Hawaii Is Bailing Out Its Wildfire-Causing Energy Company

It just makes no sense to have privately run utilities, and pretty much all US energy infrastructure problems can be traced back to it.

For people who don't understand, fundamentally how these work is they are guaranteed a certain rate of return on expenditures. The utilities are told that if they spend a dollar on approved activities, the public will give them back slightly more than a dollar as thanks.

The entire incentive structure is to just do big capital projects while minimizing any unpinned costs - which often includes things like labor and maintenance although I don't know about the specific case of Hawaii.

So there's no incentive to do serious maintenance. There's no incentive to save ratepayer cost.

There are frequent incentives for reliability in the form of penalties, all stick and no carrot, but if you think about this side of things at all you realize that it's not good enough because many of these utilities aren't reliable and that the entire principle of reliability penalties is admitting that market incentives aren't going to do the job so why are we using this entire market based approach in the first place.

Natural monopolies should not be private businesses, they should be democratically operated public institutions. End of story.

But of course all of these various utilities have grown so ponderous and huge that basically none of the states can afford to acquire them back into the government. We've all been damned by previous generations who didn't think things through.