My public utility is bad at its job because it has literally zero incentive to be cheap, and thus my utilities are expensive
Do private utilities have any incentive to be cheap?
The reason we have utility regulations in the first place is because utilities are natural monopolies with literally zero incentive to be cheap. On the contrary, they are highly incentivized to push up prices as much as possible because they have their customers over a barrel.
...which is unusual with many utilities, but is also pretty common with wireless carriers in much of the world.
"public utility" implies it's owned by the public not a profit seeking group of shareholders.
If you want to say its worse, perhaps you should check if its actually worse first.
Conversely, Texas has significantly above average use per capita, spreading the fixed costs across more kWh, but still results in higher annual costs per capita, despite lower per kWh rates.
Further, the LA fires might have also been caused by a downed line so that's going to be a fairly big cost to the power company.
That's, I assume, a reference to the 2018 Camp Fire.
> That's a huge bill that needs to be paid and that cost is ultimately going to come out of the kwh rates.
The Trust established to pay PG&E liabilities for the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp Fires, which discharged PG&E's responsibility for them, receives no additional ratepayer funds after its initial funding and is in the wind-down process expecting a single final top-off payment to already approved claimants. So, no, its not a huge bill that will be paid out of future rates.