Some thoughts on...

Your hometown utility: It's not going away, but its role will change. It will maintain the lines into your house, but instead of providing your electricity supply, it will offer a choice of other places to get it.

The meaning of choice: For the first time, you will have a chance to take personal responsibility for the environmental consequences of your electrical supply. Indeed, you will have no choice but to take personal responsibility because not to choose is to choose, and to choose poorly.

The limitations of choice: We would never rely exclusively on volunteers to sustain national environmental standards and, by the same token, we can't rely exclusively on volunteers to get the societally optimal level of renewable energy production. Given that renewables provide collective benefits, particularly in the form of reduced air pollution, we still need to invest collectively in them.

The need for federal regulation: We're trying to create a national competitive market and we have gross inconsistencies in pollution regulation for power plants depending on where and how old they are. Fixing that problem is an urgent NRDC priority, as is making sure that we maintain the national momentum on energy efficiency and renewable energy that is critical to delivering a sustainable electrical energy future.

The difference between telecommunications and electricity restructuring: What made telecommunications restructuring so profitable is the explosion in demand for the product. Companies whose market share declined more than made it up on volume. We don't want people trying to make it up on volume in electricity restructuring. It would be environmentally catastrophic.

(More than) semantics: 'Deregulation' is the press's favorite word. They borrowed it from telephones and other contexts in which government regulation was simply dismantled. But no one is dismantling the regulation of the electricity sector, and 'restructuring' is the proper term.

Nuclear power: So many nuclear reactors are uneconomic today. In past decades, the concern was over adding more. Now, the question is what replaces them when they're shut down. If coal generation expands, it's hardly an environmental plus.

Renewables: Wind is probably the closest to being directly competitive with coal today. And three-quarters of the states have wind in quantity and at velocities capable of sustaining commercially viable wind farms, according to industry estimates.

The future: It is certain that at some point in the future, electricity will come solely from renewables. The only question is when. And that is hardly a radical statement.

  Published by the Natural Resources Defense Council -- contact us at nrdcinfo@nrdc.org