Encouraging or Impeding Power Sector Competitiveness: Utility Incentives and Regulatory Policies in the Southeastern US and Beyond

The power sector faces intersecting challenges: surging electricity demand, rising customer costs, and the imperative to decarbonize the grid. Competitiveness policies that broaden market participation and better align utility incentives with these goals offer a path forward.

Using the Power Sector Competitiveness Dashboard, which evaluates 12 Southeastern states across 15 policy indicators, this report identifies existing regional barriers and future ways to nudge policies along to remedy this disconnect. It introduces a three-dimensional framework to organize the concept of competitiveness in the Southeast and beyond through the consumer, structural, and regional market dimensions.

The Southeast lags behind other regions of the United States in competitiveness and instead relies heavily on vertically integrated utility structures and, in most cases, lacks organized, independent wholesale electricity markets. The report concludes that competitiveness should be understood along a continuum, rather than as a binary choice between the status quo and full regional market participation. Using these entry points, the report identifies five actionable openings for increasing competitiveness in the region.

This work was supported by the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation under contract with the WRI Polsky Center for the Global Energy Transition. 

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