The Case for Utility Nationalization: The Tennessee Valley
Nebraska is a state with 121 municipal electric systems, 30 public power districts, 10 electric cooperatives, and not a single investor-owned electric utility. It is the only state in the Union of which that is true, and it is one of the most Republican. In 1946 the Omaha Public Power District bought the Nebraska Power Company, the last sizable private holdout, and by 1949 every private electric company in the state had been bought out by a public system. In 2024, Nebraskans paid an average of 11.5 cents per kilowatt-hour for residential power. The national average was 16.5.
That is no accident. Nebraska’s comparably cheaper costs happened in the wake of a fight that Nebraska's Republican senator, George Norris, carried on for two decades over a single American river, and the victory he finally won became the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a way to send tens of thousands back to work in the face of the Great Depression. TVA was built in the poorest corner of the country, against the open opposition of the corporate interests. It now serves about ten million people in seven states, takes no taxpayer money for its power system, and has no shareholders to pay.
This year, the question of whether it stays public was put back on the table. The New Nationalists of America say that it must stay public, and that the rest of the country's electrical system should follow it. We will make that case the same exact way that we made the case for banking reform: By consulting the historical record.
The Valley in 1933
In 1933, per capita income in the Tennessee Valley was 44% of the national average. Only 1% of farm owners had indoor plumbing and only 4% had telephones. Private power companies had electrified a mere 3% of the Valley's farms. The country as a whole looked much the same: By 1930, 85% of homes in cities and large towns had electric service, but only 10% of rural homes did. The private companies were not wicked for this reality. In fact, they were quite rational, as stringing a mile of wire to a lone farmhouse does not pay a shareholder. Private monopolies answers to the people who own their stock, and American farmers have never been among them.
The Roosevelts & the River
The idea that the nation's rivers belong to the people did not begin with FDR’s New Deal. In fact, it began with Theodore Roosevelt. In March of 1907 he created the Inland Waterways Commission and charged it with preparing "a comprehensive plan for the improvement and control of the river systems of the United States." That December, he told Congress that waterways, water power, forestry, irrigation, and the reclamation of lands threatened with flood "are all interdependent parts of the same problem." The Commission's 1908 report treated the rivers as assets of the people, warned against their capture by private monopoly, and called for developing each river for many purposes at once.
In 1908 and 1909, Teddy vetoed bills that would have let private companies dam the Rainy and James Rivers without a time limit or a charge to the public, and he told Congress exactly why:
“We are now at the beginning of great development in water power. Its use through electrical transmission is entering more and more largely into every element of the daily life of the people. Already the evils of monopoly are becoming manifest; already the experience of the past shows the necessity of caution in making unrestricted grants of this great power.”
Congress chose otherwise. By 1920 it had settled on a licensing system, run by a new Federal Power Commission, under which private companies would build the dams, and the hope of basin-wide public planning faded. The fight moved on to a river in Alabama. During the First World War the government built nitrate plants and Wilson Dam at Muscle Shoals to make explosives, and when the war ended the question moved to who would inherit them. Senator Norris answered that the dam and the river belonged to the people and should be developed for flood control, navigation, power, and fertilizer together. Congress passed his bill in 1931, only for President Herbert Hoover to veto it.
Two years later, Franklin Denalo Roosevelt, who had endorsed the idea before his inauguration, asked Congress for "a corporation clothed with the power of government but possessed of the flexibility and initiative of a private enterprise." Congress passed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act on May 18th of 1933. FDR wanted TVA to distribute its electricity through municipal utility boards and public rural cooperatives, and to help create them.
What the TVA Built
Norris Dam, named for the senator, was finished in 1936. By then TVA's rural lines were reaching farms the private companies had refused to serve. A 1936 survey of American farm homes on new lines in two Alabama counties found that 89% had electric irons, 69% had radios, and 61% had electric refrigerators. Malaria, which had plagued the Tennessee Valley, was virtually eliminated, and thousands of demonstration farms taught erosion control. TVA's rates also became a yardstick, a public benchmark for what electricity could cost when the goal was serving the American people rather than corporate dividends. Immediately, the mega-corporations recognized the threat. Commonwealth & Southern, led by Wendell Willkie, sued. The Supreme Court upheld TVA's power to generate and sell electricity in Ashwander v. TVA in 1936, and in 1939 it rejected the private companies' challenge in Tennessee Electric Power Co. v. TVA. In August of 1939 Willkie's company sold its Tennessee Electric Power Company to TVA for about $78 million.
Today TVA is the largest public power provider in the country. It sells wholesale to 153 local power companies and 58 large direct customers, operates 29 hydroelectric dams, owns more than 32,000 megawatts of capacity and over 16,000 miles of transmission line, and is the third-largest nuclear owner in the United States. Its revenue was $13.7 billion in the fiscal year of 2025. Its power system has been self-funded since 1959, it pays no dividends, and in the decade before 2023 it paid $5.3 billion in tax-equivalent payments to the states and counties it serves. Its bonds are backed by power revenues, capped by statute at $30 billion, and limited to 50-year maturities, and it cut its total financial obligations from $27.5 billion in 2013 to $20.3 billion in 2022.
