George Crocker, a founding board member of Community Power has worked on energy democracy issues since the late 1970’s. In his newly published book titled About Power: How to Democratize Electricity Crocker has gratefully compiled the valuable stories of his over 4 decades of experiences and distills from them the useful lessons learned so that the rest of us can know. The book is essential reading so that we do not have to learn the lessons the hard way or reinvent the wheel from scratch.

The main driver of climate chaos that Community Power uniquely and specifically focuses on is the way how energy utilities have incentives that are “upside down and backwards.” We can’t afford to remain trapped in a regulatory and policy compact for energy utilities that is stuck in the last century. Crocker articulately exposes the obsolete monopoly power structures in our energy utility system have slowed much-needed progress on climate justice. Examples of these resulting perverse incentives include how utilities are effectively financially rewarded when they effectively emit more pollution and are motivated to tilt the playing field again renewable power that is outside of their market share. 

Crocker also lays out to build the renewable economy in a way that can bring down these barriers caused by these “upside down and backwards” incentives. To find out what it is, come join the Book Tour Event on October 17th (with more to follow or purchase the book by clicking here or on the image below. 

Here is a vision to start with: We can meet Minnesota’s new 100% carbon free electricity energy goals quickly by taking an approach of strategically sizing and siting community-based renewable energy projects so that they require little or no new transmission infrastructure. It would take 8-10 years to do the top-down transmission line development needed to build out renewable power in the model where relatively few corporations own massive wind and solar farms in remote locations. Since the UN Climate chief says we have only effectively 2 years to finally make the clean energy transition, then why intentionally take the 8–10-year option?

Elected officials and other community leaders who intend well may assume that this is how the renewable economy has to be built because that is what the loudest voices in the room echo and could thereby greatly benefit from awareness that there is an alternative way forward with bonus benefits that George lays out in About Power. Dispersed and distributed renewable power would make our energy system more resilient and would enable the local ownership that will keep wealth circulating in our communities, creating jobs. However, utilities are incentivized to build new renewable generation in the highly centralized manner that relies upon $2-million-dollars-per-mile new transmission lines to accommodate them because makes it easier for these monopolies to maintain their market share.    

Toward this point, speaking from my own experience, I have watched Xcel Energy find a couple of creative ways to red tape to the development of renewable energy projects in Minneapolis that it does not own. These include imposing exorbitant fees for interconnecting for such projects to the grid and collaborating with the MN Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to slash the compensation that it pays to purchase energy from some community-owned solar renewable projects. Meanwhile, I have watched CenterPoint pull a bait and switch that ended up sabotaging an Inclusive Financing pilot project in front of the PUC. Inclusive financing is a regulatory reform that would allow customers to pay for energy efficiency improvements a little bit at a time using the value of the energy they save to shave the up-front cost barrier. Saved energy in the already built environment is essentially the low hanging fruit for mitigating climate chaos – and should be noncontroversial. Yet CenterPoint unilaterally insisted on jacking up the interest rate on the capital pool to a prohibitive level, prioritizing their company to be able to profit from it at the expense of allowing energy savings to turn into a net financial benefit for the customers.

Investor-owned utilities have been reluctant to consider inclusive financing because it would drastically improve end use energy efficiency if given a chance, and thereby reduce the utility’s earnings. Utility profits being tied to sales is a systemic flaw of obsolete regulatory policy that Crocker repeatedly exposes in the book. Spokespeople for utility companies have to make up false diversionary reasons to explain their reluctance to make it way easier for far more people to save energy or to pursue distributed / community owned renewable power. That is because admitting their actual private motives would cause a PR crisis for companies who have a heavily greenwashed image. The book About Power explains what those private motives are and how the reasons for them is an obsolete system rather than flawed individuals. Utilities had to be forced by the state legislature into accepting community solar, and energy efficiency programs with various logical inclusive investments simply because these sensible pro-climate approaches reduce utility profits.

Energy is so very fundamental to society. When we are able to successfully chart the course of our energy future, then we’ll have the energy to get the rest of it right. Knowing this, as well as how the electric grid is the largest machine on the continent, why are we not being taught about the economics of the energy utility system in schools? The big consequence of schools not teaching about this or giving insight into this subject matter is that a wide swath of the public is liable to get mislead by claims that renewable power is responsible for job losses, and rate hikes in what we pay for electricity when those are no longer necessarily the case. When the utilities do interface with the general public about their big picture operations, they have a tendency to speak in a way that reinforces the perception that utilities are a dry, boring subject matter that is too complicated to understand. If this “forcefield of tedium” is indeed an intentional ploy, it has been an effective way to divert the public from having enough interest in the topic needed to get clarity on the big picture patterns at play. With the publication of About Power, the inside scoop on what motivate electric utilities to behave at counter-purpose to the rest of us need not languish in obscurity anymore. 

About Power touches on the story of how Community Power started as the Minneapolis Energy Options campaign of 2013. We were able to gain a lot of momentum because so many in the city found it exciting that we had such an opportunity to chart the course of our energy future. However, we observed so many of those who were excited meant well also expressed that they don’t know enough about the system to really build out energy democracy. When Minneapolis Energy Options came to a public hearing, the dominant message of those speaking in opposition to a public takeover of our power was “Just stay out of it -it is all really complicated, and you will inevitably mess it up so please just butt out and leave it to the experts”. We see where approach has gotten us and that is exactly the symptom of us not being taught about this in schools. And it is the reason why Community Power’s next step was to launch a series of community education events about the economic incentives of the energy utility system called the Powerful Conversations Tour. While we don’t give all the technical detail on how to manage an energy system in just 2 hours, the intention of the Powerful Conversations Tour is to give just enough info to spark curiosity to learn more about the topic and to cut through the forcefield of tedium by directly clarifying what the utilities’ perverse incentives are.

So, you have a choice. You can either look away in disinterest and risk getting bamboozled by the misleading propaganda of conventional utility business management or you can help build up a movement of activists who have enough knowledge about energy management and translate that into power.