Why Publitize? Part II: When Public Ownership Gained Ground in the US Electricity Industry

Abstract

In my last column, I wrote about how infrastructure “privatization” in the United States pre‐dated by over a century the worldwide utility privatization wave inspired by Margaret Thatcher's noteworthy actions in the 1980s and 1990s in the United Kingdom. Here, I review how public participation in the US power supply and distribution industry grew quickly in the 1920s and 1930s (a wave of US “publitization” of electricity supply, so to speak). That wave was a distinct and important era in the history of US electricity supply, but it was sparked primarily by the growing pains of US regulation. When Congress and the Supreme Court finally resolved the legal and administrative means to regulate US electric utilities effectively by the mid‐1940s, the era of rapid growth in US public power supply and municipally owned electricity distribution systems came to an end.