This post is part of a symposium on Sandeep Vaheesan’s Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States. Read the rest of the posts here.
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Public ownership has long been a rallying cry for many on the left. Historically, that cry typically focused on the means of production of commodities—for what was capitalism if not a social form organized around private ownership of those means? But in recent times the left’s calls for public ownership have more commonly centered on the means of social reproduction. Water, gas and electricity, land and housing, transportation networks and services. It is these infrastructures that the left today widely insists should remain in, or be brought (back) under, public ownership; and as more and more of the relevant infrastructures have been privatized, the louder the calls for public ownership have become.
Strikingly, the justifications for public ownership articulated by its advocates tend to be predominantly negative ones. The antagonist is drawn in bold, sharp lines: namely, capitalist firms who are more interested in wringing profits out of customers than in offering decent services at decent rates while making infrastructures shipshape for a climate-stressed future. But the positive case? This is usually considerably hazier. Certainly, it is obvious in outline—public ownership—but there is frequently much less detail about how it might be achieved, what it would look like in practice and, most importantly of all, why exactly we should favor it. If “extractivism” is what we specifically denounce in private ownership, what specifically do we value in its public counterpart? Why, in short, champion it?
It was this “why” that nagged at me as I read Sandeep Vaheesan’s very impressive, deeply-researched book on the history of the American power sector and his vision of “a more ambitious federally supported expansion of public power.” Vaheesan’s argument—and to be clear, he, unlike many others, does have a forthright, positive one—has to do with political representation: Public ownership is a more democratic form of ownership than private ownership. Hence the book’s title: Democracy in Power. By “democracy,” Vaheesan means meaningful citizen participation in governance and on an elected basis. His concern with the U.S. power sector and its current approach to decarbonization is precisely that it is overseen, “in large measure, by a small clique of corporate executives and financiers” and that this arrangement constitutes a grievous “democratic deficit.” This is not to say that public ownership is entirely absent from today’s power sector. Nearly 30 percent of U.S. households, Vaheesan point outs, are already served by utilities owned and managed by federal or municipal bodies or by cooperatives (which Vaheesan includes under the “public” umbrella). But U.S. electricity can be made much more democratic, he insists, by bringing substantially more of it under public control.
There is reason to doubt, though, that “democracy” is the strongest argument for public ownership in the power sector. The technical complexity of power systems and the mixed democratic record of existing public power entities suggest that other rationales may be more persuasive. The left should consider focusing instead on how public ownership can overcome key obstacles to rapid decarbonization.
Energy Democracy
Is “democracy” the strongest argument for public ownership in the power sector? Is it even a credible argument? After all, as Vaheesan himself concedes, actually-existing public (and cooperative) ownership in U.S. electricity has, at best, an “inconsistent democratic record.” Only a fraction of cooperative and public power entities have lived up to their “latent” democratic potential. The history of the non-profit electricity sector is littered with instances of self-dealing and mismanagement. Some co-ops and municipal utilities, Vaheesan tells us, “do not seem all that different from investor-owned utilities.”
Democracy may be a plausible argument for public ownership of power at the local scale—although as Vaheesan insists, realizing this vision would require more robust codification and enforcement of good governance practices than has so far been the norm for U.S. municipal and cooperative utilities. But at a larger and wider scale? I’m not so sure. Electricity is complicated, requiring a combination of expertise across technical matters of engineering, planning, finance and more. Indeed, one of the great strengths of Democracy in Power is in making the inaccessible marvelously accessible. And electricity only gets more complicated as the scale of power generation and transmission grows.
Vaheesan chastises the Tennessee Valley Authority, America’s great exemplar of public power ownership on a trans-local scale, for being “a top-down institution from its inception,” and thus for eschewing the bottom-up “democratic” governance principles that he cherishes. But this eschewing is surely not coincidental. Given the sheer scale and ambition of the TVA enterprise—it is the dominant power producer and seller in parts of seven states, no less—could it really have ever been otherwise? In fact, is it not possibly the case that its very top-downness has actually been a key ingredient in the TVA’s long-term success?
