How Bull Connor And George Wallace Wrenched Alabama Power Into The Rate-Hiking, Coal-Heavy Nightmare It Is Today
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George Wallace, the four-term governor who famously stood in the schoolhouse door in an attempt to prevent Black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama, was never on the commission, but may be as responsible as any single political figure for the state of Alabama’s electric regulation today. That’s because throughout the 1970s, when crying “segregation forever” was no longer a viable political strategy, Wallace needed a new target for his brand of populist demagoguery. He found it in Alabama Power.
Wallace railed against what he called Alabama Power’s “exorbitant rates” for years, attempting to thwart or delay nearly every rate increase or construction project the company proposed. That campaign turned the state’s regulatory environment into a circus, pushed the state’s largest utility to the verge of bankruptcy and provoked a backlash that still clouds the ratemaking process. David Rountree worked at the PSC for 12 years in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, including stints as chief of staff or principal advisor for three different commissioners. Rountree said Wallace’s actions still reverberated through the PSC building decades later. Years before joining the PSC staff, Rountree had actually covered some of the hearings as a reporter for the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper.
“Those rate hearings were just a nightmare,” Rountree told Inside Climate News. “Nobody wanted to get sent over to have to cover a PSC rate hearing. It was like, ‘Can you just pull my fingernails out?’ And they would last for months on end.” After years of Wallace’s chaotic attacks on the system, the PSC snapped back hard in the other direction. The commissioners attempted to create a system that would take political chaos out of utility ratemaking and prevent another George Wallace from hijacking the regulatory process. Rate increases were put on “autopilot,” Rountree said, going up automatically whenever Alabama Power’s earnings fell below a certain percentage.
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In a 2013 white paper titled “Public Utility Regulation without the Public,” the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis writes that Alabama’s RSE process “allows Alabama Power to adjust its charges each year without any public evidentiary hearings and, indeed, without any participation by ratepaying consumers whatsoever other than off-the-record and after-the-fact comments at an informal hearing that completely lacks public transparency.” The paper states that only Louisiana and Mississippi have similar processes for utility regulation, but notes that those states have more “meaningful opportunities for public involvement.”
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26122025/george-wallace-bull-connor-set-stage-for-alabama-sky-high-electric-rates/