As polarized as our politics and media are these days, there’s still one thing that liberals and conservatives can agree on — monopolies are bad!
Since they have no competition, monopolies not only charge whatever they want, but they also get away with supplying inferior products and they have no incentive to innovate and improve. Why should they? You have to buy from them anyway.
This is why Americans have always hated monopolies and it’s why we have laws to prohibit them — with a few exceptions. One of those exceptions is for electric utilities, which in many states have laws that literally protect them from any competition at all. Can you imagine if the government told you that you couldn’t grow your own food and could only buy it from one company? That’s how it is in the electric industry!
As polarized as our politics and media are these days, there’s still one thing that liberals and conservatives can agree on — monopolies are bad!
Since they have no competition, monopolies not only charge whatever they want, but they also get away with supplying inferior products and they have no incentive to innovate and improve. Why should they? You have to buy from them anyway.
In exchange for their government-protected monopoly, private electric companies have to get approval from a utilities commission when they want to raise rates. That commission, however, is appointed and approved by elected officials — and guess who some of the biggest contributors to their reelection campaigns are? Yep, electric monopolies!
Even electric utilities that are publicly or cooperatively owned, such as municipal utilities, rural electric cooperatives or the Tennessee Valley Authority, often exhibit the same culture and business practices of private electric monopolies.
The monopoly system harms just about everyone. It harms us through electric bills that are higher than they should be and through policies that make it more expensive or illegal to generate our own electricity with solar. It affects us through worsening hurricanes, sea level rise and the unmitigated impacts of climate change. And it harms us through the corruption of our democratic institutions.
But for people who live where energy companies generate electricity from fossil fuels, mine for coal or drill for fracked gas, the impacts are much worse. Those impacts include polluted drinking water, mountains destroyed for coal, and private land taken by force to build pipelines.
