Negawatt resource frontiers: Extracting energy efficiency from private spaces

Abstract

Energy saved through efficiency and conservation efforts is often framed as a “resource” in climate change mitigation policies because of the ways such “negawatts” can cost-effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This research uses a case study of a US state alternative energy portfolio standard under which negawatts have been turned into new sources of profits for investor-owned electricity companies. Using archival policymaking data and analytical tools commonly used in the study of more traditional subsurface resources like fossil fuels, this paper analyzes how such companies have come to profit from negawatts. I show that, under this portfolio standard, negawatts are largely embedded in electricity customers’ private spaces, presenting a private property problem for capital accumulation similar to the challenge faced by capital seeking to extract more traditional subsurface resources. I argue that electricity companies resolve the negawatt private property problem in two ways. First, they discursively move negawatts out of private spaces through comparisons with resources like oil and gas. Second, the portfolio standard itself can be seen as granting electricity companies an enhanced spatial monopoly on negawatt extraction that functions like a mining concession. These discourses and regulations create a new and growing resource frontier which is likely to be a key accumulation space in the low-carbon economy. I conclude with recommendations for a more socially just and “deeper” politics of energy efficiency extraction.

Keywords

Energy efficiency electricity climate change mitigation environmental governance resources

Introduction

“That future of mining demand-side energy resources holds rich veins of remaining opportunities, not to mention yet-to-be-discovered efficiency resources.” – Report to U.S. Department of Energy on the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy’s Seventh National Conference on Energy Efficiency as a Resource (Nowak, 2013: 1)

Energy efficiency and energy conservation are often considered valuable tools for mitigating global climate change. By reducing demand for energy, which is often supplied from fossil fuels, such efforts can avoid the release of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. Concerns about the burning of fossil fuels have prompted many US states to pass alternative energy portfolio standards, policies that encourage the use of renewable energy sources in the creation of electricity and, in many cases, energy efficiency as well (Downs and Cui, 2014).

This study examines one such policy, the North Carolina Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standard (REPS) (NCGA S.L. 2007-397). Passed in 2007, REPS requires that the state’s three electric investor-owned utilities (IOUs) meet 12.5% of their total demand with electricity produced from alternative energy by 2021.¹ REPS allows up to 40% of the requirements to be met through energy efficiency or conservation programs. In this study, I examine the processes through which this saved energy (henceforth called “negawatts”²) has been made into a lucrative source of profits for IOUs.

This study builds on scholarship in geography and related fields that has shown how nature and environmental concern have been made into new sources of capital accumulation (e.g. Bakker, 2010; Bridge, 2010; Castree, 2003; Robertson, 2004). More specifically, this study contributes to research that has shown how avoided environmental harm has been made profitable to corporations. This research includes studies on green retrofitting (Knuth, 2015, 2019), ecosystem services (Benjaminsen and Kaarhus, 2018), carbon offsets (Bumpus, 2011; Bumpus and Liverman, 2008), wetlands (Robertson, 2000, 2004), e-waste (Kama, 2015), and biodiversity (Carter and Sullivan, 2017). Such studies can be seen in part as examining the ways not doing something—not consuming energy, not deforesting, not producing CO₂, not filling wetlands (at least in the aggregate), not landfilling electronic waste, and not reducing biodiversity—have been turned into new sources of accumulation. They also can be thought of as part of what Fairhead et al. (2012: 242) argue is a new “economy of repair”, whereby capital profits from cleaning up past environmental damages, including waste. The current study adds to this scholarship by examining how electricity companies come to profit by encouraging their customers not to consume their main product, i.e. by encouraging their customers to pay for reductions in energy waste.

In the context of the history of US electricity, REPS represents a new kind of utility growth strategy. Harrison (2013a) argues that electric utilities in NC and elsewhere have grown through two main strategies in the past: “territorial expansion” and “intensification”. In the early 1900s, utilities sought to be recognized and regulated as “natural monopolies”, whereby they are protected from competition in their service territories (Harrison, 2013a). For such utilities, electricity prices are set by regulators to allow utilities to recover both the costs of electricity generation and profits for investors (Gilleo et al., 2015). However, IOUs in NC and elsewhere hit limits to growth via territorial expansion in the 1920s (Harrison, 2013b). Particularly after World War II, utilities turned to a new growth strategy based upon expanded consumption among existing customers (Harrison, 2013a). In the 1970s, this intensification strategy in turn ran into accumulation challenges such as energy crises, technological stasis, and environmental concern (Hirsh, 1999). In the 1980s, regulators, advocates, and utilities began to frame the negawatt as a utility “resource” (Hirsh, 1999: 194), but few utilities profited from saved energy before the 2000s (see Hayes et al., 2011; Nowak et al., 2015). Although deregulation increased competition in some places, IOUs in NC and over half of US states continue to function as traditionally regulated monopolies (Flores-Espino et al., 2016).³ I will argue that by creating the explicit ability to profit from negawatts in customers’ spaces, REPS represents a new utility growth strategy whereby IOUs have more fully realized the accumulation potential of the negawatt “resource”.

Profiting from reduced energy use in private spaces is a feat for utilities; to understand how this feat is accomplished, I draw on analytical tools that are more commonly used for understanding the extraction of subsurface resources like fossil fuels. In particular, I analyze negawatts using conceptualizations of resources and resource-making (e.g. Bridge, 2009a), extraction (e.g. Andrews and McCarthy, 2014; Bebbington, 2013; Bridge, 2009b; Bridge and Le Billon, 2013; Emel and Huber, 2008; Emel et al., 2011; Labban, 2014; Mommer, 2002; Zalik, 2009), and frontiers (e.g. Bridge, 2014; Rasmussen and Lund, 2018; Tsing, 2003; Watts, 2012; Woodworth, 2017) more commonly applied to subsurface minerals and fuels. This scholarship on the geographies of more traditional subsurface resources is useful for understanding this case because it highlights the ways REPS facilitates the extraction of negawatts from private spaces by granting IOUs an enhanced (albeit incomplete) monopoly right of extraction; the comparison also illuminates the ways IOUs use technologies and measurement techniques as negawatt mine shafts and refineries and how this growth strategy creates a new resource frontier.

Following a summary of this study’s methods, the analysis proceeds as follows. In the following section, I discuss the ways saved energy can be seen as a resource, showing that REPS made negawatts profitable and that negawatt materiality under REPS is largely embedded in customers’ private spaces. This embeddedness presents a private property problem for capital accumulation, one that also exists in the context of subsurface resources like fossil fuels. In later sections, I show that IOUs resolve this private property problem in two ways. First, through discourses that frame saved energy as a resource similar to fossil fuels, negawatts are discursively moved out of private spaces and into spaces that can be more easily accessed and controlled by IOUs. Second, the REPS policy can be seen as granting IOUs an enhanced spatial monopoly on negawatt extraction that functions similarly to the kinds of mining concessions commonly used by capital to extract fossil fuels. Subsequently, I argue that these discourses and regulations create a new frontier of accumulation, facilitating corporate expansion into new spaces. As a result, saved energy is likely to be a key frontier of accumulation in the low-carbon economy. In the last section, I conclude with recommendations for a more socially just and “deeper” politics of energy efficiency extraction.

