With Sandeep Vaheesan, Legal Director, Open Markets Institute
April 3, 4-5:30 p.m.
820 Social Sciences Building, UC Berkeley
Starting in the late 1970s, the federal government and many states initiated a major reconstruction of the power sector. Because this project happened incrementally and unevenly, it is far less well-known than the deregulations of the airline and financial sector. Some states pursued structural change with vigor, while others mostly stuck with the traditional model of public utility regulation. In California, the Northeast, Texas, and parts of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, the power sector looks very different today than it did a half-century ago.
Join us 4 p.m. on April 3 at BESI as antitrust legal expert Sandeep Vaheesan explores how this restructuring has impacted energy affordability and reliability and the fight against climate change.
About the Speaker
Sandeep Vaheesan is the legal director at the Open Markets Institute. He leads the institute’s legal research and advocacy, including the amicus program. He has written and spoken widely on antimonopoly law and policy and building a fair economy. Previously, he worked at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and American Antitrust Institute.
In his scholarship, advocacy work, and popular commentary, he has focused on, among other topics, the latent statutory powers of the Federal Trade Commission. He has laid out how the FTC can strengthen antitrust rules governing corporations and prohibit a range of unfair competitive practices. Building on this work, in March 2019, he and his colleagues at the Open Markets Institute spearheaded a petition that called on the FTC to prohibit non-compete clauses. In a 2021 executive order, President Biden asked for FTC regulatory action to restrict employers’ use of non-competes. The FTC enacted a rule in April 2024 banning non-compete clauses for all workers.
Vaheesan is the author of the book Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States, which was published by the University of Chicago Press in December 2024. The book examines the past, present, and promise of rural electric cooperatives and publicly owned utilities such as the Tennessee Valley Authority: how we created them, how they perform today, and how we can perfect and expand them.