Data analysis: investor-owned US utilities charge 23% more than public ones
A Kadoa analysis of EIA data finds investor-owned electric utilities billed homes 17.8¢/kWh in 2025, well above public and co-op rates, reigniting debate over utility ownership.
What to know
- EIA-sourced data shows investor-owned utilities charged 17.8¢/kWh in 2025 versus 14.5¢ for public utilities and 14.1¢ for co-ops.
- Since 2020, investor-owned utility prices rose 34%, outpacing both public utilities (19%) and overall inflation (24%).
- The HN discussion centers on whether electricity, as a natural monopoly, should be publicly owned, with counter-examples and methodological caveats pushing back on a simple ownership-explains-price narrative.
The dispute Whether the price gap reflects ownership structure itself or confounding factors like taxes, cost of capital, regulation, and geography. · positions read across 30 posts and comments
Electricity is a natural monopoly and should be publicly owned rather than profit-driven.
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“Monopolies that serve the public good should never been profit driven, full stop.”
solfox · Hacker News ↗
Deregulated retail electricity markets have failed to produce real competition or lower prices.
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“"de-regulation" meant the separation of generation, distribution and retail. Decades after this was supposed to lower the price of electricity, it's done the opposite... There is no competition, because why would they compete if they're…”
mig39 · Hacker News ↗
The ownership-price comparison is oversimplified or contradicted by personal experience.
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“I live in a counter-example. The only water and electric utility available is city-owned and I pay triple the amount of my sister and her family that lives in another city yet has 4+ private utility companies all competing with each other.”
pandinus · Hacker News ↗
Kadoa Data company that published the analysisU.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) Source of underlying Form 861 utility survey data
The record 1 articles and posts · last 22 days
What people are saying 24 voices from 1 site · best of 30 · verbatim
- Does the price comparison control for differing tax burdens, regulatory environments, and cost of capital across utilities?
- Can deregulated retail markets ever deliver real competition for a fixed-infrastructure commodity like electricity?
- Oct 23
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Texas answers a lot of questions about how well privatization of utilities works (and the answer is often "not very well"). The electric industry in Texas has competitive rates with the rest of the country, but it also has a body count. Putting off repairs and upgrades in order to save money and make investors more money has caused several long…
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It’s not that controversial; usually I end up arguing with people who don’t believe utilities are natural monopolies rather than no government control. They usually point to starlink with the internet and solar + battery on power as incumbents that don’t need public easement. But that easement is too hard to compete with still imo and we ought to…
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I think the problem in the machine is "investors" as they have primarily a capital based value evaluation.Nothing else has value to them apart from capital and its "profitable" usage, so the fundamental reason why corporations even exist, to collectively bring about real world value takes a back seat.
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Our local co-op electric utility may have a lower rate than other states, but their policies are entirely profit based. No grid-tie. No off-peak rates. Customer experience is terrible. Internal company spending reminds me of the current decor at 1600 Pennsylvania ave. And my share in the company last year, after being a customer for nearly four…
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Note that government-owned and investor-owned aren’t the only two options.I live in Wyoming. We have a member-owned cooperative utility. At the end of the year, it pays every member a dividend. We vote on leadership and major policy. It’s locally responsive but still privately owned; the Governor can’t turn it into a slush fund.
