From what I heard there are reasons for both. Industrial electrical users are required to engage in their own impedience matching, demand regularion and other s

From what I heard there are reasons for both. Industrial electrical users are required to engage in their own impedience matching, demand regularion and other such contractual issues in addition to the ammount of other expenses for say 100MW to N consumer homes being greater than one connection to a widget factory. It isn't some mustache twirling plot to make the consumer pay more while some abstract industrial fat cat pays more or anything - real economics are at play. The prevailing obvious alternative to competitive pricing that tries to roll in other expenses would be direct generation by industrial scales running their own fossil fuel turbines or direct thermal alternatives. Which result in worse performance at scale from everyone mid-sized and up rolling their own separate systems and worse pollution control as instead of having four great smokestacks to put scrubbers on and regulate there are now four thousand small ones. Economies of scale have been here for centuries. Aluminum smelters and steel plants while they may use a lot of power also cannot be just neglected and cut off mid-cycle without wasting a very large batch slag in a way that is very expensive to clean up.