State public utility commissions are at the forefront of the clean-energy transition. These state agencies, which have jurisdiction over energy-generation resources, distribution systems, and retail energy sales, exercise significant control over the energy systems that are responsible for much of the United States’ greenhouse-gas emissions. But state public utility commissions have been slow to embrace their role in addressing climate change and facilitating a decarbonized energy grid. Some scholars attribute this reluctance to a traditional divide between energy and environmental law: energy law is said to focus on economic regulation, while environmental law focuses on regulating environmental pollutants and public health. This divide, scholars argue, prevents public utility commissioners from considering climate concerns in their energy decisions, thus fundamentally hampering the clean-energy transition.
This Feature challenges the assumed dichotomy between energy and environmental law and argues that state public utility commissions as currently constituted have significant power to address climate change and the clean-energy transition. To do so, this Feature uncovers the forgotten history of a full-scale energy transition that New York City underwent in the 1940s and 1950s. During that period, New York City suffered from a severe smoke-pollution problem due to its reliance on coal-based fuels. Rather than addressing this problem through traditional air-pollution controls, New York’s Public Service Commission spearheaded a transformation of the city’s energy grid from one that relied on coal to one that relied on “smokeless” natural gas. In a ten-year period, the Commission, coordinating with the city’s utilities, used the tools of public utility regulation to obtain previously inaccessible supplies of natural gas, construct new transmission lines, and changeover millions of appliances in homes across New York City to make them compatible with natural gas.
The energy transition orchestrated by New York’s public utility regulator provides a glimpse into the potentially transformative role of public utility regulation. From this history, the Feature makes three contributions. First, it demonstrates that, contrary to conventional scholarly wisdom, achieving environmental goals through energy regulation is perfectly within the wheelhouse of energy law. Second, it argues that public utility commissions could play a significant role in implementing and executing a clean-energy transition using extant tools of public utility regulation. Third, it suggests that modern public utility commissions’ reluctance to engage in the clean-energy transition lies in other factors, such as deeper structural and political dynamics—not doctrinal limitations. The Feature concludes that public utility’s potential within state and local governments is broader than our modern imagination assumes.