Europe faces an unusual problem: ultra-cheap energy - https://web.archive.org/web/20240620151949/https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/06/20/europe-faces-an-unusual-problem-ultra-cheap-energy
Of course you can have multiple power companies in the city! A quick search shows that I can choose from over 10 different energy providers for my home. There’s no such thing as a natural monopoly, they only happen when legislation allows them to happen.
No, what you have are 10 different customer support companies. They probably don’t own the wires coming to your house, or the substations and power poles and whatnot. Maintaining separate infrastructure for 10 companies isn’t practical, so they either own joint ventures that do (less likely) or shift that onto cities and other government entities.
We’re doing that with our municipal fiber initiative, the city owns the infrastructure and companies provide service on that infrastructure. I think “service” is a silly thing to compete on (how often do you really need something from your ISP or power company?), especially when they don’t own the lines so they can’t do much to help, but whatever. I think it’s much better for companies to compete on extra services, like providing base power, energy storage, datacenters (going with the ISP example), etc. Then again, it works reasonably well for MVNOs, so I guess there’s a chance it’s a net positive.
You’re wrong. Different companies own different parts of infrastructure, power generation and/or distribution. The system is no different to setting up a grocery shop. Grocery shops don’t own farms (usually) or a building they’re operating in, yet they can compete efficiently with each other.
As for fibre, again - no issues here. Britain has OpenReach as the main infrastructure manager, which leases it to ISPs, plus there’s a selection of independent ISPs who have their own infrastructure.
And even trains can work successfully as proven by the EU.
different parts of infrastructure
So they have a monopoly on a given part of infrastructure. So if a transformer goes down, that company would need to come out and fix it? What happens if they don’t fix it promptly? Surely you can’t reroute your power lines through a transformer owned by a different company, no?
I don’t live in the UK, so I don’t know how it works. But I do know it’s impractical to have parallel electrical systems. We’ve done that historically with internet (cable, dsl, and fiber would use separate, parallel infra), and putting in a competing service gets stuck in bureaucracy because existing players don’t want competition, which is why many areas only have one or two ISPs (they block new ISPs from rolling out new infra with regulations and whatnot). So I’m guessing that’s not happening, which means there’s a monopoly at some point.
I could totally be wrong though. What I do know is that the UK has some of the most expensive electricity in the world.