Given the complexity of electricity, Vaheesan is perhaps overly dismissive of those who express concerns about governance by boards of elected, non-expert citizens (even if such expressions of concern are often little more than the defensive, self-interested retort of elites facing threats to their control). More generally, I think a certain skepticism is merited regarding Vaheesan’s sweeping premise that full-blooded democracy in the power sector is always and everywhere a good thing—that it is, in his own words, “intrinsically valuable.” Perhaps it is. But to my mind, at least, that thesis remains unproven.
Reading Democracy in Power, I had a caution at the back of my mind that has stuck with me ever since I read the late Doreen Massey’s pioneering work on landownership in capitalist societies. Massey was a full-throated champion of public landownership, and yet she was aware that ownership in itself means little: There were and are as many examples of “bad” landowners in the public as in the private sector. Her sense was that the question of who owns the land is ultimately less important than how and why they own it. The same is perforce true of the power sector.
A Different Defense of Public Ownership
In the context of the escalating climate crisis and of the power sector’s central role in fueling that crisis, at least three other rationales for public ownership may in fact be more pertinent and persuasive than the latter’s putative democratic potential. And here we would do well to acknowledge that, as Vaheesan again concedes, coal—the dirtiest fossil fuel—currently accounts for a larger share of the supply mix for America’s cooperative and publicly-owned utilities than its private ones. Public doesn’t necessarily mean climate-friendly.
First, public ownership in electricity could help alleviate the resistance to decarbonization associated with the uncertain investment potential of renewables. Profitability in solar and wind deployment typically remains volatile and relatively low despite historic cost reductions in the underlying technologies, and despite the fact that government subsidy for such deployment remains robust (and expensive) in all major deployment territories. Rates of return are almost never in the double digits, and frequently are much lower than that. Low and volatile expected profitability has a chilling impact on private-sector investment. But if returns of, say, five to eight percent are insufficient to attract large-scale private-sector investment, they should be more than sufficient for public-sector actors. In short, public investment in publicly-owned renewable energy assets can mitigate the risk of a capital strike that would be catastrophic for the climate.
Second, public ownership in electricity allows for much-needed coordination and planning. As already mentioned, the power sector is complicated. Making it “work” requires coordination across the different parts of the supply chain—generation, transmission, distribution, retail—and across different sources of supply with different generation characteristics, all of which occurs through a grid required to constantly match production (in one set of places) with consumption (often concentrated in another set of places entirely). The idea that electricity “markets”—which in reality are rickety and contradictory regulatory constructs—can perform this heroic task while also coordinating a massive and rapid energy transition would be comical were the implications not so serious. If anything calls for the centralized coordinating capacity of the state, underpinned by large-scale public ownership, then the power sector and its decarbonization are it.
Third and last, public ownership in electricity could help deliver decarbonization at speed. Backed by political willpower and financial wherewithal, the state can in theory get bigger things done, more quickly, than the private sector ever could. Here, it would be remiss not to mention China. As numerous commentators have pointed out, China is far and away the world’s current leader on renewables investment. In 2023, it accounted for 63 percent of global net additions in total renewable capacity, while its share of year-on-year growth in global additions of net capacity was a remarkable 96 percent. Few commentators link this speed with public ownership, but they should. China is the world’s one major country where solar and wind development is almost entirely under public ownership, and thus not dictated solely by the profit motive. Beijing can implement energy policy with alacrity because it controls all of the relevant actors.
Of course, it would be equally remiss not to mention another noteworthy feature of the Chinese case—namely, that “democracy”, and certainly democracy as Vaheesan understands it in the energy context, is notably absent. Public doesn’t necessarily mean democratic. And thus we come to what is ultimately the most disquieting thing of all for us to consider. If governments can potentially get things done quicker than the private sector can, then, for better or worse, less democratic—more autocratic—states tend to be able to get things done quickest of all, unimpeded as they are by the checks and balances (and hence delays) that democratic governance entails. In other words, not only is “democracy” absent from the Chinese energy transition, but it arguably would represent an obstacle to decarbonization, or at least to its rapid implementation. To point this out is not in any way to commend the Chinese model. It is simply to observe that, where climate is concerned, time is the main thing we clearly do not have on our side. When the need for urgency finally dawns on governments, the difficulties that democratic approaches can present for urgent action are likely to become a central feature not just in the power sector, and not just in America, but in the world at large.
