Politicians lack the will to push for public utilities. That requires asking voters to go along with the government taking on financing, planning, operations, customer service, and being the bad guys who raise prices. It's easier to point to companies as the bad guys who raised electric rates, likely sparked a wildfire, or are taking so long to fix an outage.

▲

AnthonyMouse 3 days ago | parent [-]

The problem is this is set up as a dichotomy. Either you have privately owned infrastructure (and then a private monopoly), or make the utility company a government entity which then becomes an unaccountable bureaucracy captured by public sector unions etc.

Whereas the better thing to do is have the government own the physical plant (utility poles and conduits etc.) and then hire private contractors -- large numbers of small entities, not small numbers of large entities -- to do all the actual work of operating and maintaining it.

Make each contracted role simple and fungible so that none of them are too big to fail and they're all in competition with each other.

You don't want a public monopoly. You don't want a private monopoly. But who says those are the only options?

▲

Spooky23 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

In New York, the cheapest utilities by far are public utilities owned by municipal governments. Same in Massachusetts — I saved a fortune dropping some stuff in Holyoke.

Generation is pretty low intensity from an employee standpoint. I know you’re brainwashed to hate unions, but they have little to do with it.

▲

AnthonyMouse a day ago | parent | next [-]

Generation is the thing where you don't even need the government to own the infrastructure. Just don't prevent anyone who wants to from building a power plant and then have the grid buy electricity from whoever supplies it at the lowest price.

It's the transmission and distribution which are the "natural monopoly" -- the government should own the utility poles -- but that's also a thing where there is a non-trivial amount of labor involved for tree trimming and storm damage etc.

▲

Panzer04 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Cheapest to the consumer, maybe? What's the actual financial standing of said companies? Plenty of government-owned utilities require lots of propping to cover their losses.

	▲	Spooky23 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The three I’m familiar with are cash cows. Electricity is regulated and the rates have to be supported by the business model. The small operators are mostly vertically integrated in a small area, so they can deal with the capital buildouts and aren’t subject to as many swings in commodity cost. They often even own the utility rights of way, generating additional income and avoiding property taxes. It takes alot of union workers and pensions to make up for the pay of one private CEO.

▲

supertrope 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

To add an anecdote my city has a publicly owned electric utility. Most of the surrounding metropolitan area is served by an investor owned utility. My city has noticeably fewer outages than nearby areas. Although that might be because this city has buried utilities and was built later but this trend of fewer outages includes the main drag that was built in the 1800s. The private utility has raised bills much faster than the public utility. Both utilities face the same underlying cost push factors of labor costs, materials, and rising wholesale prices. The private utility announced a record quadrupling of quarterly earnings to 1.2B (year over year).

The public utility employs linemen. They don’t contract out operations.