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.