There's a state monopoly on hydroelectricity in Québec and we pay the lowest rates in North America while Hydro-Québec pumps a billion dollars into provincial government coffers every year.

Same with BCHydro. Not the cheapest, but still cheap. Much better than being at the whims of shareholders.

I’m not sure of the other two provinces mentioned, but in Ontario we pay artificially low rates for hydro (aka electricity) because the rates are subsidized.

I always thought it to be a ridiculous policy; show people the true cost of their usage and stop hiding taxes all over the place for everyone to make up the difference.

You can brag about low rates via monopoly, but someone else might be paying for em

As best I can tell[1], BCHydro isn't subsidized, unless you count the land usage grants from the province (but the water flow stability is useful for irrigation, so it has other benefits)

[1] https://www.bchydro.com/content/dam/BCHydro/customer-portal/...

That is why I have solar and batteries. Don’t have to worry about energy costs.

Why? Electricity is so easy to generate that a monopoly is impossible.

Either you generate it yourself or you pay. PG&E is not paying the third party electricity suppliers exorbitant rates, they're just charging enormous amounts for distribution. Without a political change, electricity will continue to be monopolized and extremely expensive.

I live in California. Most people's electricity bills have tripled in the last 2-3 years. There's no alternative electricity provider.

So, if everyone switches from oil, guess where the price gouging and collusion will move to?

So make or buy your own generator. Or better yet startup an energy supply company. That's the point of it never beeing monopoly. The market is ripe for entry.

So... the electric company can't become a monopoly because you can spend the money and effort to create your own electric company? How can that not be said for anything anywhere that becomes an obvious monopoly?

> How can that not be said for anything anywhere that becomes an obvious monopoly?

I can't hook up my own ISP or manufacture my own prescription drugs quite as easily as I can put up solar panels or buy a generator.

What exactly are you proposing goes in this generator?

> What exactly are you proposing goes in this generator?

Whatever fuel you have access to that's cheapest. For most people, that will be natural gas or propane.

So we're back to buying fossil fuels from a third party

> we're back to buying fossil fuels from a third party

If we ignore the non-fossil fuel solution mentioned, yes. The point is it's a weak natural monopoly due to multiple alternatives.

Yes that's basically the definition of not beeing able to becomes a monopoly. Any old joe can compete with you.

So fix California's absurd energy policy. They "deregulated" by giving PG&E a monopoly, paid Enron an absurd ransom when Enron did what should have been considered fraud and made Californian's pay the state back, routinely harm individual solar owners, and refuse to give PG&E any reason to actually maintain their century old infrastructure that sits in a dry forest etc.

People repeatedly point at California fucking up "X" and then say "look how bad X is" ignoring that the other 48 states in the union (Texas also likes to find innovative ways to fuck things up) are doing various amounts of "alright" to "quite well actually" at "X".

For example, Maine also "deregulated" it's electricity sector in the 90s, and is only recently facing problems from the state sanctioned monopoly doing bullshit, and they have an actual excuse that we haven't built out new generation capacity since deregulation, and climate change means we have had an entire year of windstorms destroying the grid, including multiple storms taking out distribution to 1/3rd of the state.

Not in Northern California.

There are lots of government-enforced monopolies