Research approach

To understand how accumulation from negawatts was accomplished under REPS, several sets of data were collected from REPS-related archival sources. The first set of data constitutes the formal legal apparatus of REPS and its implementation. As Andrews and McCarthy (2014: 7) explain, formal laws and rules are “critical to establishing the social and legal spaces in which extractive industries operate”. REPS itself (codified as G.S. § 62–133.8⁴) and the formal proceedings in the North Carolina Utility Commission (NCUC) that determined both REPS’s implementation rules (2007–2008)⁵ and each IOU’s first negawatt cost recovery mechanism (2007–2013) were analyzed. These proceedings constitute over 500 distinct documents where stakeholders, including IOUs, nongovernmental organizations, regulators, customers, and others debated how to implement the energy efficiency component of REPS. These proceedings included formal written comments from stakeholders, public hearings, and final decisions by the NCUC.⁶ On one hand, this data was used to understand what is required, allowed, and forbidden in the REPS regulatory regime. On the other, these data were also analyzed more interpretively using grounded theory methods (see, e.g., Charmaz, 2006) to analyze the patterns in the ways negawatts were framed and the major struggles within the proceedings. This included analyzing patterns in the language used by stakeholders to describe saved energy, the sources of conflict in the proceedings, and the ways various stakeholders justified their stances on negawatt regulation.

To understand the negawatt programs actually implemented under REPS, a second set of data were collected from integrated resource plans (IRPs) and evaluation, measurement, and verification (EM&V) reports. In IRPs, IOUs present their plans for future generation and efficiency “resources” in the context of their current infrastructure and projected demands. Each IOU’s 2018 IRP report⁷ was first used to identify the over 60 negawatt programs implemented by IOUs to meet REPS requirements to date (2007–2017). These IRPs included data on how much energy each program saved. Such energy savings estimates were based on EM&V reports,⁸ which are formal studies where outside consultants hired by IOUs used engineering, billing, and survey analyses to estimate the effects of energy-saving programs. These reports thus indicate which utility actions were considered to be responsible for saving energy under REPS. As I will show in the “Extracting and refining negawatts” section, these reports show that there were two major types of IOU programs under REPS; these types emerged from the data as a result of classifying and clumping programs according to commonalities in what the EM&V reports considered to be the cause of energy savings for each program.

Negawatts as resources

In this section, I use concepts commonly used in resource geography to examine negawatts as “resources”. Resources can be thought of simply as materials from nature that people value;⁹ they thus have both social and physical aspects (Bridge, 2009a). Before policies like REPS, electrical negawatts were considered valuable mainly to customers and society. Saving energy is commonly seen as valuable to individual customers as a way to reduce electricity bills (e.g. Wilkinson et al., 2007). For society, saving energy instead of generating it has additional benefits, such as reducing pollution and lowering a reliance on far-off energy sources (Lenard, 2009; Schweitzer and Tonn, 2003). Before REPS, however, this saved energy was not clearly valuable to for-profit electricity companies. Indeed, saved energy has the potential to reduce IOU revenues and profits.¹⁰

Making negawatts valuable to IOUs

Resources are said to be made and not found: they are made valuable through both social and physical processes (Bridge, 2009a, quoting Zimmerman, 1933). Under policies like REPS, energy saved in homes and businesses has become a profitable resource for IOUs. In the 1980s, regulators, advocates, and utilities began to frame the negawatt as a “resource” on par with traditional generation resources (Hirsh, 1999: 194). IOUs began to be required to do least cost Integrated Resource Planning (Hirsh, 1999: 189); for example, in 1987 NC passed Senate Bill 813, which required IOUs to consider “the entire spectrum of demand-side options, including but not limited to conservation, load management and efficiency programs, as additional sources of energy supply and/or energy demand reductions”. Yet, even though they often framed negawatts as similar to generation resources, negawatts were not yet profitable resources to most IOUs (Nowak et al., 2015). For example, although the NCUC interpreted SB 813 to mean that IOUs could raise rates to recover profits on demand-side negawatt programs, NC IOUs earned minimal to no profits on energy efficiency programs prior to REPS.¹¹

Policies like REPS have changed the negawatt landscape for utilities. Under REPS, all three NC IOUs raised customers’ rates to be paid for performance incentives, or explicit profits on their investments in negawatts.¹² Similar to NC, electric utilities have been allowed to raise rates to be paid for performance incentives in at least 25 US states (American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), 2018), a practice that began in some states in the 1980s but in most cases was implemented after 2005 (ACEEE, 2018; Downs and Cui, 2014; Nowak et al., 2015). In this way, REPS is representative of a new round of negawatt policies which help codify the ability of IOUs to profit from saved energy itself, marking a shift toward IOUs being able to more fully realize the growth potential of negawatts as a “resource”. Similar to what research on carbon offsets (Bumpus, 2011), wetlands (Robertson, 2000), e-waste (Kama, 2015), and others (Liverman, 2004) has found, negawatts have thus been made into a profitable resource for capital through environmental governance.

The challenges of negawatt materiality for accumulation

The material aspects of negawatts are less clear than their financial benefits. Indeed, understood as an absence—i.e. as saved energy—it can appear that negawatts do not have any materiality at all. In this way they are similar to carbon offsets, which Bumpus (2011: 616) argues “create a commodity and value out of a piece of nature – carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – that, if achieved properly, does not exist”. This apparent immateriality of negawatts poses a challenge for accumulation.

However, there are important ways in which negawatts do have a distinct materiality, one that has both physical and social components. I follow Richardson and Weszkalnys (2014: 7) in adopting a broad understanding of resource materiality. They argue that we should understand resources as including “the complex arrangements of physical stuff, extractive infrastructures, calculative devices, discourses of the market and development, the nation and the corporation, everyday practices, and so on”. The materiality of negawatts is fundamentally intertwined with human-built “second nature”,¹³ particularly the spaces of electricity supply/production and demand/consumption. Thus, the materiality of negawatts is tied, on the one hand, to the built environment of electricity generation, with its associated power plants, transmission lines, and transformers, and on the other hand, to spaces of electricity consumption, including buildings and appliances. Moreover, as with electricity itself (e.g. Shove and Walker, 2014), saving energy is embedded in a multitude of social practices, each of which has its own material connections to the built environment of producing and consuming energy. Put simply, we can only save energy by interacting with the built environment differently.

IOUs are able to save energy both on the supply-side and on the demand-side, yet typically energy efficiency portfolio standards have emphasized the demand-side (Thoyre, 2015b). This focus on the demand-side limits the potential climate change benefits of such policies, because US fossil fuel-burning power plants are on average only 37% efficient (U.S. Energy Information Administration (U.S. EIA), 2020).¹⁴ Almost all of the energy IOUs have saved to meet REPS requirements has been the result of demand-side changes.¹⁵ Since IOUs in NC own the supply-side infrastructure, they have control over any potential supply-side negawatts. The same is not true for demand-side negawatts, however. Any saved energy on the demand-side occurs in spaces such as homes and businesses that are considered private. This represents a private property problem for capital accumulation. Prior to REPS, it is not clear how IOUs have a right to profit from ways customers reduce their energy use in the private spaces of their homes, commercial buildings, or factories.

