Publicly-owned utilities as a way to move sustainable energy policy and practice forward + better operation

About ten years ago, then Montgomery County Councilmember Roger Berliner pushed the idea of the county taking over the public utility infrastructure in order to improve reliability and operation.  He was widely derided for this position by the Washington Post and in other quarters ... although at the instigation of utility regulatory agencies in Maryland and DC, Pepco has since instituted a multi-billion dollar reliability improvement program.

-- "You can't wish away the need to upgrade aging utility infrastructure," 2014
-- "Press piling on Montgomery County's utility dreams," 2011

It even came up in DC, during the review of Exelon's acquisition of the firm which included Pepco, the local electric utility serving DC and parts of Maryland ("The opportunity to create a DC Municipal electric utility: presentation tonight," 2015).

Seattle Public Utilities uses its revenue stream to fund best practice water-related infrastructure, while the funding stream of the electric utility in Medellin has been used to invest in significant social infrastructure there ("Medellin: from narco terrorism to a hub of innovation & social urbanism," RSA). From the article:

These projects were largely funded by the EPM (Empresas Publicas de Medellin, a public utilities company set up in 1950 and owned by the municipality). In 2000, the city of Medellin and EPM partnered to reinvest 30% of its profits in a series of public works and spaces such as libraries, parks, schools and transport infrastructure. This targeted the integration of the poor and marginalised communities through public realm investment.

The City of Manassas offers a bunch of utility services, including cable television.

Although just as there are examples of many great municipal utilities, there are some examples of ones that are terribly operated, such as Philadelphia Gas Works and the water authority in Flint, Michigan.  Often this happens because politics gets in the way, such as making the utility out to be more of a way to employ supporters of elected officials, or for other reasons.

And sometimes, especially with water authorities, abetted by poor oversight, because the community it serves is too small economically to adequately provide revenue flows to maintain and invest in the system there can be serious problems.

Our Hamburg, Our Grid: Germany.  Interestingly, there is an article in the Guardian about how the city-state of Hamburg, Germany purchased the utility generation and distribution firm serving it, and how they've been able to move the utility forward in terms of sustainability ("Getting privatisation undone puts centre-left in good shape in Hamburg"). From the article:

In September 2013, 51% of the electorate voted to “re-municipalise” the local electricity and district heating networks, as proposed by grassroots initiative “Our Hamburg Our Grid”. ..

The re-municipalised electricity grid, for which Hamburg paid the Swedish energy group Vattenfall €610m, has been making the city senate a healthy profit since 2017.

The Greens are finding that having utility grids in public hands allows them to propose initiatives that would otherwise have sounded like pipe dreams. Hamburg, a city whose wealth has historically grown around its inland port, has in recent years turned into a busy laboratory for renewable energy schemes.

Hamburg is now the first state in Germany to write a legally binding date into its constitution, the year 2030, not just for halving its carbon emissions from 1990 levels, but also for phasing out coal power for district heating altogether. The 250,000 households in the city which use district heating are still powered by coal stations in Wedel and Tiefstack.

In the future, the Greens propose, Hamburg homes will be heated entirely from renewable sources such as waste incineration, biomass or solar power. There is a proposal to build a large heat storage system underneath the harbour, capturing excess heat produced in the summer for use during the winter by pumping hot salt water hundreds of meters deep into the soil.

-- "Our City, Our Grid: The energy remunicipalisation trend in Germany", from Reclaiming Public Services, Transnational Institute

Portland, Oregon.  In the fallout of the Enron bankruptcy, the City of Portland tried to purchase the municipal portion of its utility, but it was thwarted by the bankruptcy court, Wall Street, and public opinion.

And speaking of Portland, it runs the water utility, and some very conservative forces tried to use rising water rates because of required investments in infrastructure from federal mandates as a way to bring about privatization ("Portland Public Water District: Ballot Measure 26-156 trounced by nearly 3-to-1 margin," Portland Oregonian).

California.  The bankruptcy of Pacific Gas & Electric in California.  Because of being deemed responsible for a number of wildfires, the primary electric (and gas) utility in California is in bankruptcy.  Some quarters are advocating that the state take over and run the utility.

-- "Let’s end the devastation by making PG&E public," San Francisco Chronicle
-- "There's a better way out of the PG&E bankruptcy," San Francisco Chronicle

Too big to succeed?  The thing is that the scale there are talking about is so much bigger than a typical utility operating at the scale of a county or city.

TVA and public utility distribution at the local scale.  But rural electric cooperatives and the Tennessee Valley Authority offer a more scalable alternative.

TVA is a big public utility, a Depression-era economic development initiative to bring electric power to rural areas.

While the big TVA is the primary producer of electricity, at the regional scale it is self-organized into nine customer service districts and within those districts smaller and separate organizations, many municipally owned, such as the "Electric Power Board" in Chattanooga are the sellers of electricity to individual users.

Some local electricity distributors are particularly innovative. The one in Chattanooga is a leader in linking high speed Internet ("Chattanooga as a smart city," 2014) to the grid as a management tool, providing high speed computing services much more cheaply as a result, along with cable television and telecommunications services.

If PG&E were to be taken over by the state, they should organize similarly.