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Let me tell you a little story of corruption.(details are from memory, so let's not quibble and argue over them, my autistic friends)Back in 1906, after the Big Earthquake happened in SF, the US Congress took pity on the city of SF and built the Hetch Hetchy dam to provide the City with reliable water supply (so the City wouldn't burn down again…
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Personally, I would like to see more competition in some of those spaces. But if the government is going to enforce any sort of competitive restrictions, it should go all the way and won it. For electricity, they could own the transmission lines and allow competitors to generate and sell electricity. The government could then charge a fixed…
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One culture thing I learned moving from an impoverished rural community to San Francisco was how little time the affluent spend on the necessities: cooking, cleaning, laundry, home improvement, shopping, etc.Most of my free time was spent on the necessities.Moving to SF and embracing that lifestyle (being able to afford that lifestyle...) freed me…
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Hello from Québec! Yes, with the right structure and guardrails in place, you definitely get better costs for citizens and businesses. Citizens can also petition the government when something needs fixing, which is better than "fuck you if you're not a shareholder".For an example of the opposite, you can unfortunately look at the Canadian telcom…
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To play devils advocate, in NYC which has a massive transit network. There exists a series of private transit "companies" (sometimes just a guy with a 10 person van), that provides routes that are poorly served by the publicly run transit network. The famous Chinatown buses would be another example, that run between Chinatowns in the North East…
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We have "utilities on the market" now. So we get to choose between the color of logo on the invoice. Every year we can switch around new year. Then lots of marketing is going on: people going door to door as well...For sure I now pay for all these marketing campaigns: they all offer a cheap first year. So I have to switch yearly to get a good…
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There's no reason for not separating generation, distribution, and retail.Those are completely different activities, with completely different competency requirements, economical and political characteristics.Also, bundling them is an anti-competitive measure. What is important for generation in particular, that is a competitive market where you…
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It should not really be controversial. Classic liberal economics (from e.g. John Stuart Mill and on) generally acknowledges that natural monopolies exist and that it's generally beneficial for everyone if they are publicly owned.
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Sorry I know its sacrilege to say but i think there's some things the government should simply just own. Water, energy, roads, transit etc.etc.etc... There's no advantages to bringing in private enterprise, at best they merely act as rent seekers, and at worst they strip the infrastructure of all value without any maintenance, getting taxpayers to…
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Wait, they privatized transmission as well?Electric production and transmission is interesting from an economic perspective, as the physical infrastructure is almost as perfect an example as it's possible to make for something which should be governmental (or under its direct control). You just can't get working competition there. While the power…
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It turns out that privatization of public services does not yield the lowest prices for consumer as a result of market forces. Because it does not create services markets, it creates services monopolies.
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Utilities are one of the cases where market dynamics break down. It's very obvious why, when you realize how difficult it is build even a relatively simple electrical transmission system, or a power plant. The barriers to entry are extremely high.Furthermore, switching from one provider to another is inherently difficult. There is only one set of…
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My electricity is produced by a cooperative. The coop has some 60k participants. And over the year it's managed to build and operate a respectable amount of wind turbines and solar installations, and it's now expanding into district heating and battery storage.They're producing some 100GWh/year. Which is not half bad, considering they're typically…
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Alberta's electricity system is Canada's example of this. "de-regulation" meant the separation of generation, distribution and retail. Decades after this was supposed to lower the price of electricity, it's done the opposite. Big corporations are now guaranteed a profit at each layer of the system. There is no competition, because why would they…
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I live in a counter-example. The only water and electric utility available is city-owned and I pay triple the amount of my sister and her family that lives in another city yet has 4+ private utility companies all competing with each other. And she has a house more than twice the size of mine!Bring on the competition!
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In this thread: a bunch of comments that don't understand that if you want more of something (power, food, housing, videos of cats, whatever), by far the best way to get it is to give the people providing the stuff more money.
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This whole "but government is inefficient" argument has never convinced me. Our local electric provider has as bad or worse bureaucracy and ever-increasing rates. Bureaucracy is just a symptom of aging human systems, and it can be fixed. Monopolies that serve the public good should never been profit driven, full stop.
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One interesting thing I’ve learned is that the utilities will manipulate projects to earn more take. So for example they will add a decommissioning in and then get regulators to approve that and now boom utility co snuck another 1% on the take. The bonuses that the C-suite execs of a public monopoly are getting… unconscionable.
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This feels like kinda of a useless comparison if we don't know about the tax rates they pay, cost of capital, adjusting for geographic location and local regulations etc. I.e. the largest increase was seen in NY where it is really expensive to do anything and high taxes.