Despite their disparate interests and diverse geographies, U.S. utilities have locked shoulders, especially when it comes to federal energy policies. At the core of their communique is the will to work with the Obama administration to reduce carbon emissions.

At the Electric Institute's meeting in New Orleans, chief executives from the nation's biggest investor-owned utilities acknowledged that companies based on the West Coast and in the Northeast were already using cleaner electric generation fuels than those located in the Mid Atlantic and Southeast. But they said that they would develop policy positions that considered all factors — and ones to keep the industry in-step with the demands of customers.

With that, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Power Plan is expected to be finalized this summer, requiring carbon reductions of 30 percent by 2030. Simply, the rule would give the states and their utilities the flexibility to achieve such aims by replacing coal-fired plants with cleaner ones, by installing energy efficient technologies or by trading credits as they do in California and the Northeast.

"With all the activity we have had with stakeholders, this industry has moved the ball forward," says Nick Akins, chief executive of Columbus, Ohio-based Power and the newly-elected chair of the Edison Electric Institute, during a press gathering at this week's conference. His company, for example, has just retired roughly 5,750 megawatts of coal generation.