The US has horrifying amounts of corruption in utility regulatory bodies. Often times these are elected positions, but get little attention, and so the utilitie

The US has horrifying amounts of corruption in utility regulatory bodies. Often times these are elected positions, but get little attention, and so the utilities can essentially buy themselves seats. One particularly bad example is in Arizona: https://www.degreespod.com/episodes/episode-09 https://www.degreespod.com/episodes/episode-09 There is also a lot of malfeasance at the legislative level. In Ohio, for just a few million dollars, utilities bought some very profitable legislation: https://www.cincinnati.com/in-depth/news/politics/2021/06/03/ohio-corruption-house-bill-6-bribery-timeline-larry-householder/5248218001/ https://www.cincinnati.com/in-depth/news/politics/2021/06/03... These are some of the extreme examples, but in general these regulatory bodies are poorly supervised and run by cronies of the utilities. And in California, even if the regulators are not corrupt, they are so incompetent that they may as well be bought off. PG&E has some of the highest costs for transmission and distribution of electricity in the country, yet transmission still causes fires and deaths. And it wasn't that long ago that they killed families in their homes with a gas line explosion.