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Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States de Sandeep Vaheesan

Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States

Autor Sandeep Vaheesan
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 4 dec 2024
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.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780226836386
ISBN-10: 022683638X
Pagini: 400
Ilustrații: 15 halftones, 17 line drawings, 2 tables
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 33 mm
Greutate: 0.68 kg
Ediția:First Edition
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press

Notă biografică

Sandeep Vaheesan is legal director of the Open Markets Institute. His popular writing has appeared in the Washington Post, New Republic, Atlantic, and Dissent.

Cuprins

Abbreviations
Introduction

Past
1. Wall Street Keeps Rural America in the Dark
2. Public Power Advances
3. A New Deal for Electricity
4. “Turning Our Darkness to Dawn”

Present
5. Grassroots Democracies?
6. Institutions Serving Two Masters
7. The Continued Dominance of Dirty Power

Promise
8. Our Economy to Make—and Remake
9. Public Power for the Entire Country
10. The Fights Ahead

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
 

Recenzii

"Through an illuminating historical overview of a variety of struggles for public ownership of electricity (‘public power’) Vaheesan charts a course for what we now today often call ‘energy democracy’. . . .While there are already many useful historical accounts of electricity in the United States, Vaheesan’s stands apart with his laser focus on the long-standing struggles between private and public interests."

"A feat of explanation. Most historians of electrification in the US have chosen to limit their subject matter…however, Vaheesan can zoom in and out of the local, regional, and national political conflicts that have shaped the evolution of the American electrostate across its century-and-a-half-long history…Few books summarize the policy changes that led to restructuring so succinctly and comprehensively as Democracy in Power."

"Sandeep Vaheesan’s lively new book, Democracy in Power, [paints] a striking portrait of how federal, state, and local governments collaboratively built much of the U.S. electricity system over the first half of the twentieth century."

"Vaheesan explores the history of public control of power systems in the United States, assessing how the United States has, at least partially, averted a net-zero oligarchy in power."

"[A] very impressive, deeply-researched book on the history of the American power sector."

"It seems, we need both a renewed political economy of public finance that puts power and conflict at its center and an explicitly normative project for public finance that shows how tax policy and the instruments of public finance can be used to promote a just and sustainable future. One of the many virtues of Vaheesan’s excellent new book is that it advances both elements of this project. In the historical sections of his book, Vaheesan focuses on the significant public expenditures that built the massive federal hydroelectric projects of the New Deal era, the creative forms of debt financing and the (all too limited) use of grants to electrify rural America, and, more recently, the use of tax credits to spur the growth of renewable energy."

"After years of minimal growth, electricity demand is now soaring because certain industries are using electrification to decarbonize as a way to combat climate change and because of the advent of artificial intelligence, which requires massive amounts of power. Vaheesan traces the century-long struggle over control of this capital-intensive sector between private utilities and publicly owned and cooperative entities subject to local control."

“Democracy in Power is a timely, urgent contribution to understanding the how and why of today’s power system operations. Vaheesan reveals the rarely told history of the electricity system as a site of struggle for public and community control. Democratizing the power sector is a story of David versus Goliath, but Vaheesan shows it can be a winnable fight—and maybe our best bet at building a decarbonized, livable world.”

"An impassioned and historically informed case for making good on the promise of public power in the quest for a future without fossil fuels. Vaheesan persuasively argues that decarbonization should at last fulfill the hopes and plans of New Dealers to democratize power in the United States, and organize the production of electricity along sustainable lines."

“In Democracy in Power, Sandeep Vaheesan shows how the history of US electrification can point us toward a decarbonized future. Anyone interested in the Green New Deal, consumer cooperatives, or the democratic promise of public power will find his clearly written policy analysis to be informative, intriguing, and inspiring.”

"A major obstacle stands in the way of a just energy transition: corporate monopolies that run our energy system. This timely book reminds us, through political history and an assessment of the crisis of our democracy, that business interests also stood in the way of powering rural America, and that the debate over who should own energy is almost as old as energy itself. That debate is far from over—now is the moment to claim our power back!"