In 2009, the nation is involved in a vigorous and far reaching debate about the scale of future energy systems. As we shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy a new question looms before us. Will we embrace a centralized renewable energy future characterized by greater federal involvement in planning, or will we meet local and state needs with local and state-based strategies?

For it is at the state, not the federal level, that comprehensive, least cost energy planning is used. It is at the state – not the federal or multi-state regional level – that efficiency, demand reduction, distributed generation and other commercially available strategies are often evaluated together.

It is at the local level that new technologies like smart grids, electric vehicles, distributed storage, and rooftop solar will have their major impact. The integration of millions of electric vehicles into the grid, for example, will change the context for energy planning by creating, for the first time, abundant storage for electricity.

To understand where we are and the choices before us, we need to know where we’ve been and how we got here. The battle over inter-regional transmission lines is the culmination of dramatic changes in the electricity system that began in the 1970s. To understand these changes, and the current debate, we must go back a little more than a century to the beginnings of the electricity era. In the beginning, before there were giant utilities, state and federal regulatory agencies and regional transmission lines, companies didn’t sell electricity. They sold power plants. In the spring of 1883, the Edison Electric Illuminating Company had 334 operating generators in cotton mills, grain elevators, manufacturing plants, newspapers and theaters. When central power plants did emerge, they were neighborhood affairs. Edison’s Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan served 59 customers with a 72 kilowatt demand.

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