NARUC: the most important energy affordability conference you never heard of

I recently attended the most important energy affordability conference you probably never heard of. It was the Summer Policy Summit (SPS) in Minneapolis, hosted by NARUC. NARUC is the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, a $18 million 501(c)(4).

Association

NARUC: “represent the state public service commissions [PSCs] who regulate the utilities that provide essential services such as energy, telecommunications, power, water, and transportation and who have largely shaped the profile and substance of public utility regulation in America.”

Minnesota’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) is one of fifty commissions who constitute NARUC. PUC and PSC are the two most common titles for these commissions. One of the key things they all regulate are electricity rates, to some degree depending on competition.

NARUC’s Electricity Committee: “develops and advances policies that promote reliable, adequate, and affordable supply of electricity. … State utility regulators are charged with ‘keeping the lights on,’ among other responsibilities.”

Conference

The 2026 conference started on Saturday afternoon of July 18, and finished on Wednesday morning of July 22. I was in attendance for the final two days. The top electricity themes were: affordability and reliability; clean energy transition; and hyper-scale date centers.

The predominate speakers I observed, at least in my day and a half at SPS, were: mainly public utility commissioners; followed next by utility C-suite executives; and data center energy influencers. Interestingly, the commissioners often went by the honorific “Honorable.”

The conference was quite large and very professional. It had twenty eight sponsors, largely consultants, think tanks and trade associations, mostly from the renewables space. There was one nuclear energy sponsor, as well as several data center sponsors. Three of those latter ones were in the top four biggest spender categories: Amazon; Google and Microsoft.

Highlights

I took a copious amount of notes at the many sessions I attended. The topics were: extreme weather; data centers (DCs); clean energy transition (CET); and electricity affordability .

The session on extreme weather unquestionably accepted the presumption that climate change is human-driven and catastrophic, even though the UN backed away from the latter. The highlight was the head of Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) stating being thankful that, unlike electricity, natural gas was still fully reliable and largely affordable.

The first DC session tried to make things much more entertaining by treating it like a dating game show, between two female officials and two male DC negotiators. This approach was the highlight, as the statements made were ‘motherhood’ ones about community engagement, transparency and trust, along with community benefits outweighing the costs.

The session on federal intervention was about the recent “show cause order” by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The original concern was that FERC would try to bypass states on electricity in order to increase DC growth around the country, but that had subsided. The head of the Iowa PUC highlighted the great job FERC does in natural gas.

The second DC session, like most of the others, was largely positive about DCs. According to the head of Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), new research shows electricity inflation was lowered in most states by DCs. However, the Independent Market Monitor for PJM had the opposite conclusion and, thus, favored a “bring their own new generation” solution.

The session on the clean energy transition (CET) was a surprising one. This is because, in contrast to Xcel Energy’s renewables jihad, the head of the NY Power Authority emphasised the importance of nuclear power and fossil fuels, especially to NYC. Solar and wind electricity generation are minuscule in that state, compared to that of hydro, nuclear and natural gas.

The electricity affordability session brought together the big two topics of CET and DCs. The ‘white elephant in the room,’ of unreliable and expensive renewables in an age of unprecedented demand growth, was ignored. Instead, hyper-scale DCs are expected to help ‘leapfrog’ the affordability problem through more-than-offsetting economies of scale.

Resolutions

NARUC passed a number of non-binding, but influential, resolutions on the last day of the conference, and the day after. The following excerpts from two of those are at apparent odds:

“Whereas preserving state commission discretion to evaluate all relevant facts in a transparent evidentiary record supports effective and robust state regulation and gives state regulators the ability to help ensure safe, reliable, and affordable utility service over the long-term;”

“Whereas U.S. electricity prices are increasing, creating growing affordability concerns for residential, commercial, and industrial customers across the country;”

The chart below, from Dr. Janice Beecher of Michigan State University, confirms the second quote above and, therefore, calls into question the first quote above.

Stories

Not long ago, a public utilities commissioner spoke right before I did, at an event for inquisitive but impressionable students, regarding data centers. The commissioner, a conservative appointee, confidently asserted electricity is a natural monopoly. Orthodox and heterodox economics, along with American history and overseas reforms, suggest otherwise.

Far more recently, I spoke with a commissioner, after a long day at the NARUC conference, regarding public utilities regulation. The commissioner, a degreed economist, expressed a strong belief that electricity was in fact a “public good.”

A case could be made that electricity fits the mainstream definition of “natural monopoly,” but not a very strong case. The same could not be said of “public good,” which is defined by textbook economics in terms of non-excludable supply and non-rivalrous demand, where:

“Non-excludability means that the cost of keeping non-payers from enjoying the benefits of the good or service is prohibitive.”

Non-rivalry means “non-payers could [consume a good or service] without increasing the cost or diminishing anyone else’s [benefit].”

Conclusion

There is a race going on between affordability-enhancing data centers and unaffordability-driving renewables. The evidence for the former is mounting, with some signs of waning resistance. The evidence for the latter is also mounting, with no signs of waxing denial.

And it increasingly seems to be, given their worldviews and real-world results, that NARUC and the PUCs are ill equipped to independently referee this race “without fear or favor.”