I get the intuition behind fully socializing it, but I wouldn’t go that far. Single-operator systems lose redundancy fast, and that’s dangerous for infrastructure.

A layered mix — county-level public utilities, some private operators, and some hybrid/municipal entities — might be closer to a resilient structure.

Not clean or elegant, but fault-tolerant.

You say this like it is a law of nature, but we can plan and build it directly if we want it. Redundancy is not something that only emerges from an indirect 4d-chess strategy of ownership mixes.

Exactly — if we want redundancy, we should plan and build it.

That’s why I offered one possible implementation as a hypothesis, not as a law of nature.

If you have a better non-ideal, real-world design in mind, I’d be interested to hear it — it makes the discussion much easier.

Good point. For example, the TVA and BPA are federal agencies that produce electricity. Clearly publicly owned utilities can be successful.

I live in a province in Canada where the electrical system is owned and operated by a crown corporation. They are mandated to maintain a very high uptime and they do through several means including redundancy. Our electrical bills are cheaper than much of the US. It certainly can be done; there are other means than competition to ensure adequate service.

It is essentially socialized. The government dictates the rates that utilities company is allowed to charge.

Who owns Edison?

The reason we're all here is because the government currently is dictating those rates in representation of the utility companies needs and not the citizens. How this is essentially socialized is beyond me; yet, I do concede that the same rules applied differently would much more likely meet that standard.

We already have an independent systems operator (ISO) to match the amount of load on the grid with the amount of generator current supplying it. I think this model could be expanded to where the state could literally own the transmission lines and equipment and use various regional contractors which would be engaged to maintain it in coordination with the ISO.

Then we have stable infrastructure where generation _and_ maintenance are open markets which may allow customer rates to no longer be controlled by a utilities commission and instead be directly computed from the actual suppliers costs plus taxes. It may even allow for more regional electric companies to form to provide better service to peculiar areas of the state.