Introduction: Uneven geographies of electricity capital

Introduction

In 2019, the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook observed that the proportion of electricity in final use consumption may overtake oil as a share of global energy demand by 2040. This growth in electricity demand has geographically specific drivers and manifestations; yet, the report argues that electricity’s growth represents the role of this energy source “at the vanguard of efforts to combat climate change and pollution” (International Energy Agency, 2019). Rapid decarbonization to address climate change focuses on the interlinked imperatives to transition from fossil fuels to zero-carbon energy sources to generate electricity and to electrify heating, cooking, transportation, and manufacturing among countless other processes that rely on fossil fuels as either a feedstock or fuel (Roberts, 2017), all while expanding connectivity for nearly 800 million people without access to reliable or universal electricity service (World Bank, 2020). The “electrify everything” strategy has become a slogan guiding climate justice activism and climate policy (Mingle, 2020). Geographers have taken on questions of energy transition to investigate how decarbonized electricity portends a change in the spatiality of existing energy systems (Bridge et al., 2013) without necessarily challenging underlying colonial and racial capitalist social relations (Chatterjee, 2020; Curley, 2018; Kelly and Valdés Negroni 2021; Lennon, 2017; Luke and Heynen, 2020; McCarthy, 2015). However, electricity remains under-theorized in these debates.

This special issue considers the relationship between energy, capitalism, and space through the lens of electricity capital. Electricity capital might be loosely understood as the nexus of state, regulatory, and financial relationships that shape private accumulation through electricity provision. Electricity capital operates within and reinforces difference through the ongoing processes of racialization, patriarchy, and colonialism (see, Lowe, 2015; Robinson, 2000). Access to “affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all” is a benchmark of development; however, electricity remains a highly uneven commodity and hundreds of millions of people live without electricity or with intermittent and unreliable service provision (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2020: 12). These differences, shaped in part through racial, ethnic, and gendered difference and colonial histories, are central to the operation and extension of electricity capital today as public and private companies seek profit.

Electrification is marked by immense diversity that cannot be described within a linear historical narrative (Moss, 2014). The papers in this special issue think from different historical and geographical contexts to characterize common themes that emerge from the commodification of electricity and conceptualize it as a core fraction of capital (along with other more common categories such as industrial, commercial, or financial capital). In doing so, we build on the historical–geographical insights of critical energy studies to “think of capital in terms of energy” (Szeman, 2007: 806). This kind of theory can be quite broad or specific. As one of us argues, “capitalist social life is profoundly dependent on the abundant provision of fossil fuel energy” (Huber, 2009: 105). Malm (2016: 290) went a step further in theorizing the concept of “fossil capital” as, “self-expanding value passing through the metamorphosis of fossil fuels into CO₂.” Malm’s case study was, of course, steam power in the classic industrial revolution context of British textile production and more – but his theorization pointed to all forms of capital which consume fossil fuel as a key input in the production of commodities (see, Huber, 2017 for a focus on fertilizer, but we also could point to cement, steel, and chemicals more generally). However, it is clear that electric utilities and power producers represent the primary form of fossil capital in terms of fossil fuel consumption. In the United States where we are writing from, the Energy Information Administration reports (2020) electric power consumed a staggering 90% of all coal and is the largest consumer of natural gas (36%), just ahead of the industrial (mostly chemical) sector (33%). A huge percentage of electricity is produced from fossil fuel – in the U.S. and worldwide it is above 60% (“bp Statistical Review of World Energy” 2020).

We should be clear not all electricity capital is fossil capital. Electricity is an energy carrier that results from a flow of charged particles that can be generated from different fuels or “no fuel at all” in the case of technologies that convert wind, solar, and hydro energy to electricity (Harrison, 2020: 10). Although the future of electricity could be conceptualized within other paradigms of lower-carbon, or renewable energy capital, the formulation of electricity capital captures the complexity of this resource to theorize the continuities between fossil and low-carbon fuels and contradictions that emerge within efforts to decarbonize electricity production. Furthermore, as we develop below, we argue scholars interested in the political economy of electricity should focus on specific fractions of capital according to particular historical and political conjunctures. Although Lenin and Hilferding found “finance capital” of interest in the lead up and immersion of the core imperialist powers into World War I (Hilferding [1910] 1981; Lenin 1917) – and certainly this fraction remains of interest today – the conjuncture of the climate crisis and the centrality of “electrification” to solving it, raises the stakes for a twenty-first century theory of electricity capital. We focus less on the discrete challenges of particular fuels and technologies that produce electricity and instead seek to characterize the coordinating regulatory, technological, and financial systems that enable its commodification.

