About one-third of your check pays for an elaborate system of wires that runs on towers across landscapes, on poles down your street, and, ultimately to the meter of your house. Today, your utility decides for you which power plants get your energy dollars. In the future, however, customers will be able to make these choices for themselves.
Electricity obeys the laws of physics.
They can pay their electricity dollars to clean renewable resource providers, or they can pay their money to run polluting nuclear and fossil-fueled power plants. Figure 1 shows the flow of electricity from generators to customers through the monopoly utility and the flow of money in the opposite direction. The utilities of today are vertically integrated monopolies which own and maintain the local wires, the high voltage lines which connect large regions, and many of the generating plants. In addition to paying for the wires, the utility distributes your money to generators which they own or have under power purchase contract. After all, multiple sets of wires strung over cities and landscapes by competing electric distribution and transmission companies would quickly become economically and environmentally inefficient.