History of municipal ownership in the electric-power industry in the United States: a centennial view
The dissertation describes how a number of factors were responsible for the incidence of municipal ownership in the earliest years (1882 to 1923) of this history, chiefly: insufficient municipal population to attract private capital investment; absence of a viable regulatory mechanism; and public resentment toward the corrupting influences of public-service corporations. The disappearance of over one-thousand municipal electric utilities (better than one-third of the industry total) during the second period examined (1924 to 1932) is tied in various ways to one principal cause: the creation and expansion of investor owned power networks. Unable (or able only at great expense) to combine amongst themselves and thereby take advantage of scale economies through combination, hundreds of municipally owned electric utilities had their service areas taken over by the highly integrated investor owned portion of the industry during this second period. Municipal electric utilities stages a comeback during the next period (1933 to 1945) because of New Deal legislation creating: (1) direct federal subsidies for the development of new and expansion of existing municipal electric systems; and (2) indirect federal assistance via preference sales to municipal systems of wholesale electrical power produced at federal and federally-funded hydroelectric power projects (like TVA). For the sake of completeness, the final historical period (1946 to 1981) is considered, but absent are the pronounced changes that characterized the three earlier periods: since the mid-1940's the number of municipals has stayed nearly constant.
- OSTI ID:
- 5658110
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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