Last month, Misty Pellew’s family in northeastern Pennsylvania had their power shut off because they couldn’t pay a $602 electric bill.

They ate peanut butter sandwiches for dinner and slept in hoodies and gloves to stay warm.

“I feel so useless and helpless,” the 44-year-old mother told the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, the utility company that cut the family’s power made nearly $1 billion in profit last year.

This isn’t an isolated tragedy: electricity bills have skyrocketed nearly 30% since 2020. Millions of households are now choosing between keeping the lights on and buying groceries.

Trump blames solar panels and windmills. Progressive commentators point to AI data centers. Both are missing the point—or deliberately avoiding it.

The real problem isn’t what powers the grid. It’s who owns it.

The Problem

Just like healthcare, electricity in the U.S. isn’t treated as a basic necessity. It’s treated as a business—one designed to enrich investors, not guarantee affordable power for everyone.

Today, about 72% of Americans get their electricity from investor-owned utilities (IOUs). These are private, for-profit companies whose legal obligation is to maximize returns for shareholders—not to ensure low bills or universal access.

And because regulators limit how utilities can raise rates, IOUs don’t make their money by selling electricity. They make money by building things.

Under U.S. utility law, they earn profit only on big capital projects—new transmission lines, substations, transformers—and zero profit on maintaining the system they already have.

So when utilities want to increase profit, they don’t cut costs or improve efficiency.

They propose massive new infrastructure projects, get them approved, build them, and then pass the cost directly onto customers—with a guaranteed rate of return.

Climate disasters, wildfire risk, and aging infrastructure have become the perfect justification. The more they rebuild, the more they earn. All while our bills keep climbing.

The Solution

The solution is simple: we need to stop treating electricity like a business.

That doesn’t mean electricity should be free. It means electricity should be operated the same way other countries treat essential services—at cost, without shareholders demanding endless growth.

There are two main ways to do this, both of which already exist in America, delivering electric bills that are way cheaper than their private counterparts.

The first is public co-ops. Power cooperatives are owned by the people who use the electricity, not shareholders on Wall Street. Any excess profits are put back into the system or given back to customers as lower rates—not distributed as dividends to fat cats on Wall Street.

Co-ops were built across rural America during the New Deal, when private utilities refused to serve low-income or sparsely populated areas. They still provide power for about 13% of the country—particularly in rural areas. Their electric bills are 10-15% cheaper than investor-owned utilities.

But there’s also another way: public ownership (or socialization or socialized electricity).

Local or state ownership of power companies was also very popular after the Great Depression, thanks to New Deal-era pushes that broke apart private companies.

Publicly owned power companies already serve some major cities like Los Angeles and Seattle, not to mention the entire state of Nebraska (the only state covered completely by a public electric company). It’s also how European countries like France, Sweden and Norway do power.

The benefits of this are tremendous: the average customer of a public power company pays about 15% less on their electricity bill. That number grows to 25% in some of the more expensive regions in our country.

These models work because they remove the single most expensive feature of American electricity: the guaranteed, baked-in profit margin for private investors.

Who Stops Us

If public power is cheaper and already proven, why don’t we expand it?

Because capitalists have spent the last hundred years telling people that government is the enemy, private markets are always superior, and anything that removes profit from essential services is somehow communism.

They aggressively fight municipalization, co-op expansion, or any reform that threatens their rate base.

But the truth is simple. We pay some of the highest electricity prices in the developed world because we built a system designed to make rich people richer.

The path forward isn’t complicated: municipalize the grid, one city at a time. Expand co-ops. Treat electricity like we treat roads—public infrastructure, not shareholder value. The only question is whether we have the will to take it back.