David Michael Miller
About a year ago, Madison Gas and Electric pledged to make good on its logo — “Your Community Energy Company” — by launching a multi-stage public process that would culminate in a Community Energy Partnership (CEP) to guide the utility’s future energy plans. Clean energy advocates greeted the announcement with a combination of optimism and wariness.
The optimism was rooted in the belief that building “community” into the utility’s operating structure represents customers’ best hope of advancing clean energy goals. The wariness was due to the utility’s past greenwashing, inequitable and environmentally irrational rates, and huge investments in coal-fired plants.
There is still hope that MGE can become a “utility of the future,” perhaps even a global leader in clean energy. But this hope will be fulfilled only if we, its customers, remain vigilant and forcefully demand that MGE follow through in creating a Community Energy Partnership worthy of the name.
According to the public process MGE originally laid out, town meetings would “confirm” the results of a series of small group community discussions and launch the CEP as “a vehicle for collaborative planning, monitoring and evaluation of input to provide guidance to the decision making process.” But these small group discussions were a charade, and the town meetings were delayed for months, then reduced to a single meeting now being called a community energy workshop, which remains unscheduled.
I have been a professional facilitator for more than three decades, publishing several books on the subject and producing or editing dozens of “discussion guidebooks” designed to elicit robust debate on a wide range of public issues. The more time I spent with MGE’s guidebook, Building a Community Energy Company for the Future, the more I was convinced that it would keep MGE from hearing anything during its “community energy conversations” that it didn’t want to hear.
Now it appears that we’ll never really know. In late November, MGE unilaterally issued Energy 2030 Framework, which claims the public input the utility received in its community discussions “strongly supported” the goals in the framework. We have to take that on faith since the community workshop to review and validate the community input was never held. Worse, the Energy 2030 Framework, though full of references to “consultation,” “customer input” and “collaboration,” makes no mention of the CEP.
Regardless of the specific goals in the Energy 2030 Framework, customers should reject it for what is, a callous bait and switch, and insist in no uncertain terms that MGE take two steps backward to first hold public energy workshops to re-evaluate and improve the 2030 framework based on the results of its community energy conversations and then create a viable CEP.
Without a community energy partnership that can translate customers’ voices into energy decisions, doubts will remain that MGE can be trusted to “do the right thing,” which to most of us means fair rates, less pollution, more renewables and greater customer control. MGE should be a world leader, but without significant change in its governing structure, it is incapable of assuming that role. Like nearly all utilities, MGE is owned by private shareholders mostly interested in their own bottom lines. Shareholder mutinies have proven valuable, but can accomplish only so much on their own.
An outright city takeover sounds appealing, until one begins to weigh the political and financial costs — and the time it would take to resolve them. A CEP on the other hand has the potential to act as a mechanism for injecting citizen input into MGE’s decision making on an ongoing basis and to do so in the very short term.
For that potential to be realized, MGE must work with citizens to create a partnership that is more than a closed-door talk shop. The CEP must be created and operated in the open and be independent. Most of all, citizen members of the CEP must be granted real clout, including the authority to participate in binding commitments between MGE, key stakeholders, city and county government.
All of these features of a CEP would contribute far more to a “utility of the future” if paired with a seemingly small, but significant, change in MGE’s corporate bylaws. Were MGE to become a “certified B Corp,” its executives would be free — like those of well-known companies like Patagonia and the utility Green Mountain Power — to include the community’s wellbeing directly into their calculus of creating value for shareholders.
MGE never tires of telling us how hard they’re working to keep the lights on. To that I say: Let’s all work hard to keep the light shining on MGE. We can start by letting our local reps know we don’t appreciate being stood up at public meetings and that we won’t be satisfied until we get the community energy partnership that MGE promised.
Adolf Gundersen is a professional facilitator and a member of RePower Madison, a citizen group advocating for a greener MGE.