How New York Could Build Publicly Owned Electricity Without Taking Over Dirty Plants
HuffPost
A candidate for New York City comptroller has a novel idea for a municipally owned solar utility in a city with little space for giant panel farms.
As rising utility rates squeeze working-class New Yorkers and power plant owners seek to swap oil for other fossil fuels, calls have mounted in the nation’s largest city to remove the profit motive altogether and seize the means of electricity production. But a government takeover of the city’s utility infrastructure would be no simple feat ― steep costs, lengthy legal battles, and that’s before you get to the challenge of replacing fossil fuels with cleaner alternatives. Blackouts, electrical accidents and pollution would become a political liability for anyone in power. But Brad Lander, the progressive Brooklyn city councilman now running for comptroller, thinks he’s found a way to skip past that and start generating clean, publicly owned electricity almost immediately.More Related News