this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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Capitalism. If the market is able to pay more then the company will demand more
Yeah. Someone will always be able to pay more than the common man. And companies using it to produce something will always afford to pay more than someone just consuming electricity.
That's no how capitalism works. If there is money to be made there will be more competition.
Not if the biggest players buy all their competition and use their multi-state revenue to lobby municipalities to make it