This framework builds on ongoing debates in Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space about the role of the state and the limits of existing financial, technical, and regulatory regimes to effectively realize low-carbon energy transitions (Furnaro, 2020; Hornborg et al., 2019; Lally et al., 2019; Thoyre, 2020). This perspective also offers a lens to examine the contradictory objectives imbricated in electrification, which can be an investment opportunity, a strategy for climate change mitigation, a source of jobs, a component of economic development, a state-building project, a point of national security, and a means of community wealth-building among countless other objectives. In a moment of anticipated energy transformation, we question the state capitalist processes that enable accumulation through electric infrastructures, rather than secure electricity provision as a right to energy as a basic need for a healthy and dignified life.

This introduction to the special issue proceeds in three parts. First, we define electricity capital as a fraction of capital and in relation to other theorizations of energy within capitalism to draw into focus continuities and disruptions in capital flows amid the transition from fossil fuels to a diversity of clean or zero-carbon sources. Second, we consider the varied construction of electric utilities, electricity markets, and the role of the state in creating opportunities for private accumulation through electrification. We situate the formulation of electricity capital in relation to current debates within geography, energy studies, and political ecology to analyze the growing role of electricity in an energy transition and what this means for long-standing debates as to how electricity infrastructures should be owned and operated. Throughout, we reference the articles of the authors in this special issue whose interventions investigate the transformations and tensions arising over the ownership, management, inclusion, and finance of fossil and renewable electricity infrastructures. Third, we conclude by analyzing the contradictions of electricity capital in light of contemporary organizing for energy democracy that has sought to divest from fossil fuels and invest in community ownership and collective control of renewable energy electricity infrastructures. Given the urgent need for change in the energy system to mitigate unfolding climate disasters, we ask how public intervention can transform electricity capital into a universal and democratic public utility based on two key principles: (1) conscious economic planning to achieve the “electrify everything” strategy at the speed and scale necessary to address the problem of climate change; and (2) commitment to the principle of “electricity as a human right” that guarantees electricity service to all (Franklin et al., 2017). Political organizing to democratize and socialize electricity enacts alternative, emergent, and counterhegemonic patterns of infrastructure provision and use and points toward an alternative energy regime beyond the commodification of energy.

Electricity capital

As laid out above, we see electricity capital as the private accumulation of capital based on electricity provision. We should make a few things clear and differentiate what electricity capital is and is not. “Electricity provision” is not like most other forms of commodity production. Electricity is traded and priced as a commodity but is in no way a regular commodity. As Gretchen Bakke (2016: xxiii) puts it, marketizing electricity, “effectively made electrons and, say, bananas identical objects from the market’s point of view.” But, as she continues, the materiality of electrons is almost nothing such as bananas, shoes, linen, or coats. Electricity has very unique materiality; similar to what Karen Bakker (2003) famously termed an “uncooperative commodity.” Most importantly, electricity supply must always be coordinated and equalized with demand. As such, electricity provision is a negotiated process of “load balancing” to match the distribution of electricity generation with constantly changing geographic and temporal demands in the electricity market (Özden-Schilling, 2016). More concretely, it is a complex process made up of distinct phases from electricity generation, transmission, distribution, and final use.

The networks (Hughes, 1993) of electricity transmission and distribution are fixed in space and often organized as what economists famously call a “natural monopoly.” This material relation contributed to unique forms of power generation, and it is this status that makes electricity subject to a unique set of public and regulatory processes. The “classic” form of electricity capital was the giant vertically integrated electric utilities of the mid-twentieth century – utilities that owned generation, transmission, and distribution networks. In the U.S., more than 70% of households are served by investor-owned utilities and a range of other municipal and cooperative systems comprise the remaining share (Bakke, 2016). In other parts of the world, where private electricity systems emerged, many were nationalized following WWII and state-owned enterprises came to dominate electricity provision (IEA, 2020). Although nonprofit and state-owned utilities are firmly embedded in financial markets and capitalism itself, they are not necessarily capital in Marx’s ([1867] 1990: 254) sense wherein the “sole driving force” is the “unceasing movement of profitmaking.” In other words, for electricity capital power provision is secondary to the primary goal of making a return for investors (i.e., M-C-M”).

