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After a three hour teach-in on the California energy crisis Sunday community members endorsed a resolution to pursue public ownership of utilities, and to refuse to pay the 9 percent rate hike if it becomes permanent. 

At the meeting the term “power broker” gained new meaning, entering the lexicon of double entendre the recent energy crisis has engendered. Local politicians, Green Party heavyweights and community organizers made calls for public power and re-regulation of the utilities before the 150 people filling the Berkeley Fellowship Hall of Unitarian Universalists.  

“This is an absolutely amazing opportunity to take control of a resource,” said Medea Benjamin, former Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate. “It means a rollback of the whole agenda of privatization.” 

Speakers excoriated the private utility companies, calling the crisis “engineered,” and calling the government plans to provide debt relief a form of “corporate welfare fraud.” The utility companies have denied responsibility for manufacturing the crisis, and have explained it by pointing to the number of powerplants under repair and off line. 

“The utilities have created a financial crisis for themselves,” said Graham Brownstein of The Utility Reform Network. “We the people of California are having an energy crisis.” He cautioned against legislation providing debt relief to PG&E while giving Californians stock in the company. He said the state should not be invested in a private company, and instead argued that the government should simply purchase the corporation and use this opportunity to make electricity a public utility.  

Speaker Robin David said that fighting corporate ownership of utilities required changing  

perceptions of the nature of utilities as an open market good. “We cannot do without electricity,” he said. “It’s a social resource, not a commodity.” 

David, a public utilities promoter (who also happens to be a PG&E employee and Union member but was not speaking in that capacity) also noted that any movement to re-regulate the industry and bring it under public authority would require cooperation and support of the workers. “The public power movement must realize that the companies and workers are not the same thing,” he said. 

Speakers also made calls for municipal power authorities to regulate power locally and move toward forms of energy such as hydro-electric power and solar power and away from fossil fuels they said were environmentally harmful.  

To create a context of the current state of affairs, experts reviewed the history and functioning of California utilities to provide some explanation of the recent crisis. Dale Nesbit, former engineer for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, described how the fluctuation in power usage throughout the day makes electricity an ill-suited private commodity. He said that electricity must “be produced instantaneously as it gets used,” because it cannot get stored. That means that as energy consumption fluctuates at different times of the day – more during working hours than sleeping hours, for example – companies must provide more energy, which may mean using another power plant. However, purchasing a power plant to provide energy for only part of the day is not profitable. Instead, companies produce less electricity themselves and purchase the electricity needed at peak periods on an open market, where it can cost many times more than it would from a local power producer.  

Keith Carson, Alameda county supervisor, placed the power crisis within the larger context of California. “Today’s energy crisis is indicative of the challenges we’re going to face in years to come,” he said. Without mentioning the demographic shifts that are part of the population changes in California, he also told the all-white audience that they needed to outreach to African-American, Asian-American, and youth communities to expand their movement. He noted that the impact of utility costs disproportionately impact low-income communities. 

The event was organized by the Social Action committee of the Unitarian Universalists.