Electric Life: Utility Regulation and the Fight for Energy Democracy (Urban and Industrial Environments)

Luke, Nikki

ISBN 10: 0262051974 / ISBN 13: 9780262051972

Published by The MIT Press, 2026

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Electric Life: Utility Regulation and the Fight for Energy Democracy (Urban and Industrial Environments)
• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication Date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262051974
• ISBN 13: 9780262051972
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

How workers and customers engage utility regulation to act on climate change, energy affordability, and environmental, racial, and economic injustice.

Electric Life traces the intertwined history of Atlanta’s racialized uneven development and growing electricity use to show how electricity infrastructure shapes everyday life. Nikki Luke looks at how quotidian relationships with the electric utility catalyze intersectional organizing for energy democracy. She also investigates the legal and material construction of the investor-owned utility as a regulated monopoly and the state public service commission that regulates it.

Contemporary organizing for energy democracy questions how the utility and the systems that govern it need to change to ensure energy affordability, provide remedy and reparation for enduring environmental and energy injustice, and build a just and equitable energy transition from fossil fuels. Bridging urban, environmental, and labor studies, the author demonstrates how these demands to change the utility emerge from the tradition of civil rights, labor, and environmental organizing for fair treatment from the utility, affordable energy, protection from pollution, and good jobs.

About the Author

Nikki Luke is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Tennessee.