Since the 1970s, electricity has gone through a period of “vertical disintegration” spurred by waves of electricity deregulation that created new markets for electricity generation (see, Heiman and Solomon, 2004; Stokes, 2020: 88–107; Harrison, 2020). Electricity liberalization began in the UK, Chile, Norway, and the US. Based on this blueprint, the World Bank and other multilateral lenders advanced a “standard model” of electricity reform to restructure, privatize, and open competitive markets to independent power producers (Sen, 2014). This form of electricity capital is growing in importance in response to climate change such that the capitalist renewable energy developer or independent power producer seems the apparent savior of the planet (Sweeney and Treat 2018: 39). Of course, the neoliberalization of electricity is by no means comprehensive. Efforts to pause or roll back corporatization and movements to municipalize urban electricity networks are well documented and part of a growing energy democracy movement (Angel 2017; McDonald 2009).

Another growing source of electricity generation is households that “produce” electricity – often called “prosumers” since they simultaneously produce and consume electricity (Iria, Soares, and Matos 2019). We insist these are not “electricity capital” because their ultimate aim is the production of electricity as a “use value” in powering household reproduction – not profit or capital. However, just as some have thought about private home ownership and “entrepreneurial” subjectivities (Brown, 2017; see Huber, 2013), households equipped with solar panels, batteries, and smart appliances are increasingly able to take advantage of net-metering and demand-side management programs that incentivize customers to modify their level and pattern of electricity use, extending the logics of accumulation into everyday moments of social reproduction (see, Levenda, Mahmoudi, and Sussman, 2015; Özden-Schilling, 2015; Johnson, 2020, Pearse and Bryant, 2021). Amid the complex and intersecting forms of electricity provision, the papers in this special issue understand the forms of electricity capital to be changing and expanding in geographical reach with deregulation and organizational and technological shifts in the electricity sector, particularly given the more distributed character of renewable energies. We consider the specific manifestations of profit-oriented investment in electricity infrastructures that create new opportunities for accumulation.

Our theorization of “electricity capital” is premised on a controversial notion: that there exist coherent “fractions of capital”, or class fractions within the capitalist class with a conflicting set of interests. Although Volume 1 of Capital presents a quite simplistic and undifferentiated two-class theory of capital and labor, Volumes 2 and 3 present a more complex picture featuring categories such as “fixed vs. circulating capital”, “money-dealing capital”, “commercial capital” and “merchant’s capital.” By the end of Volume 3, Chapter 52, titled “Classes” appears to even further complicate Marx’s class analysis before the manuscript agonizingly breaks off after two pages (Marx [1894] 1981: 1025-1026). By the early twentieth Century, the class fraction of “finance capital” had risen to be a core concept in attempts to “update” Marx’s theory (Hilferding [1910] 1981; Lenin 1917). As David Harvey ([1982] 2006: 283) describes, it was often seen as a crucial “power bloc” that controlled the credit system and the flow of money itself. As such, this class fraction could be seen as “a kind of central nervous system through which the overall circulation of capital is coordinated” (284). Manning Marable (1981: 10) asserted the central role of electric utilities within financial networks. Observing the overlap of electric utility officers with commercial and investment banks, he argued that utilities become “a forum for the coordination of electric power with the financial and industrial development of the entire region.” Although he was writing about Southern Company, the electric holding company that powers much of the U.S. Southeast, the centrality of energy – and increasingly electricity – to industrial, commercial, financial, and state operations evidences the need for focused attention on electricity capital as a core fraction of capital.

The notion of “class fractions” in contemporary debates is probably most indebted to the work of Poulantzas (1974: 21) who suggested, “The Marxist theory of social classes further distinguishes fractions and strata of a class, according to the various classes, on the basis of differentiations in the economic sphere, and of the role, a quite particular one in these cases, of political and ideological relations.” Poulantzas paid specific attention to the crucial role of “political and ideological” relations in terms of shaping which fractions of capital become seen as central at particular historical conjunctures and forms of struggle. Although he did insist class fractions tend to polarize “around the two basic classes…the bourgeoisie and the proletariat,” Clarke (1978) forcefully critiqued what he called “the “fractionalist” approach” (32) in its “vulgar Poulantzian” (32) variants for diverting attention to the core class relations between labor and capital and the fundamentals of surplus value production and distribution. Sica (2018) explores this in terms of a broader understanding of the centrality of energy and capitalist state theory. Importantly, an undue attention to “fractions” can also lead us to a pernicious multiplier effect as Clarke (1978: 35) suggests: “It might seem that this proliferation of features that can define an interest would lead to a limitless proliferation of fractions.”

