There are three main types of electric utilities in the United States: investor-owned utilities, publicly-owned utilities, and not-for-profit cooperatives. While investor-owned utilities make up a small share of electricity providers, they tend to serve the most customers.
Leading U.S. utility companies
Several U.S. electric utilities, including NextEra Energy, Duke Energy, and Southern Company, are among the largest utility companies in the world in terms of market value. With power generation, distribution, and storage infrastructure located throughout the United States, Florida-based NextEra Energy was the world’s most valuable electric utility in 2022, with a market value of 145.3 billion U.S. dollars. Recent years have seen impressive growth in NextEra’s installed renewable energy capacity, as the company pursues significant CO₂ emissions reductions. In fact, NextEra Energy is one of the largest producers of renewable energy worldwide.A NextEra Energy subsidiary, Florida Power & Light Co, ranks as the leading U.S. electricity utility in terms of customers, serving more than 5.2 million users in 2021. Florida Power & Light Co was also the leading utility based on electricity sales that year. Meanwhile, serving customers in five states plus the District of Columbia, Illinois-based Exelon Corporation is the largest U.S. electric utility based on revenue, generating more than 36 billion U.S. dollars in financial year 2021.
A sector in transition
The reduction in the price of renewables and energy storage, the establishment of carbon regulations, and growing international pressure have helped push the energy transition in the U.S. in recent years. Many utilities are now investing heavily in clean energy, proposing steep reductions of emissions and increases in efficiency. In fact, renewable electricity generation in the U.S. is expected to nearly double in the next decade. Electric utilities across the country have also been increasingly introducing smart meters as a means of improving distribution monitoring.In light of these emerging trends, utilities have faced rising difficulties in recent years, with new distributed capacities which are forcing companies to upgrade their transmission and distribution grids. Combined with an ageing existing infrastructure, operating expenses for transmission and distribution of major investor-owned electric utilities have increased continuously over the past decade, surpassing 20 billion U.S. dollars in 2021. The share of power delivery in electricity costs of major U.S. utilities now exceeds 40 percent, having grown 17 percentage points in one decade.
