[jedberg]

This isn't a problem that can be solved by a clever entrepreneur. This is what government is for. When you have a shared resource that everyone needs, government is the best option for making sure its distribution is fair.

We already know how to solve this: make transmission owned by the government, make generation free-market. Cities do this already. The city of Santa Clara owns all the transmission, and then buys power on the open market along with generating themselves.

The result is their power costs 1/2 as much as all the surrounding cities that have PG&E.

[infecto]

I was actually going to disagree on first glance but I absolutely agree with this.

Transmission has no business edge, you will gain the best economies of scale by having the city (or larger regional) manage it.

Free-market works on the generation side because as prices change, producers can decide to build out more capacity or innovate to gain an edge. I don’t think a single monopoly construct, like the PG&Es of the world, have incentive to innovate and properly serve the market.

[xboxnolifes]

And ironically (not really), this setup is more market competitive. Instead of having transmission owned by 1 maybe 2 companies who also monopolize generation, you get a government who just buys the power as cheap as people can make it. There are better incentives on the government owned transmission than on a company owned transmission.