Kamal Ghorui
Who keeps the lights on? Who benefits from how electricity is governed? Who bears the cost? That’s what Nikki Luke explores in Electric Life : Utility Regulation and the Fight for Energy Democracy . High electricity bills increase cost of living, barring in wealthier neighbourhoods, where charges get automatically deducted from bank accounts – insignificant to overall expenses.
Who gets power – light and heating, run machinery, study and work – how much, when, and who pays the bill, pretty much defines people’s everyday life. Yet, electricity is less treated as a public good, and more as a political tool, a commodity. Where, “corporate and state power collaborate to maintain privatised control of a vital public good”.
Luke writes about private utility company Georgia Power in Atlanta, among US’s most unequal cities, where energy bills consume more than 10% of household budgets across low-income, racially diverse communities in suburbs.
She tracks electricity pricing, urbanisation, and how the private electricity provider entered people’s “interior and intimate spaces of electric life”, increasing efficiencies of labour in every manner. She contrasts it with user/customer campaigns that followed. These demanded, “a right to affordable energy as a basic need, in a call to democratise and decommodify electric life”.
Luke’s framework addresses the power grip – of regulated private utilities, govt/state public service commissions, business elites – behind the power grid. Urban environmentalism, and decarbonisation roadmaps for city planning, defined where “electricity capital” would be invested, but users/ consumers, the paying public, had no say .
The book’s core idea is that electricity governance serves capital, and prioritises entrenched business-political interests, over poor communities, and resident middle-classes, who are pushed to suburbsas urbanisation expands. With modernisation comes an increase in property values, “without measures to protect residents from rising rents, insurance, and property taxes”.
Community-led campaigns, Luke writes, emphasise the gap – how can private utilities increase power rates when minimum wages are stagnant? As the book notes, large commercial users negotiated lower rates than residential customers. It’s similar to charging higher per-unit rates to residential and small commercial set-ups, while offering subsidised rates to industry and agriculture. People cross subsidise political interests.
The book calls for “decommodifying electricity to build a social wage”. Luke argues that ordinary people, and not just govts or companies, must have real control over how energy is produced, distributed and priced.
To that end, energy democracy means that communities get a say in where energy comes from – whether coal or renewables like solar and wind – how it’s run, and who benefits from it.
Energy democracy, Luke writes, is hard to imagine in the second Trump administration as state institutions are actively dismantled. Worse, Georgia Power warns of the “biggest surge in electricity demand” since airconditioning. This demand is driven by data centres. Question is, should consumers bear the cost of building these “vast new fossil-fuel power capacity to meet that demand?”
The direct clash of such demand with environmental goals, makes it all the more important for contemporary “energy democracy organising” to draw from US’s long history of environmental, labour, and consumer movements.
The people must seize this “time”: defined by the transition to clean energy, and increasing electricity demand. The book has lessons for the public in every country, where electricity is a political tool.
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