[mikepurvis]

> Imagine if the power company said "Pay $10 extra a month, and we'll make sure that in an adverse event, your bill for your normally consumed 1000 kWh would be $1000".

Alternatively, imagine if critical services like this were managed directly by the state, so that the cost of these adverse things was absorbed into the tax base rather than privatized by insurance companies (which eventually go bust and end up bailed out by the state anyway).

[WaylonKenning]

I live in Ontario at the moment, which is a very regulated power market. I can only buy from one retailer. They in turn get charged a singular price from the generator. The government can mandate what that price is, which is lower at the moment because of Covid.

That stuff is great for me as a consumer. But selling power below the cost of production seems like a weird economic model. And you still pay for these reductions somehow. In Ontario, the government mandates a rebate (https://www.torontohydro.com/for-home/ontario-electricity-re...). But who pays for that rebate? The taxpayers! So you get a discount on your power, paid for from your income!

I'm not an 'all-in free market' guy. I do think regulation is required to constrain the free market to operate within certain parameters. But I also don't agree that all 'critical services' should be managed directly by the state. I remember that the state used to run the Telephone network in NZ, and it would take 6 weeks to get a new phone line. Why? Because there's a process, there's a queue, and there's no competition, so what else will you do? Stuff like that is a crappy experience.

[mikepurvis]

Yup, I'm in Ontario too. Fundamentally the issue is that electricity is an essential service, much of the demand is inelastic, and most of the costs are fixed. This is why you have embarrassing situations like having to raise rates to cover those fixed costs because everyone did too good a job of conserving [1].

But it's also why this kind of service is a good fit for a government monopoly. And if that means that some of the mostly-fixed-costs end up covered by the general tax base, that's fine with me: the general tax base is taken on a progressive model where the wealthy pay more into it, and there isn't really a good way to make the wealthy pay a different rate for power (yes, I'm on the upper end of middle class, and I absolutely deserve to pay more for these things than someone else who is just scraping by— not just more because I use more, but also more on a per-kWh basis).

[1]: https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/demand-s...

[cycomanic]

Well if we talk about the phone market. There's lots of stories about people trying to cancel their phone contract in the German deregulated market and the companies just continuing to charge or not freeing up the line for the customer to change to a competitor. There is a famous case where a debt collector went into the the central office of Telekom (parent of t-mobile) and took a printer, because they were not paying back overcharged money. Just to say that things aren't all rosy in deregulated phone land either.

[adamc]

Imagine if we took those managing the power companies out and shot them. That is the mood of many in Texas.