Patrick Robbins

And so there was this public power movement that was very much on the minds of the distribution companies at this time.

And they were also worried about competition between each other.

And so the earliest business association of the distribution utilities got together and proposed this kind of.

public utility commission model where there would be a state level commission to regulate the distribution grid, you know, with a single company providing power to a given territory.

So a utility is a natural monopoly.

And, you know, in the absence of any kind of market discipline of that company, that company is regulated by a public utility commission.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

And so, you know, the obvious question is how do you prevent that company if it's a monopoly and it's got a captive customer base for the entire territory?

How do you stop them from just charging whatever they want?

My question is why didn't they do it earlier?

Because it seems to be what's happening right now.

Sorry, go ahead.

Well, no, that's exactly right.

And so that is sort of the underlying logic or how it works in theory with the public utility commission model.

You have this body that is in charge of regulating how much the utilities are allowed to spend.

The problem is that very often these regulators defer to the company on matters of financial analysis, on aspects of the grid that in some cases are considered proprietary.

The company is a private company.

So there's certain information about how our grid functions that we legally are not

allowed to know.

And so there's this massive asymmetry of both knowledge and resources between the public and the company.