Together, the materiality of negawatts thus presents two challenges to capital accumulation: on one hand, negawatts appear immaterial, making it difficult for IOUs to claim they have created them; on the other, energy that could potentially be saved under REPS is located mainly in private spaces. Under REPS, IOUs resolve these challenges in two key ways. First, as discussed further in the next section, they frame saved energy as a nonrenewable resource similar to fossil fuels that is both located outside private spaces and which requires large investments of capital to extract. Knuth (2019) has argued that positioning energy efficiency as a “resource” can make it more available as a source of accumulation; the current study shows how this framing creates a presumption that it should be IOUs, not private customers, who should be the primary extractors and beneficiaries of energy efficiency. Second, as discussed further in the “Mining negawatts” section, REPS effectively grants IOUs a negawatt mining concession which functions to give IOUs extractive rights within private spaces through a political economic tool of accumulation similar to that used for traditional capital-intensive resources like fossil fuels, while at the same time REPS creates mine shafts which transform the nebulous negawatt into something more tangible and measureable.

Framing negawatts as resources controlled by IOUs

IOUs overcome the immateriality and private property challenges of demand-side negawatt accumulation in part through discourses that build upon the 1980s-era framings of negawatts as resources. One way IOUs overcome the negawatt private property problem is to frame saved energy as a “resource” that is similar to fossil fuels and controlled by IOUs in particular. Stakeholders in the REPS proceedings often made the comparison to traditional resources and fuels explicit. For example, the NC Attorney General argued that it is important for IOUs to “use the entire spectrum of resource options, including … energy efficiency”.¹⁶ One IOU stated that their energy-saving plan “recognizes energy efficiency as a reliable, valuable resource, that is, a ‘fifth fuel,’” that should be part of the portfolio available to meet customers’ growing need for electricity along with coal, nuclear, natural gas, or renewable energy”.¹⁷ The idea that saved energy is a fuel like gas or even oil was echoed in the language stakeholders used to discuss the act of saving energy, as when several Environmental NGOs wrote of the importance of “identifying how much [efficiency] can be tapped” (emphasis added).¹⁸

The comparisons with more traditional resources were also more implicit, as can be seen in the ways negawatts were commonly treated as if they have a supply or exist in nonrenewable deposits. Multiple stakeholders discussed the “potential” for negawatts, invoking the 1980s-era idea (see Hirsh, 1999: 149–150) that there is an energy efficiency “supply curve” that demonstrates the amount of energy that can be saved at different expenditure levels.¹⁹ Witnesses discussed studies that quantified the amount of energy that could be saved in NC. These quantities were said to depend upon the cost of saving each kilowatt-hour, the price of electricity, customer adoption rates, and technologies used (see, e.g. GDS Associates, Inc., 2006). For example, a witness for the Public Staff explained that there was “a lot of energy efficiency potential that hasn’t been harvested yet” in NC due to historically low electricity prices²⁰ and a witness for an IOU argued that future rising costs of power plant construction would increase the amount of energy efficiency that was “cost-effective”.²¹ A witness for an IOU positioned saved energy as a substance that can be depleted like other nonrenewable resources when he explained that some large customers had been exempted from REPS (see more in the section, “Targeting homes for extraction”) because of “the belief that large customers are as efficient as they could be. So they’ve done all the efficiency that they could possibly do. Therefore, there is no more there”.²² These comparisons treat saved energy as if it is a supply resource that, like gas or oil, could be depleted.

In framing negawatts as resources similar to traditional fossil fuels, stakeholders discursively removed saved energy from private homes and business and instead placed it in large deposits somewhere “outside”. These frames make it easier for IOUs to claim they, and not customers, should be the ones who extract and benefit from the energy saved in private spaces. Framing negawatts as resources similar to fossil fuels also suggests that negawatts require large investments of capital to extract. In the REPS proceedings, a witness for an IOU made this argument explicit, stating:

because the [IOU] Company maintains scale advantages on the procurement side, cost of capital advantages on the financing side, a comprehensive understanding of the local utility network, and an unwavering commitment to making the needed expenditures (versus placing the investment decisions in the hands of each individual customer who may have many alternative uses for their free cash), the responsibility for capital expenditures [for demand-side energy efficiency] logically falls to the utility.²³

Thus, framing saved energy as a resource similar to traditional fuels not only weakens the presumption that private owners should be the ones who extract and benefit from it, but it also creates a new presumption that IOUs should be the ones who do so.

Mining negawatts

REPS can be seen as codifying into law the idea that IOUs play an important role in saving energy within homes, businesses, and other private spaces. It effectively grants IOUs a negawatt mining concession, which functions as a political economic tool similar to that used by capital to accumulate from more traditional deep subsurface resources like fossil fuels.²⁴ It is this mining concession that lets IOUs overcome the private property problem and profit from energy efficiency. REPS also stipulates the form of the physical access points, or mine shafts, into these private spaces, which helps overcome the accumulation challenge of negawatts’ immateriality. Among customers, REPS targets households in particular for this enhanced spatial monopoly on negawatt extraction.

Extracting deep subsurface resources

Two layers of property ownership are important for understanding the extraction of deep subsurface resources like fossil fuels: ownership of the subsurface resources themselves and ownership of the land above them. With the exception of the US, where private landowners own the resources below them, valuable deep subsurface resources tend to be owned or managed by the state (Andrews and McCarthy, 2014; Bridge and Le Billon, 2013: 38). Regardless of who owns the resources themselves, however, the common institution of private surface land ownership poses particular challenges for capital accumulation from subsurface resources. For example, the division of surface land into pieces owned by many different landowners can require that extraction of the subsurface resource occur through multiple, costly mines in inefficient locations, increasing costs and potential hazards (Mommer, 2002: 9–11, 54).

Capital overcomes this private property problem in large part with the use of mining concessions. These leases grant capital a right to access and extract subsurface resources (Mommer, 2002: 11–17). In this way, capital does not need to own the land above a resource, or even the resource itself, to accumulate from it (Bridge, 2009b). Instead, the mining concession grants capital a spatial monopoly over particular spaces through which it can access the resource (Bridge, 2009b; Emel et al., 2011). For publicly owned subsurface resources, the state grants and negotiates these concessions (Emel et al., 2011); for privately owned subsurface resources, landowners choose whether to grant such leases (Mommer, 2002: 11–12). In exchange for this right to access and extract the resource, capital commonly pays rent or royalties to the landowner and/or the state (Mommer, 2002: 47).

While the mining concession grants legal rights to extract from particular locations, the mine shaft is the “hole” or physical “point of access” (Bridge, 2009b: 46) through which the resource is moved from the underground to the surface. From there, it is moved, through processes such as refining and transportation, to markets. The expense of such mine shafts for deep subsurface resources in particular is often seen as a key reason for capital to extract them instead of individual landowners, because such landowners often cannot afford these mine shafts (Mommer, 2002: 9).

The negawatt mining concession

REPS facilitates IOU accumulation from private spaces by functioning similar to a mining concession. Like more traditional concessions, IOUs do not solve the private property problem by gaining a right to own private spaces or the negawatts within them. Instead, by granting IOUs the ability to raise rates to recoup profits on negawatt programs in their territories, REPS can be seen as granting them an enhanced right to extract negawatts.

