[I am off at 0-dark-hundred Wednesday morning to the 2023 Public Choice Society annual meetings, so below is a sadly-still-relevant essay I wrote in March 2014 to argue for lowering barriers to experimentation, technological and institutional/regulatory, in electricity. From the KP archives if you want to see
At no point does this article posit that permissionless innovation in electricity markets will result in lower base electricity costs. That's the tell. In contrast, the article is abundantly clear that producer/supplier profits can rise if they're allowed to implement bundling, additional "services", and added fee complexity. This is not real competition. We need multiple highly-motivated providers competing hard with each other to supply electricity direct to my house. The fiber internet industry is going in that direction, but it's very slow, and many major markets still only have one provider, which exposes the challenges of commodity utility supply. Electricity is not different. With internet, I'm looking for MBPS/$ - everything else, every added *service* (really just a low-quality dashboard), is irrelevant and does not differentiate providers.
At no point does this article posit that permissionless innovation in electricity markets will result in lower base electricity costs. That's the tell. In contrast, the article is abundantly clear that producer/supplier profits can rise if they're allowed to implement bundling, additional "services", and added fee complexity. This is not real competition. We need multiple highly-motivated providers competing hard with each other to supply electricity direct to my house. The fiber internet industry is going in that direction, but it's very slow, and many major markets still only have one provider, which exposes the challenges of commodity utility supply. Electricity is not different. With internet, I'm looking for MBPS/$ - everything else, every added *service* (really just a low-quality dashboard), is irrelevant and does not differentiate providers.