The Rural Electrification Model is the way to go, introduced during the FDR New Deal era. It consisted of municipal-scale networks (also applicable to fiber optic networks).

https://www.investopedia.com/rural-electrification-act-51191...

> "At first, the plan was to give these loans to companies in order to help them build electricity infrastructure in rural areas—a plan that proved too costly. So instead, lawmakers chose a type of organization well known to farmers: the cooperative, or co-op. The idea was that if farmers could organize themselves into co-ops, the REA could distribute loans to them at very low interest rates—between 2% and 3%, depending on their state—to build electricity infrastructure."

Note that a key reason for its success was that they didn't use anything like a modern federal contracting program, i.e. paying private companies, but instead worked directly with rural co-ops (just extend that to towns and cities).

Of course, this would mean taking over the transmission infrastructure from the investor-owned utilities in California.