4 ms·

Why is this? Is there no competition?

weaksauce 6y ago
they are geographical monopolies.
jellicle 6y ago
California deregulated electricity and in the absence of regulations, electricity providers discovered that they could collude in reducing capacity until prices went nice and high, and make continuous windfall profits from then forward.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > California deregulated electricity "Deregulated" is something of a misnomer here. They removed restrictions on prices and collusion, but did not remove the state-enforced monopolies that different electric providers have in different areas of the state. So they combined the worst aspects of deregulation with the worst aspects of regulation.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  The source of that problem was the price for consumers was fixed by the government, while the utility was obliged to pay whatever the wholesale price was.
- coredog64 6y ago
  Part of this was that CA’s “deregulation” outlawed long term pricing in favor of spot pricing. So it created a situation where providers could “discover” that they needed to take a plant down for maintenance at peak, only to “accidentally” raise the price of electricity. AIUI, long term contracts were seen as opaque, whereas spot pricing wasn’t.
deleted 6y ago
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BurningFrog 6y ago
California is rich enough to afford incompetent governance :)
jariel 6y ago
The state has no incentive to give you something for free that used to cost a lot. Why would they do it? Votes? The 'carriage' fee, ie the fee used to transport the electricity will grow quite a lot as the entity in charge of that finds reason to charge that much more and gov. will find reasons to tax. There's the cost of electricity - but also distributors and government in that equation. If the cost of making parts for the Google Phone were $1, and there were only 1 type of phone in the US and everyone had to have one ... would Google drop the price of the phone? Probably not. They would capture more surpluses. This will be the same everywhere. If electricity were purchased at 'independent stations' etc it would be another story entirely. As energy got cheaper, power usage would increase, and efficiency of households would go down.

they are geographical monopolies.

California deregulated electricity and in the absence of regulations, electricity providers discovered that they could collude in reducing capacity until prices went nice and high, and make continuous windfall profits from then forward.

pdonis 6y ago
> California deregulated electricity "Deregulated" is something of a misnomer here. They removed restrictions on prices and collusion, but did not remove the state-enforced monopolies that different electric providers have in different areas of the state. So they combined the worst aspects of deregulation with the worst aspects of regulation.
WalterBright 6y ago
The source of that problem was the price for consumers was fixed by the government, while the utility was obliged to pay whatever the wholesale price was.
coredog64 6y ago
Part of this was that CA’s “deregulation” outlawed long term pricing in favor of spot pricing. So it created a situation where providers could “discover” that they needed to take a plant down for maintenance at peak, only to “accidentally” raise the price of electricity. AIUI, long term contracts were seen as opaque, whereas spot pricing wasn’t.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

BurningFrog 6y ago

California is rich enough to afford incompetent governance :)

jariel 6y ago

The state has no incentive to give you something for free that used to cost a lot. Why would they do it? Votes? The 'carriage' fee, ie the fee used to transport the electricity will grow quite a lot as the entity in charge of that finds reason to charge that much more and gov. will find reasons to tax. There's the cost of electricity - but also distributors and government in that equation. If the cost of making parts for the Google Phone were $1, and there were only 1 type of phone in the US and everyone had to have one ... would Google drop the price of the phone? Probably not. They would capture more surpluses. This will be the same everywhere. If electricity were purchased at 'independent stations' etc it would be another story entirely. As energy got cheaper, power usage would increase, and efficiency of households would go down.