For Power Features and What to Know

In 2021 Texas's source of energy lay vulnerable. For decades, private utility companies neglected their duties by eschewing oversight and prioritizing profit over preparedness. They failed to winterize the grid, making it susceptible to damage from extreme weather events, and ultimately resulting in widespread blackouts and suffering for millions of Texans. A preventable disaster brought on by greed and the whims of capital. In the United States, and indeed globally, we are at a crossroads when it comes to electricity and the power grid that moves vast amounts of energy

across whole countries. A choice now lies ahead of us. Down one path lies the fate of Texas, a deregulated, neoliberal capitalist approach to energy production, transmission, and distribution that places electricity, which has now become essential to life, firmly in the hands of private owners who have no responsibilities to the public. Down the other path lies the promise of the Tennessee Valley Authority and more recently the New York Power Authority. Publicly owned utilities that place the decision-making and power, in both senses of the word, about how energy is

created and used into the hands of the people. One path locks in business as usual and climate chaos, and the other charts a future of a more equitable and environmentally sound energy grid. Today we uncover just how crucial the power grid is for a zero-carbon world, as well as how it can be a lodestone for a larger ecosocialist economy that places people and planet above profits. This video is better on Nebula. Use the link in the description below or stick around until the end to find out how to support Our Changing Climate directly by signing up for Nebula

or even gift Nebula to a friend. There, you can watch this video ad-free and also watch over 25 OCC videos that I haven't released on YouTube, including my most recent Nebula Plus video breaking down what it would take to reach 100% renewable power generation across the grid. What are power grids and utilities? Stretching across North America lies a dense network of energy. An interconnected machine of power plants, substations, and power lines. The energy grid. A massive machine bringing power from faraway production to the homes of millions

of consumers. Much of our lives in North America function on the security that when we flick on a switch, the light will go on or when we plug in our phone it will charge. Without a reliable power grid that security doesn't exist. But what exactly is the power grid, and what are the utilities that run them? Very simply, the grid is the collection of power plants, transmission lines, and distribution centers that facilitate the movement of energy from producers to consumers. To be clear, utilities are not fossil fuel companies or extraction corporations,

they merely purchase oil and gas to use in their generators to create energy that then flows throw transmission lines to homes and industry. In short, the grid is the veins and the heart that deliver fuel to customers, and the utilities control, operate, and build out that infrastructure. The grid, however, is primarily controlled by private utilities. As of 2017, investor-owned utilities served 72% of the United States market. And because the infrastructure of energy grids requires immense upfront costs, these utilities need the security of a captive

market to make a profit. More specifically, competing with an already established utility by laying down costly new transmission lines, substations, and generation stations is a fool's errand. As a result, utilities in the United States have become "natural monopolies" in their local markets. Because of this propensity for monopoly power under free market capitalism, a "regulatory pact" was established from the 1920s to the 1980s, that allowed for the utilities to completely capture local markets but in a heavily regulated manner. In the words of David Roberts

from Grist, the regulation of utilities landed on a compromise: "In a particular service area, a utility is granted a monopoly; in that area, it is the sole electricity provider. It is allowed to charge its customers whatever rates are necessary to cover costs and provide for a reasonable rate of return on investments. In exchange, the utility has to make investments sufficient to provide reliable, low-cost power to any customer in the area who wants it, with minimal 'line losses'" In short, investor-owned utilities are forced to keep costs reasonable in exchange for a captive market.

But since the 1970s there have been 17 states and municipalities that deregulated their energy generation and transmission companies. Under the assumption that freeing utilities from regulation would give cheaper prices to customers, lawmakers and politicians turned an essential service into a commodity. The idea behind this deregulation was if more utilities joined the fray, customers could have more ability to choose and thus would get cheaper prices. But that's far from the case. As the New York Times reports, "On average, residents living in a deregulated

market pay $40 more per month for electricity than those in the states that let individual utilities control most or all parts of the grid." And a deregulated capitalist power grid can have disastrous consequences when it comes to climate change-fueled disasters like we saw in Texas when a deep freeze hit the unprepared state and left millions without power. A crisis which the heavily deregulated utilities took advantage of and jacked up energy bills for suffering customers to $5,000. A crisis that revealed how the commodification of an essential service can leave thousands if not

millions in dire circumstances, especially those in poor communities and communities of color. So, the question of a transition to a zero-carbon world is as much one about politics as it is about technology. And one of the political battlegrounds will certainly be the power grid because it could very well be a crucial vessel for a just ecological transition. The climate crisis is here now, crashing down the door with deadly heat waves, catastrophic hurricanes, and gruesome cold snaps. A market-based approach to electricity generation not only prioritizes profits over the

well-being of the poor and people of color, but it also slows down any form of transition away from fossil fuels and dirty emissions. This is why we need a power grid for the people. A Grid for the People: In the city of Chicago, energy bills are on the rise. Infrastructure projects and buildings continue to push Chicagoans' monthly utility bill through the roof, a cost that's projected to reach as high as $650 by the winter of 2050. A trend that's reflected across the country, with energy prices surging 14.3% on average throughout the United States. This price gouging has led to the immiseration

