Taking back public utilities
A conversation with Cambridge Rep. Mike Connolly about a just transition and alternatives to investor-owned utilities in Massachusetts
As the grassroots effort to create a publicly owned electric utility company in Maine gains steam, progressive lawmakers in Massachusetts are pushing for a similar reassessment of the Bay State’s investor-owned utilities.
In the past two legislative sessions, state Rep. Mike Connolly (D) of Cambridge has filed a bill titled “An Act facilitating public ownership of public utilities.” The bill would create a task force to study possibilities for a public takeover of the gas and electric systems in the state. While the proposal has yet to receive major attention on Beacon Hill, as gas and electricity prices skyrocket and utilities continue to oppose clean alternatives, Connolly is hopeful that this proposal will gain more traction in this winter’s upcoming legislative session.
I spoke with Connolly about his proposal and the existing role of investor-owned utilities in the state. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
First off, I’d love to hear your inspiration and main goals in introducing this petition and bill looking into public ownership of utilities.
“There’s a variety of inspirations. Certainly, I consider myself a Democratic Socialist, so for me on one of the most basic levels, that really involves the understanding that there are, in particular, common needs that we all have in society, whether they are housing, education, healthcare, or energy, electricity, heating, et cetera. And to the extent that we have common needs, I believe they can be most efficiently and effectively addressed through public ownership structures.
That’s my starting point. On top of that, there is the point that hasn’t been lost on me … which is that as we contemplate what we need to do to meet the challenge of climate change, it's clear that these investor-owned utilities don’t align with the reality and the needs of our time, and they exist to make money for their shareholders and their owners.
There was also a specific incident that occurred that had me particularly focused on these utilities, and that was the lockout of the National Grid gas workers, back in the 2018 period. And that really left an impression on me. I was quite involved in joining these gas workers, the unions for these gas workers had regularly invited me to stand with them, to speak with them, to advocate with them.
National Grid, I believe, is a UK, England-based company. So, this notion that our energy utilities in Massachusetts are owned by this company based on another continent, and now that company is preemptively locking these workers out and not allowing them to just do their jobs, struck me as so wildly absurd. And then on top of all of that, it’s a regulated monopoly, so they essentially have a license to collect profit from the residents of Massachusetts.
And as an aside, I’ll just share – I think this is an interesting story and I often share it with people, and this sort of gets to what I would describe as some of the mismanagement and the irresponsible nature of the Baker administration — it was during this lockout of the gas workers back in 2018 when leaders of the gas workers unions asked me to join with them to visit the Department of Public Utilities.
We had federal reports and guidelines showing that the state’s department of public utilities was terribly understaffed in their gas inspector unit. And the way it works in Massachusetts, as I understand it, is the industry itself does the first line of gas inspections, and then riding a level above that, there are state gas inspectors, who aren’t even necessarily doing primary inspections, but they’re more overseeing the industry overseeing itself. And those roles of overseeing the industry, most of the positions were left unfilled by Governor Baker’s Department of Public Utilities.
Where I’m going with this story is it was literally, as I recall, just before Labor Day weekend in 2018, when myself, leaders of gas workers unions, went to DPU, and we said to them ‘we see a real problem.’ I remember saying to them “God forbid, I would hate for there to be some kind of tragedy,” and unfortunately it was a few weeks later we had the Merrimack Valley gas explosions. When those explosions happened, I immediately thought – ‘Wow, Governor Baker is ruined, people will hear about this, they will understand that this was incredibly negligent and irresponsible, and there will be accountability.’
But as you know, Governor Baker was never held accountable, the state’s DPU wasn’t really held accountable, and unfortunately the beat just goes on. But that’s my starting point for all this.
Could you elaborate a bit on how a publicly owned utility company could benefit workers?
Really, the intent behind this bill is creating the space to advance a conversation around public ownership. Along the way, as I’ve worked to open up this space, I’ve certainly heard feedback about ‘well, we could include this union or we could include that community,’ and my response to any of those kinds of observations is ‘absolutely.’ This is really my effort to try to open this conversation and bring it into the statehouse, when to my knowledge this is not a conversation that has been underway on any level on Beacon Hill.
But to your question about labor, we did our best to identify several of the relevant unions, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, specific local unions in the state, as well as the steel workers who are involved in the gas area in particular. And so, to really answer your question, this is about what we often refer to as the just transition.
