The Best Way to Fight Heat Waves and Outages Is to Green the Grid

Under these circumstances, why not build clean energy projects through our elected government, instead of trying to entice private capital to decarbonize the power system? Public development has important advantages over the private-led approach. As history shows, the federal government is not constrained by profit considerations. Public institutions do not need to sacrifice maintenance projects to satiate the demands of shareholders for stock buybacks and dividends and to offer massive pay packages to their executives. Despite its poor reliability record in Texas, CenterPoint Energy disbursed nearly $500 
million in dividends to shareholders and paid its CEO $16 million in 2023.

Further, the federal government, as the sovereign issuer of U.S. dollars that is not monetarily constrained the way households, businesses, and states are, can liberally invest to make clean energy abundant. Abundance is essential: Electrifying cars, heating, and manufacturing will do little to address the climate crisis unless the power grid is cleaned up. And public actors can engage in systems planning and optimally site a network of generation, energy storage, and transmission facilities, something that is difficult under the project-centric approach of private power developers.

In lieu of piecemeal, private-led development of zero-carbon energy, imagine well-paid workers constructing wind farms, solar arrays, geothermal stations, and storage projects across the country and connecting them together into a national grid that delivers zero-carbon energy to all points. Such federal investment could also demonstrate attractive opportunities that private companies presently do not see.