Electricity was deregulated almost everywhere around the same time (not just in the U.S. but in Europe too), and situations like Enron were the exception. By contrast, decaying public infrastructure is the rule. The NYC subway (and Amtrak and Metro North) runs slower in many cases today than a century ago, because of deteriorating track, bridges, etc. See: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/transport/2009/05/stop_th.... There is a multi-hundred billion backlog in maintenance and upgrades of water and sewer pipes. Roads and bridges are crumbling.

When the public owns the infrastructure, there is enormous political pressure to price service too cheaply, which can work in the short term but has led to the infrastructure disaster we're seeing in the U.S. now: https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org.

Plus it's much easier politicaly to get new infrastructure build than use those funds to maintain what you already have. Their are hardly any federal grants for mantaince but you want to build a 4 lane boulevard that's not going to be used much for the next 10 years here's 30 million.

> CA electricity was privatized, and we got Enron.

Texas electricity was privatized, and they got inexpensive, dependable electricity. It also hasn't held back renewable energy construction, Texas has chosen to utilize its immense wind potential for example.

California by comparison has electricity rates nearly twice that of Texas. For 2015, the Texas number was 8.64 cents per kilowatt hour (ranked 10th least expensive), while California was at 15.5 cents (ranked 9th most expensive).

Note, TX electricity is "deregulated" and the deregulation attempt learned a lot from the follies of CA's approach. They took the single company (TXU, so not really privatized per se) and broke it into the actual ones managing the infrastructure (e.g. Oncor) and limited TXUs ability to change pricing during an incubation period while other private companies sprang up.

So now TX electrical companies are just a bunch of middle men. They only compete on price and customer service, and price IIUC is basically a margin game of futures and size, not actual electricity innovation. By law, only one company can setup the lines, fix the lines, etc. Not sure how privatized that is if it's the state by another name.

I'd say the privatization or lack of between TX and CA has little to do with costs or quality. In this case, CA just had a bad company and TX a better one (or ones).