Compeerism solves the democratization of energy—builds support for the movement

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Democratizing Infrastructure.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 79-82. /LJS

Given that some degree of macrogrid dependence remains unavoidable for many communities, then, the subsequent question for compeerists is how this infrastructure can best be commonified, that is, taken out of capital’s hands and placed under the purview of stakeholder communities. This is precisely the aim of the growing energy democracy movement, which has linked demands for a renewable energy transition to increased citizen empowerment. To better grasp the challenges and possible ways forward in such a movement, it is helpful to view electricity infrastructure as consisting of three main components: generation, transmission, and distribution. The first aim of compeerist-aligned energy democracy activists tends to focus on gaining community control over the last-mile of macrogrid electricity distribution. Strategies to be pursued vary here according to the underlying conditions on the ground. In the worst-case scenarios, where investor-held energy companies have monopolized electricity delivery, the most common tactic has been to strive for a cooperativization or municipalization of the energy infrastructure (Burke and Stephens, 2018). The cooperative route is generally adopted where the underlying regulations are favourable and the population to be serviced is relatively small. Germany, for instance, has seen a significant increase in small-scale cooperatives, from less than a hundred at the turn of the millennium to close to a thousand today (DGRV, 2020). The US proves to be an outlier here, as large-scale cooperativization has also been on the table in some parts of the country, likely due to the presence of already existing large energy cooperatives that can be traced back to the electrification push of the New Deal in the 1930s. In one recent case in the state of Maine, it took a governor’s veto in 2021 to block a voter referendum that would have replaced the current for-profit utility (linked to the energy conglomerate Avangrid) with a decentralized, user/consumer-owned utility (Maine, 2021). In most instances where larger populations are involved, however, the energy democracy movement has been inclined to pursue municipalization efforts. Germany is again an exemplar of this strategy, with the city of Hamburg, for instance, ousting their corporate energy supplier, Vattenfall, as the result of a public referendum which gave the municipality full control over its grid in 2014. Notably, this transition occurred without the local support of both the dominant centre left (SPD) and centre right (CDU) parties (Provost and Kennard, 2014). In Berlin, a similar referendum, again resisted by the mainstream parties within the city council, was supported by 80 per cent of those who voted, but the measure failed because it fell one per cent shy of the 25 per cent quorum requirement (BBC, 2013). Turning to the US, while much attention has focused on Boulder’s multiyear battle to break free from its corporate energy provider, Excel, a much larger municipalization effort has been unfolding in San Francisco. In the California case the beleaguered PG&E utility finds itself increasingly in the sites of the city council, which has been entertaining the idea of a municipal takeover for several years (Castle, 2020; Kukura, 2021). Importantly, however, capital-based corporations are not always the dominant entity in electricity delivery; for example, in the US nearly half the population already receives its last-mile(s) of electricity from either a cooperative or public utility. Nonetheless, homing in on the latter first, despite tending to offer marginally better rates and greater environmental awareness than their investor-owned counterparts, these hierarchically organized public entities still generally lack options for community input and empowerment. In response to this reality, the energy democracy movement is beginning to make robust demands to address these shortcomings. Based on the Berlin case noted earlier, such demands can include the embrace of full transparency, citizen and worker participation on the board, neighbourhood advisory assemblies, and the power to force decisions through citizen petitions (Angel, 2016). The Switched On London campaign for a public utility is making similar demands (Switched On, nd). Yet, as is evidenced from the resistance to such measures from within some city governments themselves (Hamburg and Berlin are both good examples), bringing about truly commonified public utilities will be a continuing battle. The situation is somewhat brighter when we turn to existing cooperative electricity providers, as these tend to be endowed with mechanisms aimed at facilitating community input. Furthermore, being member cooperatives that are not driven by profit – if revenues exceed the needs of the cooperative, the money is redistributed to its members – they are more amenable to member interests and wishes (Bozuwa, 2018). In the US there are hundreds of New Deal era, cooperative utilities and electricity-centred cooperative federations, which were established to distribute (and in some cases generate and transmit) electricity to the large swathes of the country that were considered too unprofitable for capitalist investments. Today, US cooperatives own and maintain 42 per cent of the distribution lines that make up the last-mile(s) of electricity supply (NRECA, 2021). From an energy democracy perspective, having electricity cooperatives already in place on the ground is undoubtedly the most ideal starting point. To illustrate the compeerist potential here, we can take the unlikely case of the US state of Georgia, where a significant portion of the population, mostly in rural areas, receive their energy from various Electric Membership Cooperatives (EMCs). While the actual running of these membership cooperatives can be criticized for the decisions they have made, for instance a lack of investment in sustainability initiatives or barring the public from board meetings, the governance structure is still fundamentally democratic, meaning it is the members of the cooperative (anyone purchasing energy from an EMC) who are empowered to elect their respective decision-making board (Orrock, 2011). This governance arrangement then opens up significant opportunities to ‘hack’ the way these cooperatives have tended to operate. Indeed, it is worth pointing out here that in the oft neglected co-op elections that are offered, candidates with the most energized base usually win (Grimley, 2020). Hence with a concerted compeerist push, greater control over a cooperative board could be used to amend operating procedures to allow for greater openness and transparency while refocusing services to be more in line with commons-based principles. Furthermore, this control could then conceivably be extended to the higher tiered cooperative federation. For example, in the case at hand, each regional EMC board is permitted to vote for their particular representative to the governing body of the state-wide Oglethorpe Power Corporation, which, beyond the last-mile, is also involved in energy production and transmission.