The overall effect of this game was that more astute consumers, who tended to switch to the lower-cost providers, were ultimately subsidised by the less-astute consumers who stuck with the traditional players. Or to put it another way, the rich were subsidised by the poor.
I agree with most of what you've said but I don't agree that this conclusion follows. If anything when I was less well off I was far more inclined to put up with the hassle of changing providers every few months to minimise the costs than I am now.
I do think there were some efficiencies generated, it's just hard to figure out if a nationalised entity would have gotten there eventually. The online only account management for example probably saves a bunch over call centre staff and sending people around to read the meter.
Then the system is operating as it was designed to. This is the coercive law of competition in action. And regulation won’t help in the end. Ultimately, without an overarching ideological project beyond capital accumulation, the motivation to accumulate wealth dissolves all social bonds that enforce trustworthiness, so regulation is doomed to fail due to bribery and petty corruption.
We don't make murder legal because it still happens, and the existence of corruption doesn't make regulation a bad idea - it means we need to clamp down on corruption.
White collar crime has good PR representation, and that needs to stop.
The cooperative was performing poor profit-wise while middle management lined their pockets. If it was not a cooperative, their share price would have been in the gutter, and someone would have bought up enough shares for cheap to fire the leadership and replace it with people who are competent, and then benefited from the increasing share price of having the company ran competently.
If you are a member of the co-op, sure. Not everyone who trades with a co-op is a member. If you are a shareholder, in a company, most likely you have votes, as I think less than 10% of companies have different share classes with unequal voting rights, and of those most still have some voting rights. So in both cases (with limited exception), shareholders have voting rights. So there is no difference here, in fact all of the things you listed is valid for more traditional businesses.
The main difference, at least for the cooperative I worked for, was that no individual can have more than 1 share, where as in other incorporation models individuals can have more than 1 share. This is advantageous as one individual can expend resources to buy shares, then use the control granted by those shares to improve efficiency and the value of the shares they acquired, and everyone who is a shareholder benefits from this. No similar mechanism exists in a co-operative.
Maybe, with a cooperative, on a small scale, you can lobby enough people to effect change, but it takes a lot of time, and usually the people with time to fiddle with the politics of a co-operative probably should have as little as possible say in how it is run as they likely have nothing more productive to do.
I do vote in some co-operatives, I even vote in the co-operative I worked for, I look at the candidates, and I can clearly tell that there is no way they will change anything, never mind do something as drastic as replace the inept leadership. I could of course expend lots of time to try and convince them, but this is a massive gamble.
If I see a company is ran poorly, and I have money to buy enough shares to change it, the gamble is a lot smaller. I know it takes X resources to aquire Y% of control.
When wholesale energy prices spiked last year, followed by a cap being applied to the prices that they could charge, they weren't hedged and several ended up going bankrupt.
But those more efficiently discovered "natural" prices may be higher or lower than the prices previously chosen by the public committee. It's possible that the committee was setting artificially low prices subsidized by the public purse, and it's possible they were setting them higher than necessary. Either way, it could just be an accident - that they tried as hard and in as good faith as possible to pick the right prices, but just didn't have all the information or didn't model it exactly right - or it could be that they were responding to political pressure, choosing low subsidized prices because it's popular with voters, or choosing high prices because it's popular with lobbyists from utilities.
Markets certainly come with their own trade offs, and they certainly don't do price discovery perfectly either, but where they do have the advantage (in my view) is in spreading out the information-gathering, modeling, and incentive-following responsibilities across all the market participants, rather than concentrating them in a public committee that is inevitably a small group.
But this is really just the generic age-old argument between central planning and market structures. I tend to find market structures more appealing because I can contribute my ideas and my work into them as an employee or entrepreneur, whereas I'll almost certainly never be a central planner. But it's not a panacea by any means. There is a good reason we keep penduluming between more centrally planned solutions and more market based solutions in different areas; there are real trade offs between them and it's never obvious what the right balance is.
It was advertised as being able to offer lower prices to the consumer through competition, but all it has done is provided more ways for private companies to extract money from the general population.
Previously electricity prices were overseen by the government, and I don't really understand how a private company could do that any cheaper. There was already a market for the spot price that electricity was sold at by producers, so all the entity you bought it from had to do was balance the books. Any excess would have been put towards the balance for the next period, but now it goes to the owners of the company.