What we are bearing witness to are the early days of a variable and distributed generation revolution. Electricity is being made everywhere, by power producers of all sorts and sizes, and increasingly from uncontrollable and largely unpredictable means. And because of an awkward piece of legislation called the Energy Policy Act (1992), which laid the foundation for the deregulation of the electricity industry, in many places not only have the utilities lost control of who makes power and how and where they make it, but they have also lost the right to own power plants themselves.