The National Record
Without even considering the TVA, today roughly 2,000 public power utilities serve more than 55 million Americans. According to the American Public Power Association's, the average monthly residential bill in 2024 was $123.78 for public power customers, $139.42 for customers of investor-owned utilities, and $149.18 for cooperative customers. Public power had the lowest average residential rate in 35 of the 45 states with comparable data. Between 2020 and 2024, residential rates rose 27.2% at investor-owned utilities and 11.7% at public power. Setting aside major storms, public power customers lost 1.2 hours of service on average in 2024, against 2.3 hours at investor-owned utilities and 4.0 at cooperatives. Though public utilities are concentrated in cities and towns, which are cheaper to serve than the open country, Nebraska proves that the principle of public utilities ownership is reliable regardless of setting. Nebraska is a sparse, rural state served entirely by public power, and its residential rates run 30% below the national average.
The Private Record
The privately-owned system's problem is structural. A regulated private utility earns a return on the capital it invests. Therefore, its owners profit when it spends more. In other words, private utilities earn more by spending more. In 2025, electric and gas utilities asked regulators for a record $31 billion in rate increases, more than double the $15 billion requested in 2024, affecting 81 million Americans. Florida Power & Light alone won $6.9 billion. Utilities now plan to spend $1.4 trillion on capital projects through 2030, every dollar of which will be recovered from customers with a return attached for the shareholders who supplied it.
When Americans have challenged this arrangement, powerful interests have shoved them back down with everything they have. In 2023, Maine voters considered a plan to buy out Central Maine Power and Versant and replace them with a consumer-owned utility. The two companies' parent firms and the groups they funded spent nearly $40 million against it, about forty times what its backers raised, and it lost, 68% to 32. America must learn from this example. We must learn the disheartening fact that a private monopoly will spend whatever it takes to keep its franchise. And when voters are told that buyouts mean debt, they will balk unless someone shows them the plan, which is the entire purpose of this policy proposal.
What We Propose
The NNA proposes that TVA will be made permanently public. Congress should bar the sale or spin-off of any TVA generation or transmission without an act of Congress, give directors staggered, removal-for-cause terms, and provide that a vacancy cannot freeze the board's routine business. Second, America must build more TVAs. The federal government already runs four power marketing administrations: Bonneville, Western, Southwestern, and Southeastern, that sell federally generated hydropower. We must convert them, and any new region that wants one, into regional public authorities with TVA's charter: self-financed, multipurpose, and wholesale. Third, every investor-owned electric utility must be offered a fair price. The NNA’s Platform calls for bringing the nation's utilities into public ownership, financed with long-dated bonds rather than lump-sum buyouts. We must begin with willing sellers and with service territories whose customers have asked for public ownership. We will use condemnation at fair value only where an owner refuses a fair price and the public it serves has voted for the change. We must keep retail service in local public hands. Where a municipal or cooperative system already exists, it will stay, and where none does, the people will create one. Fourth, we will inevitably extend the same approach to water and gas distribution, which share the natural-monopoly structure, but only after the electric program has a record.
This program will be a challenge, it will be grand, and we do not pretend otherwise. But once complete, it will replace equity capital, which demands a shareholder's return, with bond capital, which demands a bondholder’s. And that will be a massive saving for the American consumer.
Objections
Some may object that public ownership will put politics in the control room. Indeed it can, and the clash between the TVA and the Trump administration proved it. But a regulated private monopoly is inherently political as well. Its politics are built upon lobbying, rate cases, and ballot-measure spending that include the $40 million they spent in Maine, conducted where customers cannot vote. Public ownership merely means that these political dimensions are open, which means that the agency can be kept from being frozen.
Others may believe that it isn’t the government’s place to run a utility. And yet, it does. Today, TVA serves ten million people. Nebraska has run every kilowatt-hour in the state publicly for three-quarters of a century. About 2,000 public systems serve 55 million Americans. For those who may object on constitutional grounds, the Supreme Court upheld TVA's power to generate and sell electricity in 1936 and rejected the private corporations' challenge in 1939. A purchase at fair value pays the compensation required by the Fifth Amendment, and TVA's own 1939 acquisition has long-set an irreversible legal precedent on the matter.
Still, many might argue that data centers and the new demand have produced a grand argument for allowing utilities to be privately owned. And yet, the rising load of utilities is the strongest argument for public ownership, not against it. Growth on this scale requires national planning, new transmission, and new generation, including the nuclear projects TVA is perfectly positioned to lead. A public authority has no rate base to grow and no shareholder to please, so it can make large new customers pay for the capacity built to serve them.
The Valley & the Plains
In 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt wrote that "already the evils of monopoly are becoming manifest." In 2025 the electric and gas monopolies of the United States asked their customers for $31 billion in a single year. Teddy’s warning is 118 years old, and today the evils are more manifest than at any point in American history. The remedy has been tested in the Valley of the Tennessee and on the plains of Nebraska, and by millions of ordinary people who merely wanted the lights of their homes to turn on. Public power has only failed where it has been run carelessly, and it has succeeded where has been allowed to run through discipline. The question before the United States of America today is not whether public power works. It is whether we will build it, and defend it, with the discipline it requires.
We, just as President Teddy Roosevelt, believe that a nation's resources ought to be held in stewardship for the public. The electrical grid is merely one of them. It is high time to put it back in the public's hands.
