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Comment by thelastgallon | Hacker News Reader

The best thing to do is for the city to own both fiber and electricity, and let providers compete for both. With Virtual Power Plants, the grid can be reimagined and it will happen faster if competing ideas/companies battle it out in the marketplace for consumers.

Second best is for electric utility to offer fiber, like EPB of Chattanooga, TN.

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I would not want PG&E (northern CA power company) in charge of any more infrastructure in California. They already have shown incompetence by shifting maintenance funds into bonuses instead of actual infrastructure maintenance.

Thats why the city should own lines. PG&E needs competition. There was a recent post, some small utilities are providing electricity a lot cheaper than PG&E.

That assumes cities are competent. The coop that provides power and fiber where my cabin is in Plumas County (far north eastern CA) is great. They even have redundant electrical feeds PG&E as well as from Nevada.

That said, after many years of living in Santa Cruz, CA - there is no way in heck the city here could manage any of that competently.

The trick is to make the power companies non-profits: split the network part from the generation&selling part, and give it proper oversight. It's what Europe has been doing for decades.

> The best thing to do is for the city to own both fiber and electricity, and let providers compete for both.

Something similar is the case in the European Union, as the electricity network is usually a different company than the electricity providers. The network is often owned by some municipal company and charges customers only for the transport of energy over the network. For the energy itself customers can choose from dozens of different providers, some of them generate their own electricity, others just buy and resell electricity on the market.

There are millions who don't live in a city.

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