of millions who are already struggling to pay ballooning housing and food costs. Heat and electricity are a human right. We can't leave their price and accessibility up to the chaos of the market nor the whims of a corporate board of directors (however regulated they may be). This combined with the fact that for a liveable future, we need utilities to generate, transmit, and distribute fossil-fuel-free power as soon as possible, a power grid based on the needs of the planet and people is essential. Indeed, any transition to a zero-carbon world necessitates

the electrification of almost everything, and assuring that electricity is emissions-free. Unfortunately, capitalist forces are making this transition slow and piecemeal. They have actively worked to maintain a fossil fuel industry dead set on locking in emissions-intensive fuels for decades. Because capitalists need the consistency and fluidity of fossil fuels to extract maximum profits from their production. As Andreas Malm's Fossil Capital notes, the purpose of the current power grid, and more broadly fossil fuel extraction and production, has been to allow

capitalists to break away from the temporal and spatial restrictions of the sun, the wind, and water. The fossil capitalist power grid allows the owners of production to concentrate and highly exploit workers in city centers for maximum profits. This is an unacceptable path forward. Our energy cannot exist to pad the pockets of capitalists. So then, how do we shift energy production and transmission from a system based on profit to one based on people/environment? There are two general approaches to that question, which can be implemented

simultaneously to bring cheap, accessible, and zero-carbon power to all people, everywhere. The first is centralized public power. The struggle for a renewable-powered ecosocialist future needs to understand the key role of power grids and utilities play for any energy transition. While they certainly aren't a silver bullet, radically transforming utilities and through them, the power grid, can be a lynchpin for a broader, just ecological transition. Utilities, after all, have an outsized influence on what our energy system looks like. Indeed,

due to the immense control of utilities across power generation and distribution, creating a publicly supported renewable transition mandate for utilities would mean a swift transition across the country. Not to mention renewable power greatly benefits from large-scale grids. A deeply democratic and extensive renewable public grid could transfer energy from Arizona when the sun is shining to the Pacific Northwest when it's cloudy. In short, supporting some form of national or perhaps international grid could stabilize historically variable energy technologies.

But to do this, a centralized public energy system would need to rip the decision-making away from private boards and place it back into the hands of workers and communities. Luckily, the power grid is one of the few arenas in the United States where there is already a fair amount of oversight and regulation surrounding private utilities. For many states, this supervision takes the form of Public Utilities Commissions (or PUCs for short), which are state-level elected or appointed entities that ensure that private utilities charge fair prices. As Matt Huber notes in Climate Change as Class War, "some states empower PUCs to make sure utilities operate in ways that 'are consistent with the

public interest.'.Thus… electric utilities are already explicitly political entities." In short, there is already a public body that oversees many private utilities. So why don't we just cut out the middleman? This has already been tested with the massive public utility that is the Tennessee Valley Authority or TVA for short. Since 1933, the federally-run power company has provided low-cost energy to over 10 million customers across seven southern states. Of course, the TVA is far from a perfect model for an ecosocialist utility company, but it's a start. The TVA still is heavily reliant

on fossil fuels and reveals that it's not enough to just nationalize or place a utility into the people's hands. If a people's power grid is to be truly just and ecologically sound, it needs to be subject to the oversight of radical electrical worker's unions, climate justice, and local community councils with mandates for a swift transition to a zero-carbon and efficient grid that provides low-cost energy to all people. An ecosocialist future demands a power grid free from the shackles of making a profit off of energy and infrastructure. To truly

tackle climate change at the speed climate science demands of us, private utilities based on lining the wallets of investors will not do. Instead, an ecosocialist grid would wield centralized public planning to build out a massive network of clean energy generation interconnected through national and international grids. This would inevitably mean massive public investment in projects that may very well be unprofitable. And unprofitable projects are anathema to private investors seeking an immediate return on their investments. The big drawback to this centralized power grid, however,

could be its potential lack of local autonomy. If energy generation is not truly in the hands of people via systems of community councils and direct democracy, then it could very well lead to a situation like the public utility of Eksom in South Africa, which shut down power in poor black neighborhoods to conserve power for those in rich white communities. This is why any centralized ecosocialist power grid will need a system of checks and balances from climate justice and labor groups as we will see later in the case of the New York Power Authority.