Just as “much of the struggle over mineral resource wealth is undertaken between capital and landlord to produce a set of compromises over how the stuff will be extracted, who will control it, and how the wealth from extraction will be distributed” (Emel et al., 2011: 73), the debates within the REPS proceedings to define the terms of IOU negawatt compensation can be seen as traditional resource struggles that draw on extractive imaginaries. The REPS law states that IOUs can raise rates to be paid for “incentives” on their negawatt programs. In the rulemaking, although most stakeholders appeared to interpret “incentives” to mean profits for IOU investors, some disagreed about what these profits might include, and it was left to the cost recovery proceedings for each IOU to determine the ultimate profit levels allowed. These profit levels were central areas of struggle and debate in these proceedings. For their first negawatt programs, one IOU was ultimately granted a 15% return on program costs for investors,²⁵ while the other two were granted 13% of the “shared benefits” of their negawatt programs, defined as the money the IOUs spared by saving rather than generating kilowatt-hours with their programs.²⁶

These debates over incentives can be seen as struggles over the appropriate royalty rate for negawatt extraction, because they focused in large part on determining how the “benefits” of energy efficiency would be split between customers vs. IOUs. For example, discussions of the “shared benefits” approach to profits echoed the concept of sharing the benefits of subsurface mining between capital and landowners. One IOU and the Public Staff, for instance, argued that awarding IOU investors 13% meant “leaving…87% of the net savings for the ratepayers’ benefit”.²⁷ Echoing the language of “risk” used by mining companies to argue that royalty rates paid to landowners should be low (Emel and Huber, 2008), IOUs also commonly argued that they required a high rate of profits because of the “risks” associated with their negawatt programs.

REPS enhances capital’s spatial monopoly on extraction, which is a key feature of traditional mining concessions. For IOUs in states like NC, being regulated as a “natural monopoly” means that such IOUs are protected from competition for sales from other utilities in their service territories. Both before and after REPS, IOUs have been similarly protected from negawatt competition from other electric utilities in their territories. Yet, both the electricity and the negawatt spatial monopolies are incomplete in similar ways. IOU monopolies have always been partial and constructed through policies (see, e.g. Harrison 2013a; Harrison, 2017). While they are protected from competition from other utilities, other types of competition still exist. Customers can generate their own electricity (e.g. household solar, industrial cogeneration) and moves toward deregulation such as PURPA of 1978 and EPAct of 1992 have increased competition (see, e.g. Heiman and Solomon, 2004; Hirsh, 1999: 243), for example from energy efficiency-focused energy service companies (ESCOs) (Knuth, 2019). Similarly, ESCOs, government weatherization programs, new “cleantech” companies like Opower and Drift (see, e.g. Knuth, 2019), as well as customers themselves, are all potential energy efficiency providers that may compete with IOUs’ negawatt programs even within their service territories. The next section shows how IOUs use REPS to defend their partial negawatt monopoly against these potential competitors.

Extracting and refining negawatts

Under REPS, IOUs positioned particular techniques and technologies as negawatt refineries and mine shafts, which helped them overcome the accumulation challenge of negawatt immateriality and defend their partial negawatt monopoly. Under REPS and its rules, IOUs can count energy saved in private spaces toward their REPS requirements if those negawatts meet three requirements. First, the energy saved must be a result of a change made after 2006. Second, the energy must be saved as a result of the IOU providing a “consideration”, defined as “anything of economic value paid, given, or offered to any person by an electric public utility” (Rule R8-68). Third, the energy saved from considerations must be documented through “industry-accepted methods” (Rule R8-68), whereby each IOU hired consultants to create the EM&V reports that calculate the energy saved by each program. These EM&V reports standardize negawatts in ways similar to how tCO2e are standardized to become sources of wealth for capital (see Bumpus, 2011). The reports thus act as negawatt refineries, transforming a multitude of technologies and customer actions into one unit: the kilowatt-hour saved, which is made measurable, valuable, and thus appropriable.

The EM&V reports indicate what actions IOUs performed that were considered, under REPS, to save energy; in other words, they indicate what kinds of physical points of access into customer spaces, or mine shafts, were allowed under REPS. Table 1 shows that Type A was the most common type of negawatt program by far, resulting in 86.2% to 100% of the kilowatt-hours IOUs were credited with saving under REPS. In this type of program, IOUs provided technologies or repairs on technologies to customers. “Considerations” provided included light bulbs, HVAC systems, repairs of HVAC systems by IOU-approved contractors, and more efficient refrigeration systems. Throughout 2017, lighting was by far the most common kind of equipment provided to customers, making up well over two-thirds of energy savings; compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) alone made up over one-fifth of total savings.²⁸

Table 1.

Classification of IOU negawatt programs implemented in NC under REPS, 2009-2017. Figures were calculated from each IOU’s 2018 IRP report and the EM&V reports for each negawatt program implemented. This data was used to classify IOU programs based on the “consideration”. Note that many of the Type C programs included a combination of equipment and tips.

Program type	“Consideration” offered under the program to customers	Percent of IOU’s total negawatts that were attributed to this type of program
Program type	“Consideration” offered under the program to customers	Duke Energy Carolinas	Duke Energy Progress	Dominion NC Power
A	Energy-efficient equipment or repairs of equipment to make it more efficient (provided either directly or via coupons, discounts, or rebates)	86.2	91.5	100
B	Tips for actions the customer could perform to reduce their electricity consumption	9.6	4.1	0
C	Other	4.2	3.3	0

Type B was the second most common type of negawatt program, resulting in up to 9.6% of the kilowatt-hours saved under REPS. In this type of program, IOUs provided customers with tips to save energy. These tips were conveyed through recommendation vehicles, the most common of which was a report, although tips were also provided via vehicles such as trainings, campaigns, and websites. Customers were advised through these recommendations to do actions such as turning out the lights, turning down hot water heater temperature settings, unplugging appliances, air drying laundry and dishes, maintaining air conditioners and refrigerators, installing programmable thermostats and insulation, and buying efficient light bulbs and appliances.

Under REPS, these technologies and reports were treated as the main mine shafts of negawatt extraction. Even though these “considerations” were paid for by customers through increased electricity rates, such technologies and reports were treated both legally and discursively as if they were items the IOU provided as gifts to customers. For example, many of the CFLs that Duke Energy Carolinas provided to customers as part of their negawatt programs were labeled “compliments of Duke Energy” and that IOU commonly portrayed their energy-efficient light bulbs as “free” in communications with customers.²⁹ As gifts given to customers, who then used them in their private spaces, these technologies and reports functioned as the physical points of access into private spaces. Each CFL or energy report, for example, served as a “conduit” or “portal” (to use Bridge’s (2009b) mine shaft language), which moved the negawatt resource out of private spaces and into the aboveground where they could be transformed into a source of wealth for IOU investors. The aggressive marketing of widespread energy-efficient programs as “free” was approved by state regulators and likely reduced negawatt competition from customers who are less likely to have purchased their own CFLs when they could get them seemingly for “free” from their utilities. Once installed, IOU-provided technologies secure the physical space of extraction for IOUs, marking it as an IOU mine for IOU extraction and profits. For example, many customers stored CFLs they received from their IOU until their incandescent bulbs burned out,³⁰ so even future sockets could be secured as IOU extractive spaces. An emphasis on technologies in particular thus allowed IOUs to defend their incomplete negawatt monopoly against other potential competitors.

