Power should be a public utility, just like water and sewage.
It's not the only reliable way.
Also the free market has a bad habit of settling on "most profitable" (in the short-medium term) configurations by sacrificing resiliency.
So do businesses - capitalism has business failure built in and expected. Private industry in energy has failed the public dramatically at times. Economic planning works in many respects - lots of places do fine with roads, energy, healthcare, water, gas, other transport infra (airports, subways, etc.).
The question is, which tool does what well, and how do we apply them? Private industry is good for rapid innovation and development, and for keeping things off the public ledger - smartphones, etc. It isn't good when failure isn't an option, such as police, water, ... look at hospitals, for a current example.
> central planning
These are bogey scare words - what is central about it? It's not a 5 year plan for the entire economy of the entire country.
Within a very short time frame, the previously iron-clad engineering of 1950s PG&E was defeated and failed, under new economic regulation. Read a couple of books about it, there are many.
What was discovered in the emergency proceedings that occurred in California during the California power grid crisis orchestrated by Enron and others, was that the upper management of PG&E had found legal loopholes in their very strict oversight, and were using dubiously declared shell companies to purchase power generating assets across the entire USA. Once those assets were purchased, and out of sight of regulators, more financial engineering took place. But the entire situation was discovered during the blackout hearings.
source: an attorney who worked for Sacramento directly involved in those hearings.
A "free market" is an attractive statement to some, politically, but we are very far down the road already for some of those experiments.
Personally, I wouldn’t trust my city or county to operate a power plant and transmission lines. I’m happy that power is regulated by my state as a natural monopoly.
Part of the inspiration for why SF is trying to kick out PGE and have municipal power.
As for SF, there is no real sense in which they are trying to kick out PG&E. While there is and always has been a vocal group of SF residents who want a free pony, when it comes down to paying the bills SF has voted in 12 separate elections to not establish a municipal utility. They have a demonstrated history of failure to invest in their own utilities stretching back 100 years.
I don’t know the true distribution, but I’d wager the vast majority of the US is served by either a corporation or some non-government organization.
Now I know and it’s 1/7 or about 15% of Americans have government or community owned power. [0]
Public infrastructure shouldn't be private. Imagine the nightmare of privately owned roads and highways.
> In the US, power is a public utility.
A city owned utility is both a public utiliy because it offers a utility service to the public and a public utility because it is municipally owned.
> And regulated as such.
I expect Burbank W&P is regulated by the CPUC, same as other power utilities that operate in California.
> The providers can be private though and depends a lot on the location.
Many providers are private; this one isn't, and it depends on the location.
> Personally, I wouldn’t trust my city or county to operate a power plant and transmission lines. I’m happy that power is regulated by my state as a natural monopoly.
This is, like prepend's opinion, man. I assume they are truthfully expressing their trust and happiness. Even if they lived within the service area of Burbank W&P or another municipal power utility, they might not trust it.
As to power being a natural monopoly, it's hard to tell exactly given that it exists in a highly regulated market; but I don't know of any US markets where there is a choice for electrical distribution. You get the utility that serves your property, or you get to pay them to build their network to serve your property, or you get no utility power (and in some locations, no certiticate of occupancy). I'm sure there's some exceptions such as a lot that stradles the service areas or a lot with a high availability use that requirea feeds from multiple substations and it makes more sense to wire to a substation from a neighboring utility. And there's the legacy DC power networks in some old cities. But generally, there's no overbuilding of competing distribution lines; unlike say telecom where many areas have at least two of copper telephone, copper coax cable, and fiber telecom; and often several vendors if you're willing to pay commercial rates for cabling.