If the residents of Tahoe owned their electricity provider, we wouldn't be having this problem. This was the norm up utnil the late 20th century and then we started selling off all the utilities for "efficiency". These public-private "partnerships" (or just straight privatization with a regulated industry) allow investors to keep profits while pushing losses onto the public.

Private equity is getting into utilities because it's a captive market, the service is highly inelastic and the owners are generally allowed to push all capex onto customer bills without recourse.

So your "interesting problem" is simply not seeing this as what it is: profit extraction.

The Tahoe area has very strong NIMBYism regulations making it effectively impossible to build power plants in the area.

It's not just a Liberty Utilities problem. Other nearby utilities, like TDPUD are in the same boat, only buying electricity and not generating it, and they are publicly owned.

Don’t start throwing private equity as another scape goat. This is more of a regulatory gap than anything. They pay CPUC rates but NV is effectively their grid. This is definitely in the wheelhouse of Liberty and Lake Tahoe residents should have been figuring out the issue.