Targeting homes for extraction

Under REPS, IOU accumulation from negawatts has created inequalities among customers in the degree to which they control the benefits of negawatts. REPS targets households in particular for an enhanced spatial monopoly on negawatt extraction by giving industrial and large commercial customers more control over the benefits of negawatt mining compared to smaller customers. REPS allows such large customers to “opt out” of IOU negawatt programs and avoid paying the associated electricity rate increases if such customers show they have saved energy on their own in the past, or will do so in the near future (62-133.9(f)). Many large customers have chosen to opt out, electing to perform their own negawatt mining,³¹ suggesting that this option gives them greater benefits than paying IOUs to mine for them. IOU-administered negawatt programs aimed at large customers also were the most customizable, giving this customer class greater control over the form of the mine shafts, likely as a way to entice them to allow IOUs to perform the mining. In contrast, residential and small commercial customers must pay higher electricity rates for IOU negawatt programs even if they buy their own mine shafts. For example, even if a household already had converted all their light bulbs to CFLs prior to REPS, they still must pay the rate increases associated with their IOU’s CFL programs. Smaller customers are thus allowed to do their own negawatt mining; however, if they do so, they pay for their own mining, that of other customers, and IOU investor profits for programs from which they do not directly benefit.

While they can assert greater control over negawatt mining, even large customers are not treated as having full private ownership of the negawatts on their premises under REPS. If any customer, residential or industrial, chooses not to allow or conduct any negawatt mining on their premises (i.e. if they do not save energy at all), they still must pay for the programs (including investor profits) through which IOUs are mining negawatts in other customers’ spaces because they must still pay the increased electricity rates associated with the IOU negawatt programs more broadly. It could be argued that there are societal benefits from, and ethical arguments in favor of, sharing the costs of saving energy across many customers regardless of whether those customers themselves save energy or not. However, it is important to understand this is also a way that IOUs raise rates on customers without providing those customers additional direct benefits.³²

Negawatt accumulation frontiers

Policies like REPS allow IOUs to overcome the immateriality and private property challenges of extracting negawatts from homes and other private spaces. In so doing, REPS helps create a frontier accumulation space where corporations expand into private spaces. Such policies represent critical new growth strategies for IOUs, particularly in the low-carbon economy.

Negawatt frontier spaces

In creating saved energy as a profitable resource for IOUs, REPS discourses and regulations are producing a new frontier of capital accumulation. Conceived of as a “spatial edge of accumulation processes” (Woodworth, 2017: 135), frontiers are places of ongoing appropriation, commodification, and enclosure (De Angelis, 2004; Knuth, 2015; Rasmussen and Lund, 2018; Watts, 2012). Resource-making is central to such frontiers (Rasmussen and Lund, 2018), where spaces are reconfigured to make resources like oil (Watts, 2012) and coal (Woodworth, 2017) available for accumulation. Creating negawatts as resources available to IOUs for accumulation reconfigures the spaces of homes, businesses, and IOUs, as well as the relationships between them.

As a result of the ways REPS gives large nonresidential customers more control over the energy saved in their spaces, homes are a key first frontier of negawatt accumulation. Home negawatts offer several advantages to IOUs. Residential customers lack powerful lobbies through which opposition to accumulation can occur in policymaking.³³ The “opt out” feature of REPS thus reproduces existing power inequalities among customers, ensuring that larger and more powerful customers retain and control more of the benefits of negawatts in their own spaces. Because of historic, sexist devaluation of household labor (Federici, 2009), as well as neoliberal environmental discourses about home environmental practices (Thoyre, 2015a), stakeholders are also already accustomed to imagining that using energy-efficient technologies like CFLs does not involve household work (Thoyre, 2020). As a result, negawatt production is easy to discursively disembody from household labor and instead position as primarily the product of IOUs’ provision of technologies and reports. Finally, during the REPS proceedings, environmental NGOs across the US and NC were simultaneously promoting home technologies like CFLs to cut greenhouse gases (Thoyre, 2015a), presenting an opportunity for IOUs to promote home technologies while appearing green. More broadly, Knuth (2019: 489) has argued that energy efficiency is an “important frontier within the green economy’s broader waste to resource program” and that, especially compared to other kinds of waste, the negawatt is “an attractively ‘clean’ and malleable” form of waste. As a result of these trends, while frontier resource-making is often a realm of violence and lawlessness (Watts, 2012), the appropriation of negawatts from homes and other private spaces appears orderly and benign, and has even been welcomed by many activists.

The negawatt frontier can be seen as a state-facilitated expansion of corporate territory into homes and other private spaces. Frontiers are often seen as edges where states extend their territory into new spaces in order to appropriate resources (Bridge, 2014; Kama, 2015; Rasmussen and Lund, 2018; Tsing, 2003; Watts, 2012). Yet, frontiers can also occur within state territories, as when the state appropriates land belonging to nonstate actors (Kelly and Peluso, 2015). The expansion of electricity systems within states has been conceptualized as a political project that remakes state territory (Bridge et al., 2013). Electricity laws in NC and other states treat IOUs as quasi-state entities, which is reflected in the ways IOUs are said to occupy “territories” (e.g. see language in NC § G.S. 62), conceived of as spaces where the state protects these corporations from competition with other utilities. When the state, through REPS as environmental governance, expands these territorial extractive rights to include negawatts, they are facilitating the expansion of IOUs into private spaces. In this way, while it is not necessary to conceive of frontiers as spaces of state expansion alone (see, e.g. Knuth, 2015), the negawatt frontier is a quasi-state space.

Technologies like CFLs, with their associated EM&V practices, are central tools of this corporate-state expansion into private spaces. Scholars have called attention to the ways household electricity technologies like prepaid electricity meters (Atehortúa, 2016) and smart meters (Levenda et al., 2015) facilitate corporate extraction because they enhance surveillance and control of private actions. Similarly, in addition to acting as defensive mines that secure IOUs’ extractive spaces, technologies like CFLs and tip reports encourage customers to change their private behavior, while EM&V reports allow corporations to measure and surveille these actions.

The negawatt frontier is not a continuous space. Instead, because of the constraints of negawatt materiality under REPS, whereby energy can only be saved at the particular and sometimes minute sites of its consumption, the negawatt frontier functions as a series of multitudinous points of access into private spaces. Although commonly likened to oil and gas reserves, large parts of which can be tapped from one location because such fuels can flow through underground spaces (Mommer, 2002: 54), saved energy cannot flow between private spaces. Extracting negawatts thus requires an enormous number of mines. Oil may be accessed through only a few places, offering concentrated possibilities for control (Bridge, 2009b). In contrast, because the “reserves” of negawatts are so spatially-bounded, diffuse, and each one is so small, accumulation from negawatts in private spaces requires many—in the case of CFLs, literally millions—of mine shafts.³⁴

Growth and the negawatt frontier

The negawatt frontier itself has been constructed to grow in two ways. On one hand, the logics of energy efficiency “potentials” position negawatts as resources that are imagined to grow in ways similar to more traditional resources like fossil fuels. The size of fossil fuel reserves, for example, are said to grow as the price of competitor fuels increases or technologies are developed to extract them more cheaply (e.g. Bebbington, 2013; SPE, N.D.). Similarly, the idea of energy efficiency “potentials” positions negawatt reserves as growing as the price of electricity increases or more efficient appliances are invented, both of which are likely to happen more in the future, especially if climate change mitigation comes to be viewed as more valuable.

