Modernist infrastructural governance meets twenty-first century fragilities: California, a cautionary tale?

In policy literature and the popular press, California’s regime of climate governance is often portrayed as a model for other states to follow. For more than two decades, California has pursued a sectorally differentiated project to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from the production and consumption of electrical power, and to make electricity and the grid the primary energy infrastructure for its economy. Though many aspects of California’s climate and energy governance regime are politically praiseworthy, efforts to reconfigure electrical infrastructure for the challenges of the twenty-first century are being opposed and obstructed by incumbent monopoly utilities and their state regulators. In this article, we argue that existing private investor-owned utilities and the commissions that regulate them are poor vehicles for effectuating substantive change. Taking California as an exemplar of dysfunction, we describe how the institutional characteristics of the regulated monopoly utility model fit poorly with the state’s commitment to decarbonise the grid and adapt to changing socioecological conditions, and how monopoly utilities oppose and frustrate movements for instutional and sociotechnical change. We argue for thinking beyond this model of energy service provisioning and call for a programme of policy research to help concretise alternative institutional forms and governance frameworks.