The moment your city's utility transforms from a privately owned corporation to a public power grid will be a binary event. A switch will be flipped. One minute, the wires connecting your home to everyone else's across your city will belong to a faceless, callous corporation, and the next, they'll be our wires, belonging to each of us collectively. It won't just be the wires. The poles, the transformers, the substations, the office buildings, the fleets of repair trucks: they will all be ours. With public power, we can improve people's lives, make our bills more bearable, and our climate more safe.
This transformative moment becomes more appealing in our collective imagination every time the for-profit, corporate utilities fail, like they just did here in San Francisco. The Saturday before Christmas, the lights went out for a third of the city. In an instant, people out shopping and eating with their loved ones, celebrating together, were plunged into darkness. The lights didn't come back on for days. It was a rainy weekend, and the Great PG&E Blackout of 2025 shut down public transit stations for both the regional BART and city MUNI systems. The power outage affected street lights across the city and bricked Waymos on the spot. Facebook, Reddit, and other online forums were flooded with discussions of how we can permanently end PG&E's control over our city's grid.
This San Francisco blackout was nowhere near deadly as the 2010 San Bruno explosion or the four fires that courts found PG&E responsible for starting, including the fatal Camp Fire that killed 48 people. None of these events have been enough to catalyze immediate change, despite the widespread anger they created. In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein writes about how this specific kind of outrage about the failures of existing institutions with nowhere to go become laden with conspiracies. She says they "get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right." We can see the facts, the failures of our existing utility institutions quite clearly. To prevent people angry about failed institutions from turning to conspiracy theories for answers, we must organize, organize, organize.
As history has shown us, we cannot count on scandals and unorganized public outrage to deliver public power.
The City of San Francisco has been trying to buy our grid from PG&E since 2019, and PG&E refuses to sell. Often private utilities charge that a city government would be overwhelmed by the complexity of the grid in an attempt to defeat new attempts to build public power, but San Francisco has operated a large electricity system for over 100 years. As one of 40 existing public power agencies in California, San Francisco has public power "in our DNA." When it comes to being capable of expertly estimating the feasibility of running a distribution system there is no entity more qualified. It's this track record that has earned support for the public takeover from the City Attorney, the Mayor, and the Board of Supervisors.[1] The city-led campaign has built an enormous amount of analysis: they continue to document PG&E's poor service and have completed full environmental and economic analyses in their efforts to gain local control over our grid.
Through this ongoing struggle, we can see that economic and environmental studies are not enough to deliver public power, either.
We need a path forward that doesn't rely solely on public sentiment or on technocratic analysis. In Organize or Burn, Fabian Holt, a professor at Roskilde University in Denmark, looks at the socialist campaign in New York to win the construction of new renewable energy, which passed the historic Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) in 2023. Holt's careful exploration of the public power organizing that delivered BPRA helps us situate its success in a longer historical context of political parties and movements. Rather than treating this monumental victory for public power as an independent event, he firmly connects the success of its strategy to key features of the organization, like the formation of NYC DSA's Ecosocialist Working Group in 2017, the development of the Public Power New York coalition in 2018, and the pivot from pressure campaign tactics into electoralism starting in 2021.
What delivers public power is political organizations that run bold, ambitious campaigns.
The story of winning BPRA is a story about organizers making a campaign possible, working within an organization, learning through their experimentation, studying the results of their methods, and building power to win their goals. Before running for state office, Sarahana Shrestha was co-chair of Mid Hudson Valley (MHV) DSA's Ecosocialist Working Group, working on BPRA from another chapter of the organization. "I was asked to run by organizers within this space to create a mandate for this legislation, and that's exactly what we did," Assemblymember Shrestha told me over email.
In Convergence, NYC DSA co-chair Grace Mausser connects the dots between the lessons learned from fighting for BPRA and the chapter's recent success electing Zohran Mamdani - a public power champion - as Mayor of New York City. Mausser writes, "We have a model for winning mass campaigns; we have a model for true co-governance with legislators; now we will bring our experience to City Hall." By 2023, their co-governance strategy had elected 8 socialists to New York State office, including both Shrestha and Zohran Mamdani. Now, it boasts 11 in state and local offices, including Diana Moreno, who was elected to represent Mamdani's former district and keep pushing for public power in the state legislature. Their organizing model based in collective, volunteer leadership and development continues to grow its power, expanding into new offices without losing power in others.
Building political power as a movement matters because affordability and obstacles to renewable energy are urgent, widely felt problems that our existing institutions are failing to solve. These failures are our opportunities. Shrestha told me, "[A]s soon as I got elected, the number one issue constituents were reaching out to us about was their utility bills... This gave us an opportunity to do town halls across the district to make sure people understood how the rate-setting process works, what the ownership model has to do with it. We found immediately that people who came to these town halls were sold on public ownership, the idea that energy should not be for profit to begin with." In December, the Hudson Valley coalition made more progress in co-governance. The New York Times reported the public power proposal to take over Central Hudson would deliver more affordability immediately, pointing to public ownership as a way to take action now.
To win public power, we must build political organizations that fight for what our communities need and change the terrain we are fighting on, too.
We should learn from these organizing methods that build enthusiasm and organizations together in order to address obstacles to public power and pursue it outright everywhere. For example, in Portland, Oregon, local movements overhauled how their city elections and their city council work in 2022, ensuring fairer and more representative decision-making going forward. Restructuring their local government made it possible to elect a socialist caucus to Portland City Council in 2024. Our public power campaigns can be outspent significantly, and, in California, the currently active Senate Bill 327 would ban investor-owned utilities from spending using money from our bill to block new public power campaigns.[2] Seventeen other states have bans on foreign spending on ballot initiatives - the type of spending that beat Maine's statewide public power campaign - that could be duplicated in other states or expanded to cover utility ownership specifically.[3]
History shows us that we should not wish for public power transitions to happen because we are right on the merits or because there is a moment of significant public attention. These conditions make transformation possible, but they do not make it happen by existing alone, as we can see from multiple examples over the last two decades. Organizers across New York state show us that strong organizations are what set apart the public power campaign victories from failures in recent history. Organizers show us how we can win.
Local journalist Tim Redmond has been writing about San Francisco's battle over our electricity system valiantly, and the Bay Guardian first started covering the story over 50 years ago. ↩︎
It is now headed to the Assembly, where a version of this same bill passed last year and was supported by the Governor. ↩︎
A bill introduced in Congress proposes to block foreign ownership of investor-owned utilities entirely, for example. ↩︎
If you made it all the way past the footnotes, you deserve a little extra dose of joy! Here's Zohran Mamdani bringing you the analysis for public power shortly after his election to the New York State Assembly in 2021.