But it is also why the second radical approach to transforming the power grid is just as crucial: decentralized "community-based" energies. If the worker and community takeover of public utilities can be seen as an immediate ecosocialist tactic to jumpstart the energy transition, decentralized community power can be seen as an immediate ecoanarchist intervention. This looks like smaller microgrids of solar or wind power controlled by neighborhoods or communities that use that power. It's an appealing strategy in the struggle against privatized power because

it immediately shifts electricity back into the hands of the people and does away with the energy losses by eliminating any distance from the point of generation to the point of consumption. But also importantly community microgrids allow people to immediately establish an energy system outside the bounds of capitalist energy markets. It re-envisions energy not as a commodity, but as a source of life. As Tatiana Roa Avendaño and Eliana Carolina Carrillo Rodríguez write community energies challenge us to rethink the purpose of the energy transition, they write:

"The energy transition is not only about changing the energy grid by using alternative technologies, but entails the more fundamental issue of our concept of energy. What purposes does it serve? And for whom should it be produced?" However, this community-based decentralized approach must still maintain an internationalist lens. If the clean energy powering your town in Vermont is soaked in the blood and sweat of cobalt miners from Kolwezi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we've merely replaced one form of exploitation and colonialism with another "greener"

kind. Decentralized community microgrids cannot be isolationist. For a decentralized community-based energy grid to be just, it must show deep solidarity with the workers producing the technologies creating their energy independence by dismantling the imperial core-periphery extraction relationship with climate reparations among other tools. This is also why any excess power generated within decentralized grids should be shared with neighboring townships or stored for later use. Interconnection is key for resilience. Ultimately though, these decentralized and centralized approaches to a more ecologically

just power grid could be collected into a system of micro and macro grids sharing excess energy across borders and between communities to smooth out the fluctuations of renewables. A system similar to that envisioned by Chris Giotitsas and his co-authors with this diagram, where multiple smaller autonomous community-level grids feed into a broader grid, a "smart grid" of sorts, that can balance energy loads and demands between those communities in real-time, while storing any excess for emergencies. But we have to struggle now to achieve that future. Luckily, there are already comrades who are building that future right now.

Towards People's Power In New York, a socialist wave of organizing and coalition building garnered a significant non-reformist reform win. One that planted a flag in the sand for people's power- in both the political and electrical sense. Spurred on by the successful passage of the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act in 2019, New York socialists and climate justice organizations sought to make the goal of 100% zero-emission electricity by 2040 a reality by transforming the way power was generated throughout the state. Their target was the New York Power Authority, one of the largest state-owned utilities in the country. Intending to bring power back to the people,

a broad coalition of socialist organizers, labor unions, legislators, and climate justice advocates built and successfully passed the Build Public Renewables Act in 2023. The law mandates the New York Power Authority to help New York reach its goal of "70 percent renewable electricity by 2030 and 100 percent zero-emission electricity by 2040" by building out and operating renewable infrastructure that bridges the gap where the private sector has failed. But demanding this of the New York Power Authority, while a radical step in the right direction, also reveals the struggles of reform-based ecosocialist strategies functioning

within a capitalist economy and political system. While the NYPA is publicly owned, it can still pick winners and losers- like powering Amazon or bringing renewable power to 5 prisons in upstate New York. Granted, the legislation has attempted to counteract this. As activist Lawrence Wang notes, "the BPRA requires the NYPA to consult stakeholders like unions, community organizations, and climate and resiliency experts in a strategic planning process to determine where, when, and how it builds new renewables, which it will then formalize into official plans.

Each plan requires three public hearings and a sixty-day comment period." Even with this oversight, the New York Power Authority is still building out power for carceral capitalist interests. So, until the direction and planning are fully in the hands of the people and not corporate and carceral interests, the power grid might still be wielded to benefit the Amazons of the world, which is why we also need to simultaneously build out decentralized power like that in Puerto Rico. There, the visions of decentralized community energies have already come

to fruition in the wake of Hurricane Maria and the incompetence of the privatized utility company, Luma. After the devastation of the hurricane, the municipality of Adjuntas was left without power for months. In response, a cooperative was formed called Adjuntas Pueblo Solar that erected a solar microgrid in the town to place access to energy back into the hands of the people. Calling it an "energy insurrection," the community built power on their terms and now have the security of power regardless of the whims of the Luma. As a result, Adjuntas is building resilience

against the onslaught of future hurricanes, and providing low-cost energy to pizza shops, markets, and other necessary components of a thriving town. Adjuntas Pueblo Solar not only reveals that building out a community-owned energy system is possible right now, but also that community microgrids based on renewables are resilient in the face of climate-fueled disasters. These are the people-led interventions we need if we are to transition to a zero-carbon, just world as soon as possible. So, I encourage you to find the work that's being done in your area and join in the fight. Whether that's canvassing for a

publicly-controlled energy grid in your area or organizing your union to assert more public, worker, and ecological power over your utility. If you're already in the fight, hop down in the comments to share and build power. Because at the end of the day, public power and a renewable future can only be achieved when we take action. And that means finding, joining, and supporting communities in your area that are actually doing the necessary work. But, simply adding wind turbines and solar panels to the current grid won't be enough.

To create a genuinely 100% renewable energy grid, we'll not only a mass, people-powered movement, but also a colossal technological and infrastructure buildout. Unfortunately, the section on designing an emission-free grid got a little too complex and way too long for this video, so I had to cut it. But instead of tossing it aside, I turned it into a full-length bonus video examining what it would take to build a fully renewable grid. That video is available right now exclusively on the creator-owned streaming service Nebula. On Nebula, you can watch over 30 bonus and extended OCC videos like this one on how fossil fuel companies are evading their net-zero commitments, or this one on

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