On the other hand, because IOUs have gotten credit under REPS for programs that have eliminated electricity use entirely for some end uses (e.g. air-drying laundry or dishes), there is an extent to which negawatts are being treated as the opposite of consumed electricity more broadly. If taken to its logical end, this suggests that the amount of electricity that can be saved is limited mainly by the amount of electricity consumed. By positioning negawatts as the opposite of consumed electricity, there are paradoxically “more” potential negawatts if more electricity is consumed, as is projected to happen into the future (see, e.g. U.S. EIA, 2019a).

While negawatt growth is often made to appear natural and ahistorical, a waste-full energy landscape in NC and elsewhere was created by design, in particular through the ways utilities and the state encouraged high consumption in the past. As utilities turned mid-century toward increased accumulation from existing customers, they often encouraged electricity consumption through expanded use of household technologies and changes in norms. For example, after World War II, ads were used to convince households to buy more electric appliances (Hirsh, 1999: 190), often shaping new cleanliness and carework norms that reinforced expansions of electricity consumption (Cowan, 1999). Harrison (2013a) argues that NC IOU intensification strategies, including the use of electricity rates that decreased with rising consumption and programs encouraging the building of all-electric homes, created unusually high levels of electricity consumption in NC. In 2017, NC had the 12th highest residential per capita electricity consumption among US states (U.S. EIA, 2019b), making the NC electricity landscape particularly rich in potential negawatts. In these ways, the past utility growth strategy of intensification created many of the “deposits” of negawatts that are embedded in the materiality and social practices of the current built environment and are now deemed a new source of profits.

REPS represents a new type of growth strategy for electric utilities, which more fully realizes the accumulation potential of negawatts as “resources”. This growth strategy uses older tools of utility growth: like the older strategy of territorial expansion, it emphasizes the involvement of the state to expand the utility’s territorial reach into new spaces; like intensification, it uses technologies and new cultures of (un)consumption to expand accumulation. Knuth (2019: 492) argues that the logic of an “economy of repair” (see also Fairhead et al., 2012: 242) applies to retrofitting efforts, whereby energy efficiency moves from a “project of scarcity” in the 1970s to “an opportunity for economic growth” [emphasis hers]. In the case of policies like REPS, the excess energy consumption that was created and made profitable in the past has damaged the climate system, and reducing that waste in order to reduce greenhouse gases has been made into a new source of profits.

The creation and expansion of the negawatt frontier is thus an important strategy of capital accumulation in the transition to a low-carbon economy. Similar to expanding the use of renewables (McCarthy, 2015) and decarbonization (Bumpus and Liverman, 2008; Knox-Hayes, 2010), this study shows that saving energy can be made profitable for capital. Gaining access to negawatts through an enhanced spatial monopoly right allows IOUs to grow. Framing negawatts as resources makes IOU growth politically palatable, appearing benign even to stakeholders who might otherwise question the growth of traditional energy industries because of the need for climate change mitigation. This finding supports and expands Knuth’s (2015) argument that green retrofitting is a potentially growing accumulation frontier. Producing and consuming negawatts is thus a potential way capital can expand accumulation while reducing energy consumption, constituting a “socio-ecological fix” (see Ekers and Prudham, 2015) through which energy companies can secure current and future markets in an era of competition and climate change mitigation.

Conclusions

Not only is saved energy framed as a deep subsurface resource, but the accumulation strategies deployed under REPS mirror spatial strategies of control commonly used to access and extract fossil fuels. As a mining concession, REPS allows IOUs to expand their corporate territory into private spaces that otherwise might appear to be outside traditional IOU territories. It has created a new frontier of accumulation through which IOUs can access negawatts through millions of technological mine shafts. On top of their prior monopoly right to sell electricity within their territory, REPS has granted IOUs an enhanced monopoly right to profit from not selling electricity in their territory. Making negawatts profitable is likely one of the reasons that electric utility programs have doubled their energy saved per year since 2010 (Berg et al., 2017). While expansions of energy efficiency programs have many positives, they are also part of a broader utility growth strategy. Policies like REPS build on the past physical and cultural construction of a wasteful energy landscape, so that, as with other “economies of repair”, consuming and unconsuming kilowatt-hours are now both profitable for IOUs.

The findings suggest that while negawatts have been treated through REPS discourses and regulations as if they are a deep subsurface resource, in practice the energy actually saved under REPS functioned more like a surface resource. The fact that REPS functioned in large part as a light bulb distribution machine is not uncommon among portfolio standards; for example, a study found that up to half of the negawatts saved through early portfolio standards across the country were via CFLs (Bickel et al., 2010). Yet, lighting changes are among the least expensive ways to save energy (see, e.g. GDS Associates, Inc., 2006). Starting in 2012, US customers were also already being forced to adopt more efficient lighting even without the aid of IOUs because of new light bulb efficiency standards that went into effect as part of the 2007 federal Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) (U.S. Congress, 2007). The emphasis on so many small and inexpensive mine shafts undercuts the rationale for putting capital in charge of negawatt mines: unlike power plants, CFLs do not require large, long-term, coordinated production processes.

Although it used the discourses and tactics of deep subsurface extraction, in practice, REPS incentivized IOUs to focus on these surface negawatts because it treated all negawatts as equally desirable (while basing profits in part on minimizing costs), obscuring the ways that negawatts might be more accurately thought of as a resource with multiple layers. Low-cost technologies like CFLs, low-flow showerheads, and programmable thermostats, as well as behavioral changes like turning off lights or air-drying laundry might be thought of as similar to surface resources which are relatively easy and inexpensive to access without capital-intensive technologies. In contrast, more expensive energy efficiency, such as purchases of larger appliances, whole-house changes to building envelopes, and passive solar design, may function closer to deep subsurface resources, requiring larger investments for its extraction. Portfolio standards could be crafted to incentivize these deeper negawatts, for example by requiring set-asides for more expensive energy efficiency measures such as low-income weatherization (e.g. ACEEE, 2016).

More broadly than electricity, this research suggests some of the tactics capital may use to accumulate from decreased consumption of other products, such as water, trees, or oil. It suggests that framing absences as “resources” can be a key step in making consuming less available for capital accumulation. However, such discourses should not be seen as merely rhetorical because capital may use similar political economic tools to accumulate from absences-as-resources as it uses to profit from more traditional resources. This research also shows that the materiality of what appear to be mere absences can constrain capital accumulation and can shape the resource frontier that is produced. Thinking in terms of more traditional resources also underscores the ways that policies used to regulate or incentivize absences are key arenas of struggle over resource distribution and can function as methods of spatial control. This shift calls attention to classic questions of who controls the resource, who benefits, who loses, and who decides, questions that can be applied to consuming less if conceived of as a resource. Viewing saved energy as a resource, for example, may change the terms of struggle over negawatts toward questions of how to ensure democratic, local control of negawatt extraction, production, and accumulation (see, e.g. Weinrub, 2014). Finally, seeing consuming less as a resource can illuminate the ways that when environmentalists and others call for slowed growth, capital may continue growing by valorizing less.

