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Comment by lockhouse | Hacker News Reader

I think energy cooperatives serve as a good model for utilities. Not a private for profit company sacrificing safety for profits, but also not a wasteful inefficient government entity.

We had an energy cooperative that serviced our previous house and the quality of service was excellent. Power was restored quickly after storms, customer service was friendly, and best of all, because everyone was a "member" instead of a customer, we got a check back every year with any excess profits that they made.

Anecdotal of course, but our current energy supplier is government run and compared to the cooperative it is much more expensive, customer service is worse, and outages tend to be longer.

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I like co-ops in general but I think they have a fairly low ceiling of effectiveness and efficiency. Once they cover too much territory or have too many members they tend to lose their way a little.

I like our crown corporation model here in Canada for huge infrastructure that has to serve millions of citizens across millions of sq km. Crown corps are fully owned by the relevant legislature, created by a specific act, but are shielded from the daily management that government ministries are subject to. They can side step the public servant salary restrictions that often prevent hiring domain exert public servants, but the crown corp remains fully accountable to cabinet and any profits are returned to citizens. It’s a good mixture of the best benefits of public ownership and private enterprise that usually minimizes the worst downsides of both. Most provinces have their electricity generator and provider as a crown corp, but cities often have their own corporation that handles residential grid connections and billing. Certainly not perfect, but it’s been a generally successful model and it’s fairly rare for a crown corporation to need rescuing.

Since Canada is so vast we have a natural risk of monopoly or duopoly for anything involving huge infrastructure buildout like the energy grid or telecommunications. We didn’t learn our lesson well enough with the grid and are really suffering from not having provincial crown corps handling cell networks and internet connectivity.

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