One of the biggest challenges facing deregulated states like Maryland, New York, and Illinois is that, while they’ve adopted renewable energy standards and climate policies, they’ve failed to implement meaningful system planning with enforceable requirements for utilities to actually meet those goals.
California, by contrast, has taken a much more structured approach. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has directed utilities to procure large and increasing amounts of renewable energy and storage capacity through an integrated resource planning process — one that includes full and funded participation of public interest groups. Utilities in California don’t own all of the renewable generation; instead, they’re required to bid competitively for it.
And it’s working. The grid stresses that made rolling blackouts a real concern just four years ago have largely disappeared, thanks to the state’s rapid and massive buildout of solar and storage. Texas, while following a different model, has seen similar progress through the mostly unhindered growth of solar, wind, and storage in its largely unregulated market.
Neither state is perfect, but both offer valuable lessons. There are clear paths for Maryland and other states to reduce energy costs and make meaningful progress toward clean energy goals — without allowing entrenched energy monopolies to call all the shots.
Nowhere is this tension clearer than in Maryland’s current debate between Exelon and Constellation. The back-and-forth between these two corporate giants reveals how deregulated markets can quickly become battlegrounds for profit rather than progress.
Constellation, for example, has no recent experience actually building power plants. The only generation it has added to its portfolio has come through acquisitions — such as the South Texas Project nuclear power plant and the massive Calpine gas generator. While Constellation may have built some generation years ago when it was still part of Exelon (or even before), those efforts were limited mostly to a few wind and solar projects in states or markets where it didn’t already own nuclear plants.
Today, Constellation shows little interest in building new generation in markets where it might compete with its existing assets. Instead, it focuses on acquisitions as the most profitable way to expand its market share. Its argument against Exelon’s return to the generation market, therefore, is transparently self-serving — a strategy to keep a powerful competitor on the sidelines rather than a principled stance on market-based energy policy.
The evidence speaks for itself. Constellation could be developing new clean generation right now, but it isn’t. The company benefits from skyrocketing wholesale and capacity market prices — many of which it helps drive — and continues to reap record profits. The fact that Constellation and Microsoft’s proposal to restart Three Mile Island (TMI) depends on TMI-1 jumping ahead of more than 200 gigawatts of wind, solar, and storage projects tells you everything you need to know. When Constellation and Microsoft announced the plan last year, Constellation stated that it required PJM (the regional grid operator) to let it connect to the grid ahead of hundreds of renewable energy and storage facilities that were already in the works, some hung up in PJM’s bureaucracy for years.
Nationwide, more than 2 million megawatts of wind, solar, and storage projects are stuck in this bureaucratic limbo: ready to be built, but blocked by transmission line owners holding up approvals. Imagine if you couldn’t put up a website because the internet provider wouldn’t sell you the bandwidth for people to visit it, or a data center wouldn’t let you rent space on a server. That is similar to what is blocking renewable energy around the country.
Exelon, meanwhile, is hardly playing the hero. After shedding its nuclear “albatrosses” by spinning off Constellation in 2022, the company now sees an opportunity to re-enter the generation market — this time with full cost recovery and guaranteed rates of return exceeding 10%. For Exelon, returning to power plant construction represents a lucrative growth opportunity and a convenient way to distract from its own skyrocketing delivery rates. In many ways, Exelon is playing Benedict Arnold to its former subsidiary, seizing the chance to reclaim profits in the very space it once abandoned.
Together, Exelon and Constellation exemplify what happens when deregulation meets monopolistic corporate ambition: energy policy becomes a profit play, not a public service.