Empowering Electricity

Co-operatives, Sustainability, and Power Sector Reform in Canada

Julie L MacArthur author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of British Columbia Press

Published:15th Jun '16

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Empowering Electricity cover

This revealing analysis of Canada’s electrical power co-operatives shines a light on the promises and challenges facing their development.

This revealing analysis of Canada’s electrical power co-operatives challenges our understanding of their history and shines a light on their potential within the nation’s electricity sector.

Canada is known for being an energy-producing nation – with much attention being paid to the Alberta tar sands and their large carbon footprint. This book looks at a very different part of the Canadian energy sector: the hundreds of renewable energy co-ops that have sprung up across the nation. These co-ops are democratically structured, community-based organizations that use sun, wind, rivers, tides, and plant and animal waste as sources of local power generation.

Empowering Electricity offers an illuminating analysis of these co-ops within the context of larger debates over climate change, renewable electricity policy, sustainable community development, and provincial power-sector ownership. It looks at the conditions that led to this new wave of co-operative development, examines their form and location, and shines a light on the promises and challenges accompanying their development.

Empowering Electricity is an empirically-grounded contribution to the literature on citizen engagement and energy policy in Canada. In particular, it provides a fresh take on BC energy politics that gets beyond the entrenched public/private dichotomy to explore one possible middle ground. While MacArthur implies that electricity co-operatives have the potential to erode public power in BC, her suggestion of co-operatives partnering with municipalities and First Nations may actually offer a new, politically viable approach to public power develpment that is both more democratic and locally acceptable than the current model. -- Nichole Dusyk * BC Studies *

ISBN: 9780774831437

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 530g

276 pages