Public Power’s Affordability Edge Faces Its Hardest Test in Years

For decades, the pitch for community-owned electric utilities has been simple enough to fit on a bill insert: lower rates, reliable service, and decisions made close to home. The numbers still back that up. What has changed, according to Scott Corwin, president and CEO of the American Public Power Association (APPA), is the difficulty of holding that ground."The thing that's really changed over the last couple years," Corwin said, speaking as a guest on The POWER Podcast, "is this increased focus nationally on resource adequacy, potential impacts to reliability, combined with affordability." He pointed to demand growth in some regions, generation coming offline in others, and the siting, permitting, and construction of new generation and transmission failing to keep pace with the demand curve. That concern, he noted, was once confined to certain areas. Now it stretches across nearly all of APPA's membership footprint.That membership is large and remarkably varied. APPA represents roughly 2,000 community-owned systems operating in every state except Hawaii, along with the five U.S. territories, ranging from big-city utilities to small rural districts. The 2026 Public Power Statistic

Fuente original: Yahoo Finance (https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/public-power-affordability-edge-faces-132851945.html)