Not only are food coops a pretty big deal in Austin, but when I lived in Austin even the electricity company that I got my power from was a coop (https://www.pec.coop/) and if the coop made too much money it redistributed the profits back out as credits to member accounts. I generally ended up with one out of twelve months effectively being free because of profit credits being redistributed back out to my account.
The whole culture of coops and nonprofit service organizations is something I really miss about Austin now that I no longer live there.
Non profits, you can get a lot of people arguing about how to best fulfill the intents of the non-profit. In that situation, whoever argues the most persuasively or loudly wins, and it's the customers that suffer.
This is great and all, but wouldn't that money be more effectively utilized maintaining or upgrading the grid or investing in renewable energy? Seems like the co-op model never really invests in progress.
For now. I generally prefer for-profit approaches because their motivations are far more transparent. They want to make money for the investors.
Non-profits exist to serve the wishes of the donors, which may be opaque. For instance, the Ride Austin investors might suddenly decide that they really want to focus on transportation to/from low income areas or art festivals. That would degrade service, and there would be no accountability to the customer in that regard.