On the sixth night of Hanukkah, two days before Christmas, the Friday company holiday for many workers in Milwaukee, people across the city and indeed the entire state of Wisconsin huddled together over their phones and computer screens to find an email message from We Energies, the energy monopoly that holds the electricity of over one third of Wisconsin’s population in its hands.
The massive power company had requested that residents lower their thermostats and prepare for the possibility of a large-scale gas outage in the region as local temperatures failed to rise above 0°F and in fact crept much lower, with wind chill values dropping as low as -20°F that day. An arctic blast had filled the national media cycle with headlines on the life-threatening cold. Milwaukee residents stared that reality in its frost-nipped face.
For people living in a major city in the wealthiest country in the world, lapses in energy and other utility services provided by We Energies are becoming increasingly common. Thousands lost power on Thanksgiving Day in the heart of the city just weeks before the December outage, and others suffered large-scale outages like the 2021 failure that left tens of thousands of people without power for days, putting residents’ health at risk and costing families hundreds of dollars each in spoiled groceries.
For We Energies, there is not much incentive to depart from this model and from the increasingly deteriorated infrastructure that’s crystalized into business as usual. Parent company WEC Energy group is valued at more than $30 billion and boasted more than $1.3 billion in projected annual earnings and a 15% profit margin in Q3 of 2022, exploiting beyond expectations and lining shareholder pockets as they have focused on doing since their predecessors, the Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company, began operations in 1896. In their endless quest for shareholder profits, We Energies has maintained a monopoly on Milwaukee energy for generations, forcing consumers to pay outrageous rates and to accept hikes like the recent 11% residential price hike with little to no recourse. For the shareholders, this must seem like a pretty good deal. For the people across Wisconsin held hostage by this system, however, the status quo is not working out.
Paltry attempts at regulation have only fallen, as former Milwaukee mayor Daniel Hoan describes in his 1914 work on the subject, The Failure of Regulation, into the bills of users as the company owners relish the profits, which, at worst, remain unchanged, or, more often, continue to rise, as ratepayers bear the financial burden. If, for example, the state should choose to adopt a green energy policy and penalize energy generators that rely on fossil fuels, the owners of We Energies’ parent company can pass on the financial burden by raising rates on the households that rely on the utility services to survive, as they did when to absorb rising fossil fuel costs in late 2022, and who have no recourse for challenging the supremacy of the company’s guaranteed profit margin. Shareholders’ lives will not deteriorate in any serious sense as the utility rates rise, but working people in places like Milwaukee already find themselves taking a second or third job to pay the electricity bill. Even now, these same working people shiver through the holidays and hope for the best, because that hope is the only say-so they feel they’ve got.
There is only one solution to this problem. Milwaukee city leaders must yield power to the people of this city via a publicly owned utility.
We must collectively own the public utilities through a municipal or cooperative system. When people collectively own their utilities, they set rates democratically, often seeing more than 10% immediately cut from their bills as they cut shareholder slush funds from their bills. The people, rather than just a few suits in a boardroom, are able to do away with regressive policies, like We Energies’ recent decision to hike residential rates at nearly double the proposed rates for corporate customers, a hike that continues We Energies’ trend of bringing their residential customers the steepest rates in the state and the most expensive utilities for any large city in the United States.
Community resource controls also empower residents to determine together where they get their energy. As the effects of man-made climate change continue to bring more severe weather, like increased flooding and extreme storms, to Milwaukee, people throughout the city deserve the opportunity to invest in quality renewable resources to offset the causes of that climate change. A collective system could, for instance, replace We Energies’ convoluted program, which forces customers to buy back the renewable energy they produce at unfair rates, with a system that values and encourages investment in renewable resources.
When utility systems are designed to serve people instead of profits, residents also report better functioning services. Municipal utility customers, for instance, experience an average of 59 minutes of downtime a year as compared to 133 minutes a year in private utilities. It only makes as much sense—the money accumulated through a public utility would return to that public utility, attending to the failing equipment that reportedly causes more than a third of all We Energies’ outages, the highest single cause of outages.
The public ownership of public utilities is not a novel idea. In Milwaukee, folks have been discussing the idea since Hoan’s fight to overtake We Energies’ predecessor in the city’s Sewer Socialist period. Cities like Austin, Texas, Los Angeles California, and Cleveland, Ohio, all boast popular municipal services that, along with other community-owned utilities, keep the lights on for more than 49 million Americans. Even folks here in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, have brought their utilities under public ownership.
Why has it not yet happened in Milwaukee? The answer is simple: the people of this city have lacked the collective political will to bring it about. After all, We Energies’ investor owners are begging the people of this city to take control of the local infrastructure. In fact, these owners will likely continue to throw fundraising dollars at both Republicans and Democrats in office and use any number of political tricks to evade bringing power to the people of Milwaukee. Nor will our local elected officials be likely to pursue this fight on their own. Rather, the demand of the working-class people across this city to survive and to live in a dignified way will be met when enough people say they are willing to take action to bring about big changes, even as it will necessarily replace politicians, disrupt the status quo for folks at the top, and take on the existing, cash-strapped systems and mechanisms that separate us from these essential services.
So what then are we to do now? We move beyond the status quo. We see the throughlines between big dreams and common sense. We believe in one another, because we will have to believe in one another, to believe in a movement for public power that dares to transform our city by reestablishing collective values when folks are feeling isolated, alienated, afraid. Together, we realize our power, and together, electrified and working toward a common cause, we are best able to say, “I am willing to do something big, because it will change my city, because it is the right thing to do.”
Already, this movement is growing. We gathered with workers from across the city to deliver the first of our petitions at City Hall in April, and we will continue to do so as necessary to make the voice of the working class heard.
When the people of Milwaukee next receive an email telling them to worry about the potential for another outage (thankfully residents were able to return to their normal thermostat settings on December 24 without major catastrophe), or worse, when people do not receive that message and instead face the panic of a bulb that fails to light and all the real dangers implied therein, up to and including the death of themselves or their loved ones in extreme cold or heat (even requests like We Energies’ December request pose real health hazards for some, as the World Health Organization sets the room temperature floor at 68°F room for infants, the elderly, and those with significant health problems), I hope in this mess we find the decency within ourselves to get mad as hell, to call on our neighbors, and to put an end to this exploitation.
Sign our petition demanding Milwaukee City Hall use Chapter 197 to give us public ownership of public utilities.
Great article. I’m a three(?) year member of the DSA. My favorite part of my monthly bill is seeing the donation request to help those that have difficulty paying their power bill. Yet, this terrible company makes billions. This has to change. This must change!