Deregulation isn't about improving consumer outcomes, it's about improving profits. Expecting it to result in lower cost per kWh is a losing game.
The only person waving evidence around in this thread demonstrates that Texas has substantially lower electricity prices than the US average. And the article argues that there are edge cases where the market design could be improved. But I am well aware that the US has a range of regulatory strategies around power and I'm sure people have done detailed, exhaustive comparisons that are of high quality on the effects and outcomes of different regulatory approaches. Surely there are mountains of evidence that could be pointed to here.
Is it to much to ask that the opinions are supported by evidence? Electricity outcomes aren't that complex. The important variables are price, reliability, safety and pollution if you like.
Texas having a power crisis recently just isn't that big a deal for arguing about regulation vs deregulation on either side of the fence. Highly regulated systems also have crisises, regulators aren't perfect and nobody claims they are.
You need to provide evidence for the claims that the free market improves things, not the other way.
If the plan is to decide what is good and bad by innuendo that is a lousy plan and we can all probably agree on that point. This is the perfect opportunity to debate using facts and evidence rather than all sitting in a circle and observing that none of us have any. These whingers should leave some space for people who intend to be guided by facts.
> Is it to much to ask that the opinions are supported by evidence?
Economy is not a field i'm familiar with so i can't unfortunately provide evidence, but it always appeared to me that with some notable exceptions, regulations protecting consumers from corporations had great effects: lower prices, better quality, better customer service...
Half the articles i read about the USA seem to be about medication prices rising twofold every few years despite being well-studied/produced for decades (like insulin), or ISPs injecting their own advertisement or blocking services from competitors or making lawsuits against municipal ISPs, or people raising debt just for having a lawyer or receiving an education, etc.
There's a lot i hate about France (where i reside), but i'm certainly glad we have "medicare for all" through a national insurance (sécurité sociale), net-neutrality regulations, and free legal defense and education. Although as some would point out, the french governments of the past 30 years or so have been hard at work to dismantle all that.
Competition does not advance humanity. Cooperation is what brought humanity so far (see also: Kropotkin, Graeber, etc). Competition does not reduce costs, except occasionally when a mogul wants to capture the market (like free.fr did when they offered 30€/mo unmetered xDSL back in the early 2000's, which they don't do anymore now that they've become big enough to assert their position).
Don't get me wrong, i'm not advertising for State monopoly. On the contrary, i laud autonomous projects and infrastructure and i'm very critical that in France it's illegal to even build your own house for private usage (unless you follow very strict regulations) or to produce your own electricity (unless you sell it back to EDF). I just don't think that what most people refer to as a deregulated "free market" (based on money and private property) has better outcomes except for the 1% who own everything.
Famous anecdote in french FLOSS circles: when the telecoms regulator (ARCEP) began the process to "open competition" for the ISP market, there were hundreds of ISPs across France and the dozens of representatives couldn't fit in a room at ARCEP offices. A few years later than that, there were only 5-10 represented operators left. Now you can count them on one hand, and the ARCEP people seem happy/relieved about that, as if they'd done their job implementing "competition" by reducing the number of competitors.
"Free markets" rhetoric is a catchy slogan for might makes right. No contracts, no rule of law, no fair and impartial arbitrators, no opportunity for recourse (tort). So not a market.
Only if one ignores consequences (externalities).
System failures leading to fatalities, casualties, losses incurred by other businesses, parents staying home with kids because schools closed, customers getting stiffed with emergency pricing, retail rush on generators and propane, etc.
Your basic Freedom Markets™ scenario of using disaster (capitalism) to bulk transfer wealth from customers and tax payers to gate keeping elites.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
> ...just isn't that big a deal for arguing about regulation vs deregulation on either side of the fence.
What about accountability? Consequences?
Where in your thesis are victims able to be made whole?
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Markets have rules. That's what makes them markets. No rules, no markets. Then it's just an extortion racket, no matter how much lipstick you put on that pig.
Regulators always have a bias towards rate reduction. Once the deregulation movement set in, power generation became a fat hog ready to be exploited. In some cases, investors even got to use tax free municipal borrowing facilities.
So much in the energy literature looks like a clock that stopped. For instance you still see cost estimates of advanced combustion systems from the 1970s that have been carried into the future without adjusting for inflation and changes in technology.
People still compare nuclear power to coal but they quit building coal plants circa 1980 for the same reason they quit building nuclear plants -- the capital cost of the steam turbine is an order of magnitude more than a gas turbine, so even if you get the heat for free a current generation coal or nuclear plant is going to struggle to compete against the power plants we've been building since the 1980s.
You can see a graph of coal capacity added by year here: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30812
The US built coal plants in the 1990s and even in the 2010s. These last ones started construction in roughly the years 2003-2008, when US natural gas prices were elevated and (many thought) due to go up even more:
https://www.macrotrends.net/2478/natural-gas-prices-historic...
Coal's brief renaissance was halted by a triple-whammy of lower gas costs (from shale), lower wind costs, and lower solar costs. It's soon to face another whammy: falling grid scale battery costs. I don't think that the continental US will ever build another coal generating station. But that happened more recently than 1980.
You already have all the customers you're going to get
I think it's kind of funny that some people think that "deregulated" markets are somehow magically efficient or competitive. Collusion and monopoly are inherently higher profit margin businesses and so incentivized by unregulated markets. Monopolies can be supply, transport, territorial, or temporal, but all optimize ROI.
Note that regulatory capture is yet another method of stifling competition and creating monopoly pricing power.