Jacobin - The Defeat of Public Energy in Maine Isn’t Reason for Despair

Legal director Sandeep Vaheesan publishes a piece on how Maine’s voters recently rejected a referendum for publicly owned energy after a disinformation campaign led by the energy lobby.

Earlier this month, the people of Maine decisively said no to publicly owned energy. If they had voted yes on Question 3, which was on the ballot on November 7, they would have authorized their state to take over Central Maine Power (CMP) and Versant, the two major private electric utilities in the state, and replace them with the consumer-owned Pine Tree Power Company. Instead, following a massive propaganda blitz by CMP and Versant, Mainers rejected Question 3 by a seventy-to-thirty margin.

In 2021, Pine Tree Power did not even make the ballot after Democratic governor Janet Mills vetoed a bipartisan bill to put the question to a popular vote.

Opponents of the bill made several assertions in their attacks against Question 3. They argued that the legal wrangling following a successful takeover bid would be costly, that these costs would have to be footed by the taxpayer through a large public borrowing campaign, and that all of this would delay more pressing issues, such as addressing climate change. But ultimately, the lobby against the bill relied on the argument that political control over public energy utilities would lead to corruption and mismanagement.

The fearmongering around public governance of Pine Tree Power reflected a basic hostility toward democracy. Instead of absentee control by Iberdrola (the Spanish energy company that owns CMP) and the city of Calgary, Canada (the owner of Versant), the board of Pine Tree Power, as proposed, would combine popular accountability with industry expertise. The people of Maine and their elected representatives would set rates and decide on how much to invest in conservation and efficiency. Many power systems, including in Sacramento, California; Omaha, Nebraska; and Eugene, Oregon, have had elected boards for decades, with good results for the public.

Read full article here.