The Public Power files

People are craving systemic solutions to stop climate change. Our energy system holds the most potential to switch societies to renewables and reduce emissions. Making power public is the only way to get us there.

With energy, whoever is the boss gets the benefits. It’s time for us to take back control so that everyone benefits, instead of private companies. Replace profiteering that prevents energy systems from phasing out fossil fuels and ramping up renewables. As proven by the struggles from Mexico to South Africa, public ownership of energy can offer exactly this: an urgent, viable and bold solution for the failures of profit-driven markets and multinationals.

Public power is about reclaiming our energy across scales. It’s a stepping stone for the democratic control needed to make system-wide transition operations responsive to people’s needs on the ground. 

TNI's Public Power files provide pathways to democratic, system-wide alternatives to the fossil fuel cycle – containing the cutting-edge evidence social movements need to expose the many harms of today's energy economy. 

Learn all about how we can reclaim energy as a whole by building popular power through public ownership, deepening democracy and decolonial justice. Dive into real-world examples throughout our report to find out what that looks like in practice.

To turn public ownership into energy democracy, public bodies must start sharing power and resources with communities. This takes multiple forms:

• Reverse energy privatisations on all levels and restore accountable public electricity utilities, by resetting their public mission and mandate to start planning, funding and delivering a managed decline of fossil fuels.
• Create public–public partnerships (PuPs) for an effective and well-resourced public energy model that can lead on decarbonisation. These solidarity-based collaborations enable public energy institutions to acquire, expand and jointly build urgent transition capacities – technical and otherwise.
• Instate progressive energy tariffs to help cut unnecessary consumption, protect social use and factor in people’s needs and ability to pay. This, to enable societies to prioritise essential, social reproductive energy use – whether it is to keep water, schools and public transport running, or to power and make visible all the care, cooking and cleaning work.
• Build public–community partnerships that combine State-owned enterprises with more localised governance across scale and territories – community renewables can only thrive as part of a country-wide public system. While a state-owned electricity utility must be responsive and accountable to the energy needs and the impacts of its operations on the ground.
• Defend the rights of rural, Indigenous and other racialised people and make sure that the struggle for public renewables is not pitted against but reinforcing their demands for territorial self-determination. The struggle for a free Palestine and a global energy embargo on Israel is the most urgent case in point to sever ties with fossil fuels and colonialism.