Thus, in proposing a new “class fraction,” the burden of proof is on us to demonstrate its importance. In so doing, we make three points. First, although specific investors own and control capital invested in electricity systems, other capitalists confront electricity as a commodity or, as Christie (1980) argued, a key form of constant capital or “means of production.” If not the “central nervous system” electricity is absolutely foundational to not all, but most forms of commodity production and circulation. Thus, it is a fraction of capital that nearly all other capitals must confront for a key input. In other words, capitalist consumers of electricity might engage in intra-class struggles over the cost of this vital form of constant capital with electricity capital. As McDonald (2009: 4) puts it, in a very similar project to theorize what he calls “electric capitalism,” “it is impossible to compete meaningfully in today’s global economy without access to (cheap and reliable) electric power.” Indeed, in some but not all contexts, electricity has become absolutely central to what Marx called “the value of labor power” – or the basket of commodities needed to reproduce the worker based on a socially agreed-upon standard of living rooted in the “the habits and expectations with which, the class of free workers has been formed” (Marx [1867] 1990: 275). For many, electricity is necessary to everyday life and intertwined across the “sprawling sites of social reproduction between home, work, school, and shopping center” that are also “linked to a vast electricity grid” which opens new circuits for accumulation necessary to the reproduction of capital (Huber, 2013: 19; see also Needham, 2014). Living under the rule of capital means “paying the bills” and one of those is, of course, your electric bill. Consequently, the legendary environmentalist union activist Tony Mazzocchi once quipped, “The most radical piece of literature in American reaches the home of every American each month…it’s called the utility bill. It is escalating the indignation of the American people” (Leopold, 2007: 377). This is not unique to the U.S., even if the U.S. is unique in its accommodation (and promotion) of highly predatory forms of electricity capital (see, e.g., Stokes, 2020).

Our second point in demonstrating the importance of electricity capital as a fraction of capital is that electricity capital is often regulated as a critical “public service” or simply a “utility.” There is a deep history of political struggle across the world around the means of electricity provision especially when and where privatization is threatened and those in power have not already ceded control of electricity to private-for-profit utilities. Given its “monopoly” status, it became apparent that such private “investor owned” utilities could not operate like other forms of capital without gouging consumers and widening their tyrannical power. Thus, today, electricity capital necessarily involves forms of public scrutiny and regulation (see, Harrison, 2013; Malaluan, 2014). Although many forms of capital attempt to claim an “apolitical” status and ask to be given “freedom” in the market, electricity capital is always already politicized.

Third, as Poulantzas put it, specific fractions of capital often rise to the top of public attention given the more “conjunctural” forms of political and ideological struggle. Electric utility restructuring was central to neoliberal agendas and popular protest beginning in the 1980s (Harvey, 2003; Roy, 2002). Today, many struggles around electricity center on energy poverty, energy access, and the climate crisis. As reviewed above, it is clear that any effective decarbonization strategy must begin with the electric power sector. Renewable energy also represents a possible pathway to addressing uneven access to electricity (Baker and Phillips, 2019; Gómez and Silveira, 2015; Kumar and Aiken, 2019). As a result, electricity capital – especially insofar as it is generated from fossil fuels – is increasingly becoming another core ideological and political target of the climate justice movement (S Baker, 2021). It is this political conjuncture that demands a more careful theorization of this specific class fraction (see, Hall and Massey, 2010).

Electricity is a form of energy, and we should take care to situate our theorization in relation to the burgeoning discussions on the relationships between energy and capitalism (see, Huber, 2009; Malm, 2016; Mitchell, 2013). As others have pointed out, energy is an abstraction conjured in the throes of the industrial revolution and theories of thermodynamics (Daggett, 2019). Energy comes in vastly different concrete forms all of which pose a diverse “set of obstacles, opportunities, and surprises” to capital circulation (Boyd et al., 2001: 556). As if to anticipate Clarke’s warning about a proliferation of unwieldy “fractions,” Szeman (2007: 806) wonders, “if we think of capital in terms of energy, what do the tea leaves tell us about what comes next? Wind capital? Solar capital? Biomass capital? A seemingly impossible conjunction of terms. Nuclear capital? Hydrogen capital?” Departing from Szeman and Malm’s theorizations of oil and fossil capital, we posit that electricity capital best encompasses the emergent political and technical forces that drive changes in energy provision.

