At the state level, campaigns to take power systems back into public hands are making strides. In California, the failures, greed and bankruptcy of the statewide grid operator, PG&E, has prompted activists to push for public ownership instead of an investor bailout. In Rhode Island, the Democratic Socialists of America’s #NationalizeGrid campaign against power company National Grid is picking up steam. In January, Rick Savage, a Republican and business owner from Bethel, Maine, responded to the possibility of a public utility quite straightforwardly: “Creating Maine Power will reduce costs to businesses like mine, put the control back in our hands, and put money back in our pockets as Mainers.”

The Green New Deal could give communities the much-needed financing, legal authority and capacity to kick out investor-owned utilities in favor of community-run, renewable-powered ones by launching a Community Ownership of Power Administration, akin to Roosevelt’s REA.

We also need to think about large-scale planning that can structurally shift entire systems to serve the many. Here, another program of the original New Deal shows what can be done: The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a government-owned corporation created in 1933, was part rural electrification program, part agricultural management, part river management and part jobs program for a region of the country hit hard by poverty. A large-scale experiment in regional planning, TVA now provides wholesale energy to seven states and 10 million customers.

It should be noted that TVA backed away from an initial vision of more bottom-up democratic control, and its record on equity is far from perfect. When building its dams in the 1930s, it used eminent domain to take over farming land and failed to adequately support displaced black farmers. Its environmental record, too, is spotty, marred by large hydropower dams, nuclear and coal power.