> it has literally zero incentive to be cheap

Do private utilities have any incentive to be cheap?

The reason we have utility regulations in the first place is because utilities are natural monopolies with literally zero incentive to be cheap. On the contrary, they are highly incentivized to push up prices as much as possible because they have their customers over a barrel.

Utilities do have incentive to be cheap as long as there are is the presence of competing offerings and the lack of collusion.

...which is unusual with many utilities, but is also pretty common with wireless carriers in much of the world.

I believe the idea is that you shouldn't have a corporation provide the utility if there's only going to be one.

"public utility" implies it's owned by the public not a profit seeking group of shareholders.

A private electric grid is a nightmare. Look at Texas. People pay more, and they get less coverage. It's worse by every metric. The conversation should revolve around, how can we fix the government so that it isn't 5 corporations in a trench coat who systematically defund public utilities and social safety nets in hopes of breaking it so they can privatize it and make billions sucking up tax payer money while doing no work. See the billions in tax funding to ATT, Google, etc... to put in fiber internet that they just pocketed the cash and did nothing.

In Texas electricity is literally less than half the price than the price in my state on average. (14c/kwh vs 34c/kwh) (I live in California)

If you want to say its worse, perhaps you should check if its actually worse first.

A big part of the reason that California average electrical price per kWh is high is that a huge portion of the cost is fixed costs, and California's efficiency push has resulted in the lowest lowest per capita electricity usage (and fourth lowest per capita energy usage) in the USA, so the fixed costs are spread over fewer kWh.

Conversely, Texas has significantly above average use per capita, spreading the fixed costs across more kWh, but still results in higher annual costs per capita, despite lower per kWh rates.

Let's also not forget the cost of the things like the campfire fire. That's a huge bill that needs to be paid and that cost is ultimately going to come out of the kwh rates.

Further, the LA fires might have also been caused by a downed line so that's going to be a fairly big cost to the power company.

> Let's also not forget the cost of the things like the campfire fire.

That's, I assume, a reference to the 2018 Camp Fire.

> That's a huge bill that needs to be paid and that cost is ultimately going to come out of the kwh rates.

The Trust established to pay PG&E liabilities for the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp Fires, which discharged PG&E's responsibility for them, receives no additional ratepayer funds after its initial funding and is in the wind-down process expecting a single final top-off payment to already approved claimants. So, no, its not a huge bill that will be paid out of future rates.