At a basic level, capital invested in electricity infrastructure is also a long-term investment, or what Marx called “fixed capital” (see, Marx [1939] 1993: 678 ff). Therefore, shifting from fossil fuels to more renewable or other clean sources challenges the spatiality and temporality of electricity capital. Harvey ([1982] 2006) theorized “fixed capital” as a central category in his effort to bring geographical insight to Marxian political economy. He saw “fixed capital” as a contradictory source of crisis in the circulation of capital itself. On the one hand, investment in fixed capital in everything from machinery to infrastructure (and he mentions power plants specifically) can serve as a “godsend for the absorption of surplus, overaccumulated capital” (Harvey [1982] 2006: 236). It is these investments in the built environment that form the core of Harvey’s notion of a “spatial fix” (Harvey, 1981). Yet, on the other hand, fixed capital – insofar as they are massive investments often fixed and immovable in space – eventually become barriers to further accumulation. As Harvey ([1982] 2006: 226) puts it, fixed capital can, “imprison capital in ways that are not always desirable.” He goes on to describe fixed capital as “value imprisoned within a specific use value” (Harvey [1982] 2006: 237). Harvey’s key insight is to understand capital as a dynamic process of value in motion wherein the “value” of fixed capital is constantly shifting and prone to crisis and devaluation. For this reason, capitalists may seek to shift the burden for financing infrastructures necessary for production “on to the shoulders of the state” or rely on other means to fund fixed capital investments such as the joint stock company (Marx, [1939] 1993: 531). As Harvey shows so clearly, this “value imprisonment” is regulated through the credit system and, thus, fixed capital investment nearly always circulates as “interest-bearing capital” in the financial sector. The investments are so large investment could not happen anyway else meaning that finance must be understood as internal to and “inextricably bound up with” electricity, as Lucy Baker argues in this issue (see also, Baker, 2015). As others in this issue point out so well, electricity capital always circulates in and through circuits of finance capital.

Joining together these two fractions of “fossil” and “fixed” capital into our theorization of “electricity capital” brings the contradictions of fossil capitalism clearly into view. On the one hand, electricity capital is so reluctant to shift away from fossil fuel-based power generation because utilities, investors, and regulators have sunk so much capital in these “use values” in the first place. Their debt and interest payments – and the overall investor class – demand they get the most out of their fixed capital until its value is fully realized. To switch away to clean energy would “devalue” their assets before the maturation date (see, Knuth, 2016). The ways in which electricity capital is “imprisoned” by these fossil fuel assets certainly is not “desirable” as Harvey put it. On the other hand, the prospect of new investments in fixed capital formation in the form of a clean energy grid does present the prospect of a “fix” to capital’s chronic overaccumulation problems. New rounds of electricity capital formation may create what Ekers and Prudham (2015) call – and McCarthy (2015) argues more specifically in relation to energy – a socioecological fix for capital. In this case, the socioecological and spatial fix are one in the same, made possible in part through state regulation, tax policy, and financing as we turn to in the next section. Yet, as we explain in the conclusion, we do not believe a “fix” for capital will be a “fix” for the climate. A climate fix will only come by overcoming electricity capital itself.

Electricity capital, regulation, and the geographies of electrification

The formation of electricity capital as a core fraction of capital is predicated upon the commodification of electricity that takes form in the nexus of state, regulatory, and financial relationships. Despite the designation of electric utilities as a “natural” monopoly, the standardization of the infrastructures and mechanisms to make and sell electricity are politically negotiated and enormously diverse. Electricity remains underexamined in critical energy studies, in part due to its complexity and the diversity of forms that electricity service takes across the world whether it is provided through state-owned enterprises, regulated corporations, municipal companies, membership cooperatives, or generated directly at the point of use. The means by which users access or pay for electricity are equally varied ranging from prepaid meters, public subsidies for minimum basic service, volumetric rates, unauthorized connections, “off-grid” solar panels or lamps, metered prosumption, power purchase agreements, or some combination of the above (Angel, 2019; Baptista, 2015; Johnson, 2020; Kumar and Aiken, 2020; Naqvi, 2018; Ruiters, 2009). As in other comparative analyses of infrastructure across the Global North and South (Anand et al., 2018; Ranganathan and Balazs, 2015), reading the papers in this special issue together illuminate patterns, in this case of for-profit electricity capital that become evident in infrastructures, regulations, financing mechanisms, and actors at work across these diverse contexts. Amid changes in the resources and technologies used to generate electricity, the industry remains subject to financial markets and regulation. Electricity is capital intensive and financial entities lend money to electric utilities based on the premise of stable demand for electricity that will allow utilities to repay their debts, however, “those market conditions are set by the state” (Harrison, 2020: 3). The central role of regulation is somewhat unique to energy and electricity, in particular, requiring greater attention to state policy, investment, and regulatory action that mediates and directs electricity capital’s fixed capital investments and enables accumulation through electricity provision.

