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Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

Deceptive [original] headline ["Amazon Isn’t Paying Its Electric Bills. You Might Be "]: Amazon is surely paying all the bills it negotiated.

Economically-questionable conclusions: although individual secretive utilities might on occasion make dumb deals, they'll charge households whatever the market & regulators will allow, and then charge Amazon whatever the market & regulators allow.

And utilities would like Amazon as a customer because of the efficiencies of scale it'd provide. They'd not want Amazon at-a-loss, that then requires making other customers to pay more – and if utilities already had the market-power or case-to-regulators to charge others more, they'd already be doing it.

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  Economically-questionable conclusions: although individual secretive utilities might on occasion make dumb deals,
  they'll charge households whatever the market & regulators will allow, 
  and then charge Amazon whatever the market & regulators allow.

Because most utilities are monopolies that are allowed by regulators I'm not sure that the market's invisible hand has that much of an impact is this particular situation. The consumers who need electricity for their homes don't have much choice here.

Edit: formatting

most utilities are monopolies

That's interesting. In Norway and UK, etc., You can buy your electricity from any operator you like. The only monopoly is the power cable. So I get two bills, one for energy and the other for the transport of it.

> The only monopoly is the power cable.

That there, is enough, though. It's not as if you could choose not to pay for that portion and pay only for the energy.

As such, the rate could go up without bound. (Well, bounded by competition from off-grid systems that are 2-6x as expensive in the long run and have a huge up-front cost).

OK, we've replaced the title with the article's subtitle, which is more specific.

The subhead is less sensationally figurative, but still has factual problems: this "one customer's discounts necessarily push rates up for others" is not strongly supported by the article, or by economic reasoning. (Often scale can drive everyone's rates down: that's the whole mechanism of utility monopolies!) And it's certainly not supported in the inflammatory "everyone else" formulation.

And even in the particular leading anecdote of the article, it's not so much Amazon's rates that have caused a regulator to approve a new assessment on other customers - it's neighbors' demands for more-expensive underground transmission lines. Even if Amazon received no discounts, the lines would still be needed, and the regulator would allow this sort of capital outlay to be passed-through to ratepayers.

If you or anyone can suggest a better title—i.e. one which is accurate, neutral, and uses representative language from the article—we'll happily change it again.

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