Calumet Editions

About Power

How to Democratize Electricity Now

Accelerating climate chaos and deepening inequity persist because electric utility service is built backwards. Utilities profit when they sell more power and pollute more; conservation cuts earnings. Meanwhile, costly transmission lines are built for remote renewables instead of prioritizing community-scale projects that need little new infrastructure. About Power argues that better energy management can reduce major social and environmental harms—and insists nuclear power is not the answer—offering history, diagnosis, and a path to fix what’s broken.

The world is in crisis over Climate Chaos and multi-dimensional inequities. About Power shows how the electric utility industry contributes to this crisis, and how delivering electric utility services properly could instead provide solutions.

—Mark Ritchie, former Minnesota Secretary of State and civilian aide to the Secretary of the Army

Description

A primary reason we have accelerating Climate Chaos and profound societal inequity is that society delivers electric utility services upside down and backwards. On the demand-side, electric utilities are financially healthier when they emit more pollution, while conservation reduces their earnings. On the supply-side, big, very expensive power lines get built to accommodate large, remote wind and solar developments from the top down, instead of first developing strategically sized community-based renewable energy projects that require little or no new transmission infrastructure.

About Power makes the case that society’s major problems can be reduced, if not solved, with proper energy management, and why, emphatically, nuclear power is not part of the solution. When we get energy right, we’ll have the energy to get the rest of it right. About Power provides an historical context that sheds light on why society gets energy management so terribly wrong and offers direction about correcting the flaws.

Product Details

PublishedAugust 12, 2024
ImprintWisdom Editions
LanguageEnglish
Print length198
ISBN-13978-1962834216
Dimensions6 x 0.5 x 9 inches

About Power is a timely field manual for organizing the power of an engaged citizenry to curtail monolithic institutional power companies which are trashing our planet in the pursuit of ever more cash. George Crocker’s inspired tales of adventure in the halls of power provide a clear introduction to technical and political basics of the energy sector while painting a convincing picture of how citizen action can change the world.

—Glenn Carroll, verified review on Amazon

This was a fascinating read on many different levels. It is well researched and well written. It takes a book like this to realize there is another path forward.

—Jane E. Larson, verified review on Amazon

He stands for power that empowers, educates, and “serves as an economic engine, enhancing the financial well-being of the community producing and consuming the power.” His stories of successes and failures on our way to realizing this future are equally illuminating. For classic Crocker, don’t miss the NAWO Westinghouse adventure in Chapter 6; an initiative for which I am particularly grateful as a downriver neighbor of a nuclear plant. Thank heavens he wraps it all up by providing a CLEAR vision of how this is done: from organizing and sharing knowledge, to assembling a community vision and the teamwork it takes to implement it.

—Ted Tollefson on Amazon

Do you want to understand Electrical power generation in America? Do you want to learn how and why our electrical usage is a major contributor to Climate Change? This book, About Power, will arm you with this information and more. Mr. Crocker will show you what needs to change, and even what we need to do to make it happen.

—Barb Tilsen on Amazon

What comes through in this book is the author’s decades of experience in fighting big, corporate utilities to protect the public interest and the environment. His stories from the trenches help the reader grasp the uphill fight to address climate change in a monopoly-dominated system, and the hope that renewable energy offers us if it can be built and properly managed for the public. ‘Substation municipalities’ should become a byword in a more democratic energy future!

—Juuls, verified review on Amazon