State intervention made the commodification of electricity both possible and profitable in the case of private and investor-owned utilities that emerged in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Yet, states across the world also expanded electricity access, building infrastructure and providing basic minimum allotments or subsidies to foster a sense of national identity and advance economic development (Bennasr and Verdeil, 2014; MacLean et al., 2016; see McDonald, 2009). Elizabeth Chatterjee (2020: 4) show in her analysis of electrification in Asia where it was not “private capitalists but the state that led electrification” in the postcolonial period, that the developmental state model “embedded electricity in a moral economy that cut against fossil capitalism’s logic of commodification” (Chatterjee, 2020: 16). State-owned and operated electric infrastructure offered an alternative form of electricity provision, seen also in the U.S. in hydroelectric dam construction, the cooperatives sponsored by the Rural Electrification Administration, and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which was exported as a development model (Alatout and Schelly, 2010; Ekbladh, 2002; Lally et al., 2019; Nye, 1992). Electric infrastructures such as “large dams offered a way to build not just irrigation and power systems, but nation-states themselves” (Mitchell 2013, 44), cultivating citizen-consumers. Socialist states also led mass electrification programs, following Lenin’s (1920: 516) aphorism that “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” Schwenkel (2018: 113), writing about power plant infrastructure in Vietnam describes that mass electrification projects and their material imprint in the landscape could “inspire a sense of social cohesion…. electricity was metonymic for both modern development and individual enlightenment” (see also, Coopersmith, 1992; Sneath, 2009). Conversely, while observing the influence of the state in apartheid South Africa, Christie (1984: 1–2) questions how “far from being a “spirit of progress” … electricity is used by the state and by owners of property to serve their particular interests.”

In the 1980s, international agencies began to push for electric utility restructuring to support market-based liberalization including corporatization, independent regulation, and private sector involvement in electricity generation, transmission, and distribution (Beder 2003; Sen 2014; Furnaro 2020; Gore et al. 2019; Kelly and Valdés Negroni 2021). Liberalization is intended to create the conditions for profitable investment for electricity capital (Chandrashekeran, 2022; Harrison, 2020; van den Bold, 2021). Harvey, in conversation with Arundhati Roy’s analysis in Power Politics, describes the privatization of energy companies as a dialectically related process of extended reproduction and “accumulation by dispossession.” As part of a neoliberal push to create and cannibalize resources within, yet “outside” capitalism “[a]ssets held by the state or in common were released into the market where overaccumulating capital could invest in them, upgrade them, and speculate in them” (Harvey, 2003: 158). Privatization of the power sector dispossessed citizens of state-owned infrastructures with a mandate to provide affordable electricity and ensure universal access as well as other social benefits such as quality job creation and economic development (see, Kumar, 2022; Rampini, 2021).

Electricity restructuring followed countless halting and varied paths (McDonald 2009, 2014; L Baker, 2021; Chandrashekeran, 2022; van den Bold, 2021). Corporatization created new shareholder interests and deregulation opened space for independent power producers that operate alongside restructured utilities. State involvement remains prominent in electricity in the multiple forms electric utilities take and re-regulation has in many cases followed liberalization to set the conditions for financial investment in electricity through environmental and climate standards (Furnaro, 2020). Across these contexts different state institutions and public actors work “to contain class conflicts and to arbitrate between the claims of different factions of capital” (Harvey, 2003: 91). Even the World Bank, switching strategies from the liberalization push of the 1980s has recognized that states are “the facilitators of investment and the enablers of conditions for private sector participation to flourish” (Newell and Phillips, 2016: 42). However, state support alone may be insufficient to secure needed electricity capital investment to guarantee and extend basic service (see, Chipango, 2018; van den Bold, 2021). The central, intervening role of the state in electricity markets should not be viewed from the specific narrow “interests” of that sector itself.

