Alexandra B. Klass (University of Michigan Law School) and Dave Owen (UC Law, San Francisco) have posted The President and the Power Grid, forthcoming in Michigan Law Review Online (2026), on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
There is a sharp discontinuity between the second Trump administration’s electricity policies and those of previous presidential administrations. President Trump has directed the Department of Energy to use statutory authority designed for wartime conditions and sudden emergencies to prevent electric utilities from retiring aging coal plants. In doing so, he has elevated the President’s role in electric grid governance and reduced the primacy of the independent expert regulatory agency—the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission—that Congress authorized to govern electricity markets and grid reliability. This Essay places these actions in historical context. It recounts the executive branch’s role in electricity policy during the first part of the twentieth century, when the federal government responded to wartime crises by building new electricity supplies and actively managing existing electricity infrastructure. While these early and mid-twentieth century executive actions may superficially resemble present-day events, they were, in fact, profoundly different. Even amid the urgency of wartime, the executive branch was laying the foundation for an integrated grid managed by expert government agencies, not through direct presidential decrees, and it was working for technological progress, not regression. Building on this history, this Essay then explains why the present-day shift from expert agencies to presidential power in electric grid governance matters. The most obvious reason is that it will carry heavy financial and environmental costs to consumers and the nation. But the increased assertion of presidential power in electric grid governance also has doctrinal significance in light of recent developments in Supreme Court jurisprudence surrounding statutory interpretation and presidential use of emergency authorities.
Recommended.
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