http://truth-out.org/news/item/20564-the-transformation-of-americas-energy-economy
The Transformation of America's Energy Economy
Saturday, 14 December 2013 11:21 By Bob Massie, WBUR | News Analysis
In a ground-breaking move, voters in Boulder, Colorado, approved an
initiative to end their relationship with Xcel Energy, a utility with
$10.7 billion in revenues, thus clearing the way for the city to form
its own municipal utility that would lower rates and make greater use of
renewable energy.
Opponents of the effort had themselves put the question on the ballot in
order to block measures by the city council. They also tried through a
second initiative to hamstring the city from issuing enough bonds to be
able to afford the purchase of Xcel’s facilities.
During the fierce battle that attracted national attention, corporate
executives and their allies argued that the city had neither the money
nor the expertise to manage such a complex enterprise. Advocates for the
municipal utility, including New Era Colorado Foundation, fought back
with a crowd-funding campaign that raised more than three times their
financial goal. In a landslide, two-thirds of voters supported the idea
of bringing the utility under public control and then rejected the
borrowing limits designed to kill the deal by a similar margin.
Though the utility industry has gone through a wave of consolidation
over the last two decades, they are starting to show the strains of
technological, economic, and political change. Municipal utilities are
far more common than most people are aware, with more than 1000 already
functioning in the United States, serving 50 million customers, a
population greater than the size of Spain. Most of these entities are
owned by cities, and controlled by panels of local citizens. Some are
even cooperatives owned by their members.
Proponents of change, not only in Boulder but around the country, have
argued that public control creates three vital benefits. First,
decisions are made not by distant corporate managers whose first
priority is to generate returns for absentee shareholders or to pay
enormous salaries for executives, but by managers who are accountable to
the community. Second, because of this, municipal utilities can focus on
important local goals, such as investing in renewable energy,
efficiency, and other factors that increase community resilience. And
finally, the rates of municipal utilities are traditionally lower than
their counterparts, and they channel any financial surplus — also known
as profit — back into the community.
All of this comes at a time when the entire model of a corporate utility
operating a centralized grid is facing steady erosion. Universities and
cities across the country are expressing their desire to move away from
both hiring — or even owning stocks — in companies that remain committed
to fossil fuels. In addition, every family who installs solar on their
roof not only slashes their need for energy from a utility, but also
cuts the revenue for those same firms.
As the number of customers inexorably drops, the firm must spread its
costs across a smaller and smaller number of customers, which increases
their rates and creates even more demand to leave the grid. This
long-term shift has caught the attention of both the U.S. Department of
Energy, which supports it, but also the Edison Institute, the industry
association of large utilities, which warned in January 2013 that the
entire energy industry may follow the path of the phone companies, which
struggled to maintain a vast system of land-lines even as customers
flooded to widely distributed cell phones.
As the price of solar energy steadily comes down — and as oil continues
to rise — the transformation of America’s energy economy is under way.
The two critical questions for those who want to see America shift to a
new economy that is just and sustainable for people and planet, is
whether the technological shift from a centralized fossil fuel grid will
be matched by a smaller shift from centralized large-scale corporations
to democratic control. If this happens, with cities like Boulder leading
the way, the energy, the dollars, and the decisions about the future
will move into the hands of local communities, which would free more
Americans to take the transformative steps we both want and need.
--
Darryl McMahon
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing
himself.” ― Leo Tolstoy
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