The Green New Deal did a great job of outlining this concept, making it very clear up front that to the extent you are a worker in the gas industry or the electric industry or one of these utility industries, our intention is to make your life better, not worse, and to facilitate this transition away from fossil fuels, to facilitate a transition to public ownership, and to do so in a way where the working class sees benefits, rather that disruption, loss of jobs, loss of income, or anything like that.
With the intention here being using this legislation as a vehicle to really open up a conversation around public ownership of utilities, it would be very important to have the workers directly at the table, involved in that conversation, fully represented and fully onboard with plans to change the structure of how utilities are owned in Massachusetts.
In the Statehouse, how receptive have lawmakers been to this? What’s the response been like?
Certainly, there’s been some mixed reaction. I’m grateful that there have been several cosponsors of the bill, and so that’s been nice to see. On the other hand, I think it’s fair and realistic to say that this hasn’t been on the agenda of legislative leadership, and largely even in the advocacy community. There’s some great work being done by Take Back the Grid, and certainly I think there’s some support in general for the concept, but it seems like there’s so much to work on in the climate emergency that I don’t know that we even have a critical mass of attention on the idea.
We haven’t even mentioned it yet in this conversation, but we are seeing astounding, incomprehensible warnings about what to expect this winter in terms of price increases … I’m hopeful that we can build on the initial effort of filing this bill in the first two sessions, and as more people realize how poorly served they are by this investor-owned model of public utilities, that more people are going to be eager to engage in thinking about how we can make utilities more like a Fire Department, where it’s just a thing that profit isn’t involved in, and universal access is the expectation.
Is there anything else you’d like to add about this before we finish up?
I would very much encourage anyone who might read this interview, or read reporting on the bill, anyone who is interested in this topic, I would encourage them to reach out to me and my office. Everyone’s welcome to get involved. What we really need on this particular topic is to really create that space where we can bring more people to a table to have a real conversation about how we can move from the status quo to truly publicly owned public utilities.
Climate News Roundup
Connecticut
Connecticut leaders spoke at a roundtable about the Connecticut Green Bank and rising energy prices, in light of federal funding for green banks in the Infrastructure Reduction Act (Michael Lyle Jr. — WSHU)
Maine
Workers in the state’s lobstering industry seem to be skewing heavily Republican in the governor’s race, worried about investments in offshore wind energy (David Marino Jr. — Bangor Daily News)
Massachusetts
The state’s Department of Public Utilities approved $472.47 million in investments over four years in the eclectic distribution system by Eversource ($162.6 million), National Grid ($300.8 million), and Unitil ($9.07 million) — these costs will ultimately be passed on to ratepayers (Colin Young — State House News Service)
Mayflower Wind, a company developing an offshore wind project off of the state’s South Coast, has committed to training and employing union workers (Dharna Noor — Boston Globe)
The Department of Public Utilities has fined National Grid $1.6 million for safety violations in the company’s gas pipeline system (Christian Wade — North of Boston Media Group)
New Hampshire
Famed author and environmentalist Bill McKibben spoke with the New Hampshire Bulletin about New Hampshire’s role in fighting and adapting to the climate crisis (Amanda Gokee — New Hampshire Bulletin)
Rhode Island
Rhode Island’s Public Utilities Commission is starting an investigation into how to reduce and eventually eliminate emissions from the state’s gas system. Climate advocates are pushing for a transition away from gas altogether, while utilities are focusing on nascent technologies like carbon capture and hydrogen fuels (Lisa Prevost — Energy News Network)
Vermont
UMV researchers are trying to model how the accelerating climate crisis will affect personal behavior (Kevin Gaiss — WCAX)
Across the Region
Solar company Sunrun announced that it has succeeded in creating a ‘virtual power plant’ by connecting thousands of distributed solar systems across New England (Miranda Willson — E&E News)
As someone who lives in an MLP community, please know that public ownership is far from a silver bullet. 14 MLP's, with no public vetting or engagement signed a contract with MMWEC, 2015a. This innocuous title flew under everyone's radar, allowing them to obtain all permits, save one for financing, and quietly plan and start building an oil/gas peaker plant in the midst of an EJ community in Peabody MA. A coalition has been protesting this plant for over 2 years with no results. This is just to say, that ongoing involvement and oversight is constantly needed from the public, even with publicly owned utilities.