Pacific Gas and Electric was built by engineers, who had a mandate to transfer huge amounts of power across very large and difficult terrain. When the management in the 1950s post-WWII society had this mandate, they executed amazing feats of engineering with very reliable outcomes. Much later, the very stable and profitable grid attracted a new kind of management, those interested in money. New kind of cost-cutting around maintenance, new kinds of labor relations involving non-union subcontractors, and a lot of advanced financial engineering involving using money to make money, took over from the previous internal culture. This was executed carefully and with a lot of control, and was successful, until the de-regulation of the electricity markets and then Enron.

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.

> And do those countries have large and rapidly growing demand? A free market is the only reliable way to respond effectively to changing demand signals. Economic central planning always fails over the long term.

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.

> Economic central planning always fails over the long term.

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.