run on electricity.⁵ Underappreciated is that this strategy will require a massive expansion of electricity generation (one notable estimate from Princeton University suggests we will need to double or even quadruple generation over the next three decades).⁶ After decades of stagnant demand for electricity, this expansion would require a growth in generation capacity not seen since the 1970s.⁷