Liam Denning, Columnist

U.S. Power Has Swung From Markets to Mandates

An Exelon bailout in Illinois shows how much electricity generation has changed in less than a decade.

September 22, 2021 at 10:00 AM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Chris Crane, president and chief executive officer of Exelon Corp., in 2016.
Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg

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Well, this seems awkward:

That was Chris Crane, CEO of Exelon Corp., answering a question about potential state subsidies for his company’s merchant nuclear plants on an analyst call back in 2014. Seven years on, Illinois lawmakers just enacted an energy bill that … bails out Exelon’s merchant nuclear plants there. This isn’t to dunk on Exelon. Rather, Exelon’s experience captures the whiplash in U.S. utilities over the past decade or so.