Private money, public good, and the original fight for control of
America’s energy industry.
Until the 1930s,
financial interests dominated electrical power in the United States.
That changed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal which
restructured the industry. The government expanded public ownership,
famously through the Tennessee Valley Authority, and promoted a new
kind of utility: the rural electric cooperative that brought light
and power to millions in the countryside. Since then, public and
cooperative utilities have persisted as an alternative to shareholder
control. Democracy in Power traces the rise of publicly
governed utilities in the twentieth-century electrification of
America.
Sandeep Vaheesan
shows that the path to accountability in America’s power sector was
beset by bureaucratic challenges and fierce private resistance.
Through a detailed and critical examination of this evolution,
Vaheesan offers a blueprint for a publicly led and managed path to
decarbonization. Democracy in Power is at once an essential
history, a deeply relevant accounting of successes and failures, and
a guide on how to avoid repeating past mistakes.