Our framing of electricity capital troubles the “assumptions of simple binaries between public and private, and market and state in electricity governance” (L Baker, 2021, 18). Electricity capital cannot be understood as a solely private actor. Rather, the formation of electricity capital is the result of a circulation process reliant on regulation, climate mandates, fiscal and financial policy, and direct state investment that span state-owned enterprises in China (Wang, 2022) and loan guarantees for nuclear construction in the U.S. (Kempner, 2019) among countless other intersecting sites of investment. The interest of the state varies across these contexts, and the overlap of public and private investment that shifts ownership, management, and liability for capital investments makes it difficult to define and investigate who exactly has a stake in electricity capital. The authors in this special issue draw from interviews with a renewable energy company, utility, and government officials, participant observation in regulatory proceedings, industry trainings, and conventions, and a range of industry, financial, lender, and regulatory reports to untangle the connections between regulators, elected officials, bankers, bi- and multi-lateral lenders, construction firms, renewable energy developers, independent and merchant power producers, investment banks, private equity firms, pension funds, and utilities among countless other actors. Uncovering these connections does not imply the discovery of nefarious or illegal practices (although also see Stokes, 2020; Harrison, 2020), but rather an effort to theorize the licit financial, legal, and regulatory complexities that generate profit for electricity capital (Appel, 2019; Kumar, 2022).

These intersections become especially important given the need to decarbonize the power sector. Moving electricity capital from one form of fixed capital to another requires a process of “capital switching” (Harvey, [1982] 2006), which has historically been possible with the “right incentives by governments” (Castree and Christophers, 2015: 381). Following the financial crisis, scholars interrogated the “activist” role of the state that intervened in financial and energy markets (see, Caprotti 2010) and the historical example of the U.S. Rural Electrification Administration was touted as a reason for cautious optimism that the interests of financial capital could be used to achieve rapid decarbonization (Castree and Christophers, 2015). However, the overlap of public and private interest in electricity capital requires greater attention because it is a site where the pace and form of decarbonization is managed. Utilities have sought customer and state support to recover stranded financial liabilities fixed in fossil capital and switch to renewable energy capitalization (Knuth, 2017; Le Billon and Kristoffersen, 2020; Lehr, 2019; Trabish, 2019; Spivey, 2020; Kennedy and Stock, 2021). Regulation – however opaque, ineffective, or contentious (such as when shaped through a process that Leah Stokes (2020: 25) describes as “organized combat”) – enables and circumscribes profitability.

Although there are important questions about whether or not an energy transition away from fossil fuels is actually underway given that growing investment in renewable energy is matched by growing fossil fuel production and consumption (York and Bell, 2019), climate and energy regulation to encourage renewable energy has so far furthered electricity capital’s expansion. National commitments to international climate accords and specific policy-enabled mechanisms to create greenhouse gas inventories and trade emissions credits in carbon markets territorialize carbon emissions at different geographic scales to establish emission reduction targets, including from electricity (Kama, 2014; Klinsky, 2015; London et al., 2013). Robust scholarship examining the geographies and (urban) political ecology of decarbonization commitments and energy investment considers the uneven effects of various public policy strategies that are influenced to different degrees by the demands of electricity capital (Becker et al. 2020; Bulkeley et al., 2014; Hilbert and Werner, 2016; Long and Rice, 2019; van den Bold, 2021). Renewable portfolio standards that require a certain share of electricity generation within a city, state, or utility service territory to come from renewable sources are a prime example. In some cases, these standards contradictorily define carbon-intensive or polluting “waste” fuels as “renewable” or allow companies to profit from energy savings (Behrsin, 2019; Levenda et al., 2021; Stokes, 2020; Thoyre, 2020). State-run auctions and competitive bidding processes (L Baker, 2021; van den Bold, 2021) to win public subsidy through feed-in tariffs or land, water, or shoreline concessions can enclose certain resources to allow for profitable extraction (Chien, 2020; Jacobs et al., 2013; Kelly and Valdés Negroni 2021; Knuth, 2016; Rignall, 2016; Sellwood and Valdivia, 2018; Spivey, 2020). Tax breaks and rebates for residential and commercial energy production represent another manifestation of state support (Knuth 2021; Luke and Heynen, 2020; Mulvaney, 2019; Kennedy and Stock, 2021). This neoliberal model of quasi-public, quasi-private control over electricity has profoundly uneven implications as public resources are directed to companies invested in electricity capital accumulation rather than universal, basic service provision.

