Pacific Gas and Electric was built by engineers, who had a mandate to transfer huge amounts of power across very large and difficult terrain. When the management in the 1950s post-WWII society had this mandate, they executed amazing feats of engineering with very reliable outcomes. Much later, the very stable and profitable grid attracted a new kind of management, those interested in money. New kind of cost-cutting around maintenance, new kinds of labor relations involving non-union subcontractors, and a lot of advanced financial engineering involving using money to make money, took over from the previous internal culture. This was executed carefully and with a lot of control, and was successful, until the de-regulation of the electricity markets and then Enron.
Within a very short time frame, the previously iron-clad engineering of 1950s PG&E was defeated and failed, under new economic regulation. Read a couple of books about it, there are many.
What was discovered in the emergency proceedings that occurred in California during the California power grid crisis orchestrated by Enron and others, was that the upper management of PG&E had found legal loopholes in their very strict oversight, and were using dubiously declared shell companies to purchase power generating assets across the entire USA. Once those assets were purchased, and out of sight of regulators, more financial engineering took place. But the entire situation was discovered during the blackout hearings.
source: an attorney who worked for Sacramento directly involved in those hearings.
A "free market" is an attractive statement to some, politically, but we are very far down the road already for some of those experiments.
