Utilities celebrate when they can service an address for less than a grand in their public filings. For coaxial TV service the cable company is often required to cover the first $4200 in build out costs to a given address here in the USA.

Running parallel infrastructure of the same type is very expensive and damages the cost model of both providers, as they are forever fighting for market share.

Open access to shared infrastructure can work for some types of infrastructure like internet, but water, sewer, gas and electric where real time need needs to always be met with quality supply otherwise the infrastructure is damaged permanently makes it impractical to have multiple operators pushing water, gas, or electrons into a shared grid.

Reseller models like what Texas has developed disintermediate the customer from their actual electric provider. It's just a legal fiction effectively.

Yes, and they should be treated as such - regulated according good policies.

Reseller models like what Texas has developed disintermediate the customer from their actual electric provider. It's just a legal fiction effectively.

Indeed, moreover, the Texas system got "interesting" in a not-good way during the huge blackout a couple years ago when charges jumped to a $1000+/hour for retail customers gambling on the raw market rate systems, (in my memory of the events).

I don't the legal fiction helps anyone here but well connected scammers (remember Enron?).

Playing the lottery - small downside, huge (albeit improbable) upside. Buying wholesale power unhedged - small upside, huge downside, and not all that unlikely - in the last few years here, we’ve had several hundred year storms.

I joke, but only somewhat. This whole model is pretty clearly at least a bit broken. I don’t believe for a second that electricity cost $1k/kWh in any way that truly makes sense. Perhaps marginal electricity cost that much, but that’s a very different statement.

I wonder whether there is good research on market design for goods like electricity that are:

- Generated at a rate that is only weakly dependent on demand. (But may have expensive sources that will only operate when it’s economical to do so.)

- Are generated by very capital-intensive plants.

- Are mostly not storable. Taking delivery of electricity now and reselling later is expensive.

- Are needed by users in a mostly inelastic manner.

Cloud computing resources are similar. The “spot” electricity and cloud compute markets are a bit odd. They don’t work at all like spot commodities, many of which can be put in warehouses.

Marginal electricity is what people use at the margin.

There's a futures market for that. As a retail customer, you probably wouldn't want to use it directly. But companies can offer that as a service for you, and give you a long running contract that they hedge via the futures market.

To the retail customer that looks pretty much like a regular old contract, but with lighter regulation on prices on the backend.

Btw, my comment was meant in the sense that from the point of view of the market, one individual household's electricity consumption wouldn't move prices too much. Thus it's at the margin.

Plenty.

E.g. a well argued defense of the current energy-only marginal pricing model: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4087528

Or something different?: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tej.2019.02.010