Highlights

Energy efficiency has been made profitable to electricity companies through a state alternative energy portfolio standard.

Energy efficiency is often embedded in electricity customers’ private spaces, presenting a challenge for capital accumulation.

Energy efficiency is made profitable in part through discourses that frame it as a resource similar to fossil fuels.

Alternative energy portfolio standards can function as mining concessions, granting electricity companies the ability to extract efficiency from private spaces.

Creating energy efficiency as a resource produces a new accumulation frontier that is likely to grow in the low-carbon economy.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Ben Riegel, Martin Doyle, Sherryl Kleinman, Elizabeth Havice, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this work.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

References

American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) (2016) Supporting low-income energy efficiency: A guide for utility regulators. Available at: https://aceee.org/sector/state-policy/toolkit/supporting-low-income (accessed 10 December 2019).

American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) (2018) Snapshot of energy efficiency performance incentives for electric utilities. Available at: www.aceee.org/sites/default/files/pims-121118.pdf (accessed 16 June 2020).

Andrews

McCarthy

(2014) Scale, shale, and the state: Political ecologies and legal geographies of shale gas development in Pennsylvania. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 4: 7–16.

Atehortúa

JFV

(2016) Barrio women and energopower in Medellín, Colombia. Journal of Latin American Studies 49: 355–382.

Bakker

(2010) The limits of “neoliberal natures”: Debating green neoliberalism. Progress in Human Geography 34(6): 715–735.

Bebbington

(2013) Extraction, inequality and indigenous peoples: Insights from Bolivia. Environmental Science & Policy 33: 438–446.

Benjaminsen

Kaarhus

(2018) Commodification of forest carbon: REDD+ and socially embedded forest practices in Zanzibar. Geoforum 93: 48–56.

Berg

Nowak

Kelly

, et al. (2017) The 2017 state energy efficiency scorecard. ACEEE Report U1710. Available at: https://www.aceee.org/sites/default/files/publications/researchreports/u1710.pdf (accessed 16 June 2020).

Bickel

Swope

and Lauf

(2010) ENERGY STAR CFL market profile. U.S. Department of Energy Report. Available at: www.energystar.gov/ia/products/downloads/CFL_Market_Profile_2010.pdf (accessed 10 December 2019).

10.

Bridge

(2009a) Material worlds: Natural resources, resource geography and the material economy. Geography Compass 3(3): 1217–1244.

11.

Bridge

(2009b) The hole world: Scales and spaces of extraction. New Geographies 2: 43–48.

12.

Bridge

(2010) Resource geographies I: Making carbon economies, old and new. Progress in Human Geography 35(6): 820–834.

13.

Bridge

(2014) Resource geographies II: The resource-state nexus. Progress in Human Geography 38(1): 118–130.

14.

Bridge

Bouzarovski

Bradshaw

, et al. (2013) Geographies of energy transition: Space, place and the low-carbon economy. Energy Policy 53: 331–340.

15.

Bridge

Le Billon

(2013) Oil. Cambridge: Polity Press.

16.

Bumpus

(2011) The matter of carbon: Understanding the materiality of tCO2e in carbon offsets. Antipode 43(3): 612–638.

17.

Bumpus

Liverman

(2008) Accumulation by decarbonization and the governance of carbon offsets. Economic Geography 84(2): 127–155.

18.

Carter

Sullivan

(2017) How economic contexts shape calculations of yield in biodiversity offsetting. Conservation Biology 31(5): 1053–1065.

19.

Castree

(2003) Commodifying what nature? Progress in Human Geography 27: 273–297.

20.

Charmaz

(2006) Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide Through Qualitative Analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

21.

Cowan

(1999) The industrial revolution in the home. In: MacKenzie

Wajcman

(eds) The Social Shaping of Technology. 2nd ed. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

22.

Cronon

(1991) Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: WW Norton & Company.

23.

De Angelis

(2004) Separating the doing and the deed: Capital and the continuous character of enclosures. Historical Materialism 12(2): 57–87.

24.

Downs

Cui

(2014) Energy efficiency resource standards: A new progress report on state experience. ACEEE report U1403. Available at: https://aceee.org/sites/default/files/publications/researchreports/u1403.pdf (accessed 20 June 2019).

25.

Ekers

Prudham

(2015) Editorial introduction: Towards the socio-ecological fix. Environment and Planning A 47: 2438–2445.

26.

Emel

Huber

(2008) A risky business: Mining, rent and the neoliberalization of “risk.” Geoforum 39: 1393–1407.

27.

Emel

Huber

Makene

(2011) Extracting sovereignty: Capital, territory and gold mining in Tanzania. Political Geography 30: 70–79.

28.

Fairhead

Leach

Scoones

(2012) Green grabbing: A new appropriation of nature? Journal of Peasant Studies 39(2): 237–261.

29.

Federici

(2009) The devaluation of women’s labor. In: Salleh

(ed.) Eco-sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology. London: Pluto Press, pp.43–65.

30.

Flores-Espino

Tian

Chernyakhovskiy

, et al. (2016) Competitive electricity market regulation in the United States: A primer. National Renewable Energy Laboratory Report. Available at: www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/67106.pdf (accessed 17 June 2019).

31.

GDS Associates, Inc. (2006) A study of the feasibility of energy efficiency as an eligible resource as part of a RPS for the state of NC. Available at: http://digital.ncdcr.gov/cdm/ref/collection/p249901coll22/id/256463/ (accessed 10 December 2019).

32.

Gilleo

Kushler

Molina

, et al. (2015) Valuing efficiency: A review of lost revenue adjustment mechanisms. ACEEE report U1503. Available at: https://aceee.org/sites/default/files/publications/researchreports/u1503.pdf (accessed 20 June 2019).

33.

Hall

Evans

Wiedenhoeft

, et al. (2011) Duke Energy Residential Smart $aver CFL program in North Carolina and South Carolina: Results of a process and impact evaluation. Available at: https://efile.mpsc.state.mi.us/efile/docs/16671/0030.pdf (accessed 4 August 2017).

34.

Harrison

(2013a) ‘ Accomplished by methods which are indefensible’: Electric utilities, finance, and the natural barriers to accumulation. Geoforum 49: 173–183.

35.

Harrison

(2013b) The historical-geographical construction of power: Electricity in Eastern North Carolina. Local Environment 18(4): 469–486.

36.

Harrison

(2017) Electric conservatism: The rise of North Carolina’s conservative power politics. Southeastern Geographer 57(4): 332–350.

37.

Hayes

Nadel

Kushler

, et al. (2011) Balancing interests: A review of Lost Revenue Adjustment Mechanisms for utility energy efficiency programs. ACEEE Report U114. Available at: www.aceee.org/sites/default/files/publications/researchreports/u114.pdf (accessed 20 June 2020).

38.

Heiman

Solomon

(2004) Power to the people: Electric utility restructuring and the commitment to renewable energy. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94(1): 94–116.

39.

Hirsh

(1999) Power Loss: The Origins of Deregulation and Restructuring in the American Electric Utility System. Cambridge: MIT Press.

40.

Kama

(2015) Circling the economy: Resource-making and marketization in EU electronic waste policy. Area 47(1): 16–23.

41.

Kelly

Peluso

(2015) Frontiers of commodification: State lands and their formalization. Society & Natural Resources 28: 473–495.

42.

Kind

(2013) Disruptive challenges: Financial implications and strategic responses to a changing retail electric business. Energy Infrastructure Advocates. Available at: http://roedel.faculty.asu.edu/PVGdocs/EEI-2013-report.pdf (accessed 16 June 2020).

43.

Knuth

(2015) Seeing green in San Francisco: City as resource frontier. Antipode 48(3): 626–644.

44.

Knuth

(2019) Cities and planetary repair: The problem with climate retrofitting. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 51(2): 487–504.

45.

Knox-Hayes

(2010) Constructing carbon market spacetime: Climate change and the onset of neo-modernity. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100(4): 953–962.

46.

Lazar

and RAP Staff (2016) Electricity regulation in the U.S.: A guide. 2nd ed. Available at: www.raponline.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/rap-lazar-electricity-regulation-US-june-2016.pdf (accessed 20 February 2018).

47.

Labban

(2014) Deterritorializing extraction: Bioaccumulation and the planetary mine. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104(3): 560–576.

48.

Lenard

(2009) Renewable electricity standards, energy efficiency, and cost-effective climate-change policy. Electricity Journal 22: 55–64.

49.

Levenda

Mahmoudi

Sussman

(2015) The neoliberal politics of “smart”: Electricity consumption, household monitoring, and the enterprise form. Canadian Journal of Communication 40: 615–636.

50.

Liverman

(2004) Who governs, at what scale and at what price? Geography, environmental governance, and the commodification of nature. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94(4): 734–738.

51.

Lovins

(1989) The negawatt revolution: Solving the CO2 problem. Keynote address at the Green Energy Conference: Montreal. Available at: www.ccnr.org/amory.html (accessed 27 March 2014).

52.

McCarthy

(2015) A socioecological fix to capitalist crisis and climate change? The possibilities and limits of renewable energy. Environment and Planning A 47: 2485–2502.

53.

Mommer

(2002) Global Oil and the Nation State. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

54.

NC General Assembly Session Law (NCGA S.L.) 2007-397. Senate Bill 3. Available at: www.ncleg.net/Sessions/2007/Bills/Senate/PDF/S3v6.pdf (accessed 10 December 2019).

55.

NC Utilities Commission (NCUC) (2018) Frequently asked questions. Available at: www.ncuc.net/Consumer/faq.html (accessed 28 October 2019).

56.

Nowak

(2013) Seventh national ACEEE conference on energy efficiency as a resource: Report to the U.S. Department of Energy. Available at: https://aceee.org/files/pdf/white-paper/eer-2013.pdf (accessed 17 December 2019).

57.

Nowak

Baatz

Gilleo

, et al. (2015) Beyond carrots for utilities: A national review of performance incentives for energy efficiency. ACEEE Report U1504. Available at: www.aceee.org/sites/default/files/publications/researchreports/u1504.pdf (accessed 9 June 2020).

58.

Regulatory Assistant Project (RAP) (2011) Electricity regulation in the US: A guide. Available at: www.raponline.org/docs/RAP_Lazar_ElectricityRegulationInTheUS_Guide_2011_03.pdf (accessed 27 March 2014).

59.

Rasmussen

Lund

(2018) Reconfiguring frontier spaces: The territorialization of resource control. World Development 101: 388–399.

60.

Richardson

Weszkalnys

(2014) Introduction: Resource materialities. Anthropological Quarterly 87(1): 5–30.

61.

Robertson

(2000) No net loss: Wetland restoration and the incomplete capitalization of nature. Antipode 32(4): 463–493.

62.

Robertson

(2004) The neoliberalization of ecosystem services: Wetland mitigation banking and problems in environmental governance. Geoforum 35(3): 361–373.

63.

Schweitzer

Tonn

(2003) Non-energy benefits of the US weatherization assistant program: A summary of their scope and magnitude. Applied Energy 76: 321–335.

64.

Shove

Walker

(2014) What is energy for? Social practice and energy demand. Theory, Culture & Society 31(5): 41–58.

65.

Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) (N.D.) Petroleum reserves definitions. Available at: www.spe.org/en/industry/petroleum-reserves-definitions/ (accessed 17 December 2019).

66.

Stokes

(2020) Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States Oxford: Oxford University Press.

67.

Tucker

Weiss

(2014) Residential electricity rates and pricing in North Carolina 2014. Available at: https://efc.sog.unc.edu/sites/default/files/Residential%20Electricity%20Rates%20and%20Pricing%20in%20North%20Carolina%202014_FINAL.pdf (accessed 28 October 2019).

68.

U.S. Congress (2007) Energy Independence and Security Act. HR 6/S. 1419. Public Law 110-140, signed 19 December 2007.

69.

U.S. Energy Information Administration (U.S. EIA) (2015) Exelon-Pepco merger could create largest U.S. electric utility. Available at: www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=23432 (accessed 7 June 2017).

70.

U.S. Energy Information Administration (U.S. EIA) (2019a) Annual energy outlook 2009 with projects to 2050. Available at: www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/aeo2019.pdf (accessed 10 December 2019).

71.

U.S. Energy Information Administration (U.S. EIA) (2019b) North Carolina state energy profile. Available at: www.eia.gov/state/print.php?sid=NC (accessed 16 June 2020).

72.

U.S. Energy Information Administration (U.S. EIA) (2020) FAQS: What is the efficiency of different types of power plants? Available at: www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=107&t=3 (accessed 2 October 2020).

73.

Thoyre

(2015a) Constructing environmentalist identities through green neoliberal identity work. Journal of Political Ecology 22: 146–163.

74.

Thoyre

(2015b) Energy efficiency as a resource in state portfolio standards: Lessons for more expansive policies. Energy Policy 86: 625–634.

75.

Thoyre

(2020) Home climate change mitigation practices as gendered labor. Women’s Studies International Forum 78: 1–11.

76.

Tsing

(2003) Natural resources and capitalist frontiers. Economic and Political Weekly 38(48): 5100–5106.

77.

Watts

(2012) A tale of two gulfs: Life, death, and dispossession along two oil frontiers. American Quarterly 64(3): 437–467.

78.

Weinrub

(2014) Expressions of energy democracy: Perspectives on an emerging movement. Available at: www.localcleanenergy.org/files/Expressions%20of%20Energy%20Democracy.pdf (accessed 10 December 2019).

79.

Wilkinson

Smith

Beevers

, et al. (2007) Energy, energy efficiency, and the built environment. Lancet 370: 1175–1187.

80.

Woodworth

(2017) Disposable Ordos: The making of an energy resource frontier in western China. Geoforum 78: 133–140.

81.

Zalik

(2009) Zones of exclusion: Offshore extraction, the contestation of space and physical displacement in the Nigerian Delta and the Mexican Gulf. Antipode 41(3): 557–582.