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In the early 90s HL&P Houston lighting and power decided to go private. I guess it was put under pressure politicians paid off to a company called Centerpoint and the distribution is auctioned off I think but the distributors I’m pretty sure collude with one another. It’s an absolute mess now contracts with small print hidden fees, kilowatt one is expected to use for one rate if we go below your charged another rate sometimes they charge you what they think you’ll use. It’s a mess.

One thing that should be public and that’s public utilities. as a right leaning person, I’ve always regretted that Houston lighting and power went private.

Oh, and the infrastructure is now shit .

Category one hurricane tins of thousands of people without power for weeks never heard of before in the history of Houston hurricanes

Mayor Lanier is going to get to the bottom of it. He’s a Democrat he thinks like a right wing

The little greedy bastards are going to get in there and fuck everything up it will take a decade all the good intentions. Those people will die off will be replaced by people that never made the deal.

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Yeah there's plenty of cases where fully privatizing an existing public monopolies makes things worse (at least in the short term). A better way, I think, is to liberalize the market, i.e. stop making it illegal for private companies to compete with it. If the public former monopoly is actually offering a valuable service then it'll remain competitive.

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I can relate to the importance given to public hydro-electric projects. I grew up in Kerala, in South Inidia. The majority of the electricity in the state is from hydrolectric plants. Every year we were taken to one of these projects – since they were typically created by damming a river or tributary, one side would be public garden. It was mostly a great day out with our classmates for us though, we didn’t give too much attention to the guided tour of the power plant.

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And several are (rightly) considered awe-inspiring feats of engineering, like Hoover Dam in the US or Itaipu in Brazil–Paraguay. Other than the consequences for policy, the more I think about it the more I think there's something to their sacredness. Hydro dams are the modern world's wonders.

I had no idea Kerala produces a lot of hydro power! In fact I had no idea it had hills or mountains or anything of the sort. Thanks for drawing my attention to a region of the world I knew very little about.

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