Earlier this month, Pacific Gas & Electric, the investor-owned utility company that supplies power to much of California, cut off electricity to over 700,000 customers. The company argued that such a drastic measure — the largest planned power outage in the state’s history — was necessary to prevent wildfires.

Yet for some activists, this bleakly framed choice served as another reminder that investor-owned utility companies are not positioned to manage our energy futures, especially as climate change raises the stakes.

In recent years, activists around the country, including in New York City, Boston, Providence, Chicago, Boulder, and Washington, D.C., as well as Northern California and Maine, have been working to transition utilities to public ownership, which would make them accountable to the public instead of investors. In Northern California, the Let’s Own PG&E campaign emerged shortly after the Camp Fire, the deadliest fire in California history, which was caused by PG&E power lines. In other parts of the country, activists are fighting against utility companies’ direct contributions to the climate crisis and systemic inequalities.

The fight in New York City has grown particularly heated over the past few months. In July, in the middle of a deadly heat wave, Con Edison intentionally cut off power to some of New York City’s poorest neighborhoods, sparking outrage. Last month, at a rally outside the National Grid office in downtown Brooklyn, activists from groups like Stop the Williams Pipeline Coalition and the New York City Democratic Socialists of America spoke out against investor-owned utility corporations’ continued investment in gas pipelines. In particular, they’re angry about National Grid’s push for the highly contested, twice-denied Williams Pipeline that would cut through New York Harbor and proposed rate hikes from the two major utility corporations.

“Both ConEd and National Grid are proposing to raise our rates to expand fossil fuel infrastructure,” Lee Ziesche, an activist with Sane Energy Project, told the crowd. “What they are proposing completely fails the climate test.”

The ultimate goal for some activists is to abandon investor-owned utility corporations altogether and build a more democratic system in their place. Last year, NYC-DSA launched a Public Power campaign to make the energy grid publicly owned. Building on this idea, on October 19, a coalition of grassroots organizations launched Movement for a Green New Deal, a campaign that will demand utilities be publicly owned as a key part of this transition. Giving the public control over New York City’s energy future, activists argue, could lay the groundwork for the just, rapid decarbonization of the energy sector.

“We could decommodify clean energy and guarantee it to all New Yorkers as a human right, much in the same way we already guaranteed clean water through our public water utility,” said Amber Ruther, an organizer with NYC-DSA, during a recent hearing before the New York State legislature.

Ruther argued in her testimony that investor-owned utilities are not positioned to tackle the climate crisis. “The incentive structure for private utilities was designed to encourage them to build as much infrastructure as possible,” said Ruther. “But now that incentive structure is obsolete and it's preventing us from achieving our climate goals.”

To replace investor-owned utilities, the Public Power campaign is calling for a large-scale public utility. This could mean the expansion of the New York Power Authority, the largest state public utility in the U.S., or the municipalization of private utilities. Once established, a public utility would be responsible for the major work of transforming the grid, Aaron Eisenberg, an organizer with NYC-DSA, explained to Teen Vogue in an email.