In June 2015, David Roberts, the energy beat writer for Vox, told Bill McKibben of the New Yorker that the cozy ambience of state-level regulatory oversight had lulled the American electric power industry into a state of indolent contentedness. This cushy public-private arrangement, which “[had] not attracted the single greatest minds” into utility management, permitted executives to “build power plants, sit back, and [watch as] the money [came] in.” As a result, according to Roberts, a haze of “boringness” surrounds the entire electric power sector, making it “the sleepiest business” in the United States (McKibben, “Power to the People”).

In his new book, The Power Brokers, Jeremiah Lambert tells a dramatically different tale. In Lambert's hands, the story is not one of dull minds breezily collecting outsized profits due to comfortable relationships with compliant regulators. Rather, it is one of corporate intrigue and political machinations, business strategies, and governmental ambitions brought to life through seven pocket biographies of the utility industry's most towering figures. Indeed, it is through case studies, composed using a wide array of sources, that Lambert identifies perhaps the central issue in the electric utility business's nearly 150-year career: unremitting rancor between investor-owned electric companies and governments (in this case, mostly the federal government) for command over a service that by the early twentieth century had become indispensable to daily life for millions of Americans. In Lambert's words, “the history of the electric power industry in the United States, created by entrepreneurs, is also the history of the exercise of political power,” and his study aims to analyze both “the continuing government effort to shape and control an essential industry and the strategic countervailing responses it evoked” (pp. ix, 259).

Lambert begins his exploration of the power brokers’ activities in the late nineteenth century with perhaps the most significant figure in the American electric utility industry's early history, Samuel Insull, and concludes in the early twenty-first century with an examination of Duke Energy's CEO, the calculating sustainability reformer Jim Rogers. In the intervening five chapters, Lambert introduces the reader to other notable actors, some of whom are instantly recognizable well beyond the confines of a discussion about the electricity industry (e.g., David Lilienthal and Amory Lovins). Lambert marshals the stories of each of his key figures to burnish his central claim that electricity's history is an unending public-private contest and, what is more, that ambitious leaders have consistently tried to leverage this rivalry to their advantage. At some points, as with economist Paul Joskow, the impulse for change seems pure. At other points, as with Enron founder Ken Lay, greed and megalomania appear to be the primary motivating factors. Indeed, Lay emerges as the story's chief villain, an “arrogant and contentious” character whose capacity for hubris, according to Lambert, matched that of the most tragic figures in Greek mythology (pp. 204–205).

As compelling as Lambert's characters are, however, readers of this journal will find themselves asking where the author locates them—and his narrative of public-private enmity in general—in the historical literature on American business and capitalism. In fact, Lambert identifies no specific scholarly debates in which he wishes to intervene. More explicit engagement with recent works on the subject would have enabled Lambert to speak better to the concerns of business and energy historians (e.g., Paul W. Hirt, The Wired Northwest: The History of Electric Power, 1870s–1970s [2012]; Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest [2014]; and Christopher J. Manganiello, Southern Water, Southern Power: How the Politics of Cheap Energy and Water Scarcity Shaped a Region [2015]). Granted, as an energy attorney primarily interested in policy, Lambert likely had other goals and audiences in mind. Yet with no clear articulation of those aims, it is difficult to decipher what the author sought to accomplish.

The opacity of Lambert's historiographical position, and that of his intended audience, only increases as one encounters a somewhat mercurial critical posture toward his subject. In some of the book's more provocative passages, Lambert, in keeping with his argument, seems to cast an image of a private business sector under constant siege by a federal leviathan bent on practicing “‘political capitalism’—the state's intrusive power to reorder markets and set the terms of business engagement” (p. ix). More particularly, he writes that reactions to Insull's colossal failures opened a “more intrusive role for government” and “invited aggressive government intervention” in the 1930s and, further, that the New Deal's public power ambitions reeked of “hubristic overreach and nonaccountability” (pp. 129, 260–61). It thus appears that Lambert's work consistently portrays the electricity business as an elusive object over which private enterprise and the federal government—proposed here as ontologically discrete, antagonistic entities—squabble unendingly. Yet in other portions of the book, especially those devoted to Lovins and Rogers, the author implies that government initiative is required for any positive results in competition and sustainability, and he concludes the book, in a bout of non sequitur, with the overt suggestion that “to enable a green industrial revolution in response to climate change, the government will have to incentivize transformation of the nation's energy infrastructure” (p. 262). It becomes clear that, despite his stated claims, Lambert sees the utility industry as a public-private hybrid—a finding that, again, he might have better explicated had he more pointedly engaged with recent historical literature on the subject.

These flaws, though, are not fatal. Lambert does an admirable job of providing historical context for each of his topics and characters, and he certainly dispatches the notion that the electricity business is sleepy or boring. Whether in the world of business history or in the realm of policy, readers seeking an introduction to key figures and core issues in the history of the American electric utility industry will find Lambert's book a useful survey.