Local Power
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2022
Abstract
This Article is about “local power.” We use that term in two distinct but complementary ways. First, local power describes the authority of local governments to en-act regulatory policies in the interests of their citizens. Second, local power describes the authority of local governments to exercise proprietary control over the sources and delivery of electric power to their citizens. This dual meaning of local power is particularly important today, as an increasing number of local governments are seriously considering “municipalizing”—taking control of local electric power systems—at the same time that, outside the electric power sector, many states are constraining local regulatory power by displacing or “preempting” local initiatives in a broad range of environmental, economic, and social policy arenas.
Building on this dual meaning of local power, this Article constructs a new and important link between two existing bodies of legal scholarship: (1) state and local government law, with a focus on the recent, aggressive state preemption of local environmental, economic, and social regulatory policies and (2) energy law, with a focus on the broad authority that exists in virtually every state for local governments to act in a proprietary capacity to control the generation and delivery of electric power to their citizens to meet a broad range of economic, environmental, political, social, and racial equity goals. In establishing this new connection between the two scholarly fields, we illustrate how local communities’ exercise of control over electric power systems creates a stark counternarrative to the well-documented trend of increased state preemption of local regulatory authority in many states across the country. This counternarrative creates opportunities to consider local governments in their capacity as providers of a critical service—electricity—that today is laden with many of the same economic, environmental protection, and social and racial equity goals local governments may also attempt to achieve through traditional regulation. This analysis also provides a new perspective on the renewed scholarly debates over “localism” and shows how local control over power systems can counteract historic parochialism concerns associated with renewable energy projects that are critical to a U.S. clean energy transition.
Recommended Citation
Klass, Alexandra B. and Rebecca Wilton. "Local Power." Vanderbilt Law Review 75, no. 1 (2022): 93-160. (Work published when author not on Michigan Law faculty.)
Comments
Work published when author not on Michigan Law faculty.