Throughout “the lost decade,” two trends dominated the landscape of the electric utility industry in the United States: decarbonization, or a dramatic reduction in the “carbon footprint” of the typical electric utility, and decentralization, the movement away from the historic, large, centralized generating station model toward greater reliance on smaller, dispersed generating resources – rooftop solar, for example – throughout a utility’s service territory. For the most part, these trends were driven by economics or market forces rather than specific government policies.

With respect to decarbonization, as discussed in Chapter 2, the displacement of coal-fired generation with natural gas-fired combustion turbines throughout “the lost decade” – largely as a result of cheap, plentiful “fracked” gas and improvements in combined-cycle combustion turbine technology – produced significant reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the electric utility industry. Natural gas is twice as clean as coal in terms of carbon emissions when combusted to generate electricity.