Giving Compass' Take:

• Robert Raymond reports that some Californians, spurred by intentional power outages, are considering electric cooperatives.

• How can funders support local efforts to take control of essential services? 

• Learn about how intentional power outages hurt low-income families. 

It’s no surprise that northern Californians are disaffected with the investor-owned electric utility. They’ve been found culpable for gas line explosions, for some of the state’s deadliest and most destructive wildfires, for diverting safety money toward profits and executive bonuses, and — most recently — for a grossly mismanaged series of intentional blackouts that impacted millions in the Bay Area alone.

But if there’s a silver lining to the PG&E disaster, it’s that — in the midst of filing for bankruptcy — they’ve opened up the space for conversations about alternatives. And perhaps one of the most interesting of these conversations is based on the idea of transforming the utility into a network of cooperatives: utilities owned and managed by the ratepayers themselves. It’s an idea that’s being discussed by the mayors of 22 California cities including San Jose, Oakland and Sacramento, and although it might sound a bit far-fetched, there are actually many precedents for it.

“The history of co-ops in the electricity sector is fascinating,” Johanna Bozuwa, co-manager of the Climate & Energy Program at Democracy Collaborative told Shareable. “They go back as far as the 1930s, during which a key tenet of the New Deal was to provide access to electricity by creating the rural electric co-op model that continues to provide energy today.”

There are, in fact, over 900 rural electric co-ops operating in 47 states providing electric service to 56 percent of the U.S.’s landmass. And, according to Bozuwa, many of these were started during the New Deal.

Electric co-ops work pretty much the same way as an investor-owned utility like PG&E, except instead of being owned by shareholders, it’s the ratepayers — the people actually paying for and using the electricity — who are the owners.

Read the full article about the movement toward electric cooperatives by Robert Raymond at Shareable.