If the prevalence of state investment, management, and regulation defines electricity capital, it also presents an opportunity to reverse or reimagine the process of utility unbundling and restructuring as scholars and activists working to eliminate profit-making and rent-seeking from electricity have argued (e.g., Fairchild and Weinrub, 2017; Harrison, 2013; McDonald, 2014). Labor and community organizing for “energy democracy” and a “just transition” away from fossil fuels challenges the profit imperative of electricity capital to “center the voices, hopes, and dreams of the poor, people of color, Indigenous people, and those marginalized by the old energy system in the redesign of the new system” (S Baker, 2021: 16). Efforts to harness the “revolutionary power” that Shalanda Baker (2021) describes are seen also in the proliferation of recent scholarship on democratic experiments that community organizations, unions, and city governments have developed and strived for to decommodify electricity and recognize it as a human right (Angel, 2017, 2019; Ashley et al., 2020; Becker et al., 2020; Paul, 2018; Stephens, 2020; Sweeney, 2013; Szulecki and Overland, 2020; Welton 2018). The authors in this special issue begin to consider these questions in analyzing and critiquing the valuation of electricity capital and moving toward a more just energy system.

Conclusion: Toward energy democracy

The rallying cry of the climate justice movement is “system change, not climate change” (Roussopoulos 2018). Although we agree with such a call to arms, as Christian Parenti (2014) argues, the timeline of the climate crisis does not allow us to wait for a “revolution” to transform our energy system. However, “system change” might be possible in a single sector. Our effort to theorize electricity capital in this special issue is based on a premise that solving the climate crisis begins with decarbonizing electricity – and this decarbonization won’t occur at the speed and scale necessary if profit continues to be the overriding criteria in expanding and transitioning electricity systems. Realizing calls for “energy democracy” requires attention to the intertwining of public and private interests in electricity given that the precondition of any democratic engagement with economic life is attacking the autocratic “despotism of capital” (Marx [1867] 1990: 526). Energy democracy should mean that other criteria besides profit – such as eliminating poverty and addressing climate change – should predominate in how we organize energy systems (S Baker, 2021). Furthermore, while electricity capital insists energy decisions should follow the fluctuations of market prices, energy democracy would necessarily require a change to public and participatory planning toward decarbonization instead of reliance on anarchic market forces (see, Klein, 2014).

Moving toward energy democracy and beyond electricity, capital means a struggle for public ownership and control of electric utilities – moving electricity itself into the sphere of “the political” (Wainwright and Mann, 2015) where democracy is allowed unlike the private sector (see, Anderson, 2017). There already is a rich historical record of public power being a vehicle for achieving broader social goals beyond those of private capital. In the U.S. in the 1930s, New Deal programs hired Woody Guthrie to sing songs about the Columbia River (and dams) doing work for the people (Huber, 2018). Although we can understand the ecological problems with such projects in hindsight, we do need to recover that kind of popular vision of serving the public good through energy projects. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was also premised on delivering energy to rural areas in “energy poverty” with the slogan “electricity for all.” Organizing energy democracy in the Tennessee Valley has called on TVA to renew its public power mandate and support no-carbon infrastructure investments rooted in the needs and priorities of local workers and energy-burdened residents (Energy Democracy Y’all, 2020). The People’s Policy Project (Bruenig 2019) has also discussed that a new “Green” TVA could be a model to expand the jurisdiction of public power to build out clean energy infrastructure across the country and employ rural workers in the process.

Public power does not automatically mean energy or climate justice. Authors in this special issue examine the distinct ways in which communities and workers have challenged electricity capital through union organizing, protests, and legal action to demand that the state use its regulatory influence to reign in private power (Pearse and Bryant, 2021; Luke, 2021) and to call out the patterns of labor exploitation, pollution and environmental degradation (Kumar, 2022; Rampini, 2021; Wang, 2022), and land enclosure and rent-seeking (L Baker, 2021) that the state allows. Current state capitalist, municipal and public utilities, and rural cooperatives are often enthusiastic burners of fossil fuels and run by reactionary social blocs (see, Schneider 2017). Energy democracy is constrained so long as electricity capital rules our power system. Public ownership offers a chance for social struggles to build power able to transform our energy system and to reimagine carbon-free electricity as a public good – like many view healthcare or education. Although electricity capital routinely shuts off power to poor households and disproportionately households of color – leading to verified instances of premature death (Franklin et al., 2017; see also Angel, 2019; Baptista, 2015; Silver, 2015) – electricity could be transformed into a human right, not a privilege. A public power system that delivers electricity as a human right could contribute to mass popular enthusiasm behind the larger transformations needed to decarbonize everyday life. It is these kinds of social struggles and mass movements that can set the stage for calling into question the entire capitalist system itself.

Highlights