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Jukka Peltokoski

Economic Democracy and the Billion-Dollar Co-op | P2P Foundation - 0 views

blog.p2pfoundation.net/...24

cooperative osuuskunta energia energiaosuuskunta sähköverkko demokratia yhteisötalous jukkap2p Unioni

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 25 May 17 - No Cached
  • Candidate Donald Trump made a campaign stop in February 2016 hosted by South Carolina’s Broad River Electric Cooperative.
  • By the onset of the Great Depression, few people in the rural United States had electricity at home—about 10 percent. The power companies that had lit up the cities simply didn’t see enough profit in serving far-flung farmers. But gradually some of those farmers started forming electric cooperatives—utility companies owned and governed by their customers—and strung up their own lines.
  • We typically think of our democratic institutions as having to do with politicians and governments. But there are democratic businesses, too—not just these electric co-ops, but also hulking credit unions, mutual-insurance companies, and ubiquitous cooperative brands from Land O’Lakes to the Associated Press. Their democracy is fragile. When it’s not exercised or noticed, these creatures act on their own volition.
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  • Local co-ops band together to form larger co-ops of co-ops—power suppliers that run power plants, cooperatively owned mining operations, and democratic banks that finance new projects.
  • It’s also a neglected democracy
  • by member-owners of the co-ops
  • and by a society that forgets what cooperative economic development have achieved.
  • Electric cooperatives are conservative institutions, carrying out the business of reliability while balancing their members’ interests with formidable inertia. But they’re also poised to lead a radical shift to a more renewable distributed-energy grid. They can be fiefdoms for long-entrenched establishments, but they’re also bastions of bottom-up, local self-governance.
  • depends not just on the whims of investors or on the promises of presidents, but on the readiness of the people who use it to organize.
  • We Own It, for instance, is a new network started by young but seasoned cooperators determined to support organizing among co-op members
  • Heneghan believes that co-ops are uniquely positioned to benefit. Their lean, local, customer-centered kind of business has already made them pioneers in easy, low-risk financing for energy-efficiency improvements and renewables.
  • Co-ops not locked into G&T contracts have been especially ambitious in switching to renewables.
  • electric co-ops still lag behind the national average in their use of renewables. The local co-ops are bound to their decades-long G&T contracts, and the G&Ts say they can’t walk away from their past investments in coal anytime soon.
  • co-op staffs know as well as anyone that their democracy is in some respects nominal—an opportunity, but by no means a guarantee.
  • According to Derrick Johnson, the president of One Voice and the state NAACP, “Our ultimate goal is to help them understand how to develop a strategy to maximize members’ participation.” Then, he hopes, “they can begin to think about renewable energy differently.”
  • Without member pressure, for instance, managers often have an incentive to sell more power rather than helping members reduce their consumption, their costs, and their carbon footprints.
  • In particular, he pointed out the billions of dollars in “capital credits” that co-ops collectively hold—excess revenues technically owned by members, but that often go unclaimed, serving as a pool of interest-free financing.
  • “There are so many things that point to a structural change in the electrical industry.” He compared the change to what cellular did to telephones.
  • By way of explanation, a staff member repeated what I’ve been told by the leaders of other big co-ops: Low turnout means that members are satisfied.
  • “If the members are not involved in any significant way, the directors become very insular, and they can basically do with the co-op as they please.”
  • As the Trump administration assembles its promised trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, it seems unlikely to unleash a fresh spree of cooperative rural development.
  • Jukka Peltokoski on 25 May 17
     
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