for the means to create electricity without fossil fuels if possible. Much of the world considers the increased use of fossil fuels to be only a factor in bringing them further at the mercy of the OPEC nations, and efforts at governmental regulation in the 1970s were directed precisely at curtailing energy use to the degree possible in order to reduce that dependence on OPEC oil. More recently, though, it has been decided that regulation is not the proper way to accomplish this task. The legal rationale for much regulation in the United States stems from Supreme Court decisions on constitutional questions. There is a distinction made between public utilities and other industries, but this distinction has become progressively blurred in law and in practice, with interventions in each in order to accomplish some public goal. At the same time, there is something that can be called a public utility, even though the identification of such industries may shift over time:
But there remains a core of industries, privately owned and operated in this country, in which, at least in principle, the primary guarantor of acceptable performance is conceived
to be (whatever it is in truth) not competition or self-restraint but direct government controls--over entry (and in many instances exit), and price, and conditions of service--exercised by administrative commissions constituted for this specific purpose. In this respect, the public utilities remain a fairly distinct group, comprising the same industries that 60 or 80 year ago would have been given essentially the same designation and regulatory treatment--the generation, transmission, and distribution of electric power; the manufacture and distribution of gas; telephone, telegraph, and cable communications; common-carrier transportation, urban and interurban, passenger and freight; local water and sewerage supply. . . and, in a sense at the periphery, banking (Kahn, 10/1).
These ind...