You are correct, but only at unrealistic levels of bad. A potential competitor risks that they lower the prices after the have dug in the pipes and that is enough that the competitor is bankrupt. Even if water quality is the issue, it is easier and cheaper for the incumbent to fix the issue than for you to dig in new pipes. Only in the case where the incumbent has worn out pipes that all need to be replaced at once (unlikely - pipes last a long time and we have had good success relining pipes in many cases: leaving only a minority that need expensive replacement at any one time).

Because the bad has to be unrealistically bad before someone can compete nobody sane will.

Government granted monopolies are granted under oversight and regulation that would be extreme in any other scenario. Many of them don't even get to set prices. No discipline or market forces needed. The regulators just regulate predatory action.

In your example no one is going to dig a rival pipe because you can't just go around installing pipes under other people's roads and land. The permission to do that is granted to a single entity by the government, further reinforcing the natural monopoly. There is no situation where it is economically feasible to lay more pipe when you have no right to do that.

NEE profit margin is currently 40.37% https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NEE/nextera-energy...

From that, NEE pays 43.72% in dividends.

So we can say that 17.64% of the amount paid for energy to this company is wasted in dividends ALONE.

Just to put some numbers on the waste on the private side.

Is this a serious take? Citations from DOGE and American perception?

DOGE isn't a source so don't cite them. They just made shit up.

The American public is stupid and wrong and their perception is not useful here. They will believe the government wastes 50% of every dollar because they have been told that, even though it's just stupidly wrong.

The GAO is actually the only information you provided. They are trustworthy and happy to be critical of every administration, and they don't get enough love for their important work.

I don't know if you realize this, but 3-7% literal fraud is actually a pretty good number for a very complicated system. 15% "waste" where it's hard to even define what "waste" is is also a good number.

Visa and Mastercard accept far higher for a far simpler fraud profile.

Also you said "This guy thinks waste in government is only 15%" and then the only data you provided has to wave many hands to get up to 13-20%. What the hell man?

It's unfortunate, for sure. Luckily, clean tech manufacturing and deployment will eventually outpace the ability to capture energy for returns [1] [2]. China currently has enough solar PV manufacturing capacity for double current global demand, and battery manufacturing capacity is catching up. Prices will keep coming down, and eventually everyone who wants to go off the grid and has space for batteries and solar should be able to.

Just like China is cramming down legacy auto export TAM through their EV exports (BYD has surpassed Ford in international sales as of this year, as is constrained by not having enough marine vessels to export more), solar and batteries will come for investor owned utilities as well.

[1] https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...

[2] https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/ex...