I wonder at what point California will just nationalize their grid/energy infrastructure. These “markets” always end up as some private monopoly with all the corresponding terrible incentives around upgrades and maintenance. If it was actually controlled by the state, it could be mandated to build out renewable-centered, decentralized systems as well.
Well, in order to nationalize their power they would first need to be a nation. To be honest I don't know why one giant utility for an entire state is a desirable thing. In most places I've lived in, each community runs their own utility company. I've had cooperatives, city owned utilities, and private utilities. The best experience by far was the co-op. Since the customers owned the utility, we would get the profits back as credits on our bills usually during the middle of summer when power usage is highest in Florida.
>in order to nationalize their power they would first need to be a nation
A nation is a social construct that California could certainly fit into. Hell, Jerry Brown called it one. Examples of nations: Palestine, the Kurdish nation, Tibet.
The legal construct is called statehood. States can bind themselves into larger legal entities by giving up some of their own rights. Examples include: the US federal government, the European Union, and the United Kingdom.
Sorry, no. A nation is a legal construct, and California is not a sovereign nation. If it's a social construct then I'm founding my own nation tomorrow.
I don't know anything about Jerry Brown but he doesn't sound very bright.
A nation is a group of people with a common culture, identity, and usually language. A state is a legal construct implying self-governance and monopoly of force.
"Nation" has become colloquially synonymous with "nation-state", which lead to your confusion. But the legal aspect is from the "state" part, not the "nation" part. There have been historical states (eg. the Holy Roman Empire, Hapsburg Austrian Empire, Ottoman empire) that were not nations, and there are present day nations (the grandparent mentioned some: Palestine, Kurdistan, Tibet, as well as Basques, Zulus, and others) that are not states. Some present day nation-states (eg. Germany & Italy) were nations since medieval times but did not achieve unified statehood until quite recently (1871). The U.S. started as a state (technically, 13 states and one federated government) but did not really become a nation until after the Civil War.
If you can convince other people to identify with you, you absolutely can found your own nation. It won't be a state, though, so while might have your own customs good luck on having your own laws.
The US was most definitely a nation before the Civil War. And the Civil War was waged to prevent people that identified with each other from founding their own nation.
>A nation is a stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, history, ethnicity, or psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.
California is part of the United States. The nation is United States. Sorry, I know Texans and Californians both think they're big enough to be exceptions, but they're still just states.
The stable community is the USA. We share highways, military resources, language, government, traditions, laws, etc. This is a ridiculous argument.
I highly disagree with this sentiment. Very few of the US institutions are well designed, and I suspect that there will be a decline of American hegemony worldwide.
People can, and frequently do, make distinctions between nations and states. Hence the term "nation-state" to refer to those nations which are also states. If there wasn't a distinction, the combined term wouldn't be necessary.
PG&E is big, but it doesn't cover the entire state. For example, much of San Diego is served by SDG&E, much of LA is served by SoCal Edison, and several larger LA satellites like Riverside (~400k pop) have their own city-managed power utilities.
They were nationalized, once, and were privatized by the electorate something like 20 years ago. I remember people debating it as a kid
edit - I'm looking this up and having trouble finding evidence of this outside of AB 1980 (proposition to break the state-sanctioned monopoly and allow competition among energy suppliers), which was from 1996
Interesting. Didn’t know that history. Kind of wonder what the arguments in favor of privatization were given that doing so doesn’t seem to have resulted in any meaningful upgrades or better outcomes.
"Private companies are more efficient" is one of those things that's been said often enough that it becomes a "truth".
This obviously doesn't pan out when you've got a monopoly or captive audience. Around me we have a choice of energy retailers, so we get to deal with the "efficiency" of several competing bureaucracies instead of the "bloated" government one.
Politicians love it because it abstracts them from any accountability to the people, even our left wing parties are pro-privatization these days.
Actually, India has public utilities and most of the common cause for loss is Theft, at multiple levels.
A private company would eradicate it since its effecting the bottom line, but public companies may choose to ignore because the people stealing may be a voting bloc to curry favor.
It may not be the case in US, but you are trading one set of problems with another and that is the best case.
I think by theft GP meant "random citizens stealing infrastructural elements made from copper for scrap value" and stuff like this. A private entity ready to steal from people or itself still won't tolerate outsiders stealing from them.
A private monopoly on its absolute worst day would still operate more efficiently than a federal or state power agency. One still has a bottom line, the other just has meetings to look busy.
Not really. A dysfunctional private monopoly will go as bad as they can go without having people just abandon a product/service category entirely. Which, in case of captive audience or a necessity, can be really bad. Oh, and with falling quality prices can still go up - it's a monopoly, after all, it's not like customers can go elsewhere.
I'm curious, do you think taxpayers ought to be on the hook when a state-run electric company burns down a town, or should California invoke sovereign immunity when that happens?
We tried nationalizing in Europe, within a capitalist framework: it just doesn't work. The TL;DR of 70 years of that experiment is that the State (gov and legis) is an extremely bad steward of any business endeavor; whereas lack of competition basically means no innovation and rent situations (it becomes sort of a tax in disguise to just hike prices or keep them stable when they should decrease).
Most unregulated big markets devolve into some kind of cartel after concentration, though, so that's yet another dead end after a 50-year cycle generally (telecom shows it well, TV as well, construction too).
What seems to work, for now, is a sort of regulated hybrid framework:
- networks and transport (of elec, data, whatever) is opened to a few companies, which can only sell access to said infrastructure to other actors, not market it to end clients.
- classic "operators" thus rent infrastructure capacity to these major actors and sell it to customers.
This allows very small actors to emerge (like "virtual" ISPs and telcos, we now have very small energy companies all over Europe). It's a recent development but these new startups provide great customer service and modern end/site equipment (easy to monitor, plug to some IS, etc).
The infrastructure caretaker status is typically "slightly public", with a non-profit mandate to maintain the infrastructure and develop it, using influx of for-profit investments by the operators, some citizen oversight, special status by law, etc. Basically, we try to make sure it costs as little as it should (it doesn't always work, rails are in a very bad situation for instance, and the caretaker is so deep in debt it's a failure, but the oversight of that dates to 100% public times with government-appointed CEOs).
TL;DR / conclusion: find the right medium between "private/unregulated" and "public/monopoly". Both are disastrous, but there are sweet spots in-between. Note that I have no idea how to pull off such change in the US, elec or telco markets are simply too entrenched / congress too corrupted it seems. We have that problem too but currently we're circumventing most democratic systems (whether citizen opinion or lawmakers corruption) by invoking the EU: “we must do it, no choice, it's EU law now”. That works most of the time and is the reason why the EU is so hated yet so quintessential. I'm not sure the Federal level would carry as much authoritarian weight in US States.
A counter example would be Quebec's grid which was nationalized in the 40s. Hydro Quebec owns generation, transmission and distribution for the province and provides the lowest residential rates in North America while operating at a profit. Admittedly we have access to stupid amounts of hydro power and a population that's a lot smaller than California.
I think the right thing is to go back and forth between the two systems. Wait until people are fed up with one, then switch to another to clean up and optimise. Once that stops working well switch to the other model. Rinse and repeat.
