This is an excellent article from Floodlight and the Orlando Sentinel: Dark power: How FPL, other utilities neutralize opponents, grow profits
It was also reprinted by The Guardian: Leaked: US power companies secretly spending millions to protect profits and fight clean energy
… Hundreds of pages of internal documents – which are only coming to light now because Matrix’s founders are locked in an epic feud – detail the firm’s secret work to help power companies like FPL [Florida Power and Light] protect their profits and fight the transition to cleaner forms of energy.
The Matrix saga illustrates the political obstacles policymakers and experts face as they attempt to cut climate pollution from the power sector, one of the biggest greenhouse gas contributors in the U.S. …
There are similar kinds of illegal shenanigans to undercut renewable energy in Ohio and, most certainly, in other states.
Grist: How a $60 million bribery scandal helped Ohio pass the ‘worst energy policy in the country’
On a warm morning in July of 2020, FBI agents and local sheriff’s deputies converged on a farmhouse just outside the tiny town of Glenford in central Ohio. They led away a blue-eyed man wearing a gray Carhartt T-shirt and baggy jeans. He was heavy around the middle, clean-shaven, with closely shorn white hair. His name was Larry Householder, insurance man, gentleman farmer, and the powerful leader of a Republican supermajority in the Ohio House of Representatives.
Federal prosecutors brought Householder before a judge and laid out their findings. Their investigation suggested the politician had orchestrated a grand conspiracy in which three electric utilities — FirstEnergy, its former subsidiary Energy Harbor, and American Electric Power — gave Householder a $60 million slush fund to help get like-minded politicians into the Ohio legislature. In exchange, Householder helped steer billions of dollars in subsidies their way. …
We really need to clean up the state regulatory agencies which are supposed to be overseeing power utilities and put in jail those who have engaged in bribery, corruption, and fraud. Ratepayers should not be paying to help private companies make obscene profits and to stymie alternatives.