A push for increased public ownership of electrical utilities and new opportunities for cities, states and nonprofits to get involved is helping propel a U.S. transition to green energy that puts local needs above private profits.
“That has really catalyzed a massive explosion of municipalities, cities, states really thinking about how they could become the engines for renewable deployment,” Bozuwa told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The Electric Power Supply Association, a national trade group, declined to comment on such municipalization efforts, but Pepco, the targeted D.C. utility, has raised alarm bells.
Backers say those public utilities deliver lower rates, more dependability and a greater receptivity to local communities. Woodring is the president of Ann Arbor for Public Power, an advocacy group that has gotten the city to do an initial feasibility study and is now pushing for an additional, more in-depth report.
Last year, New York state passed a key law facilitating such public investments in renewables, while voters in Maine rejected a high-profile referendum to create a statewide public power utility. New York’s Build Public Renewables Act for the first time allows the state’s publicly owned power authority – the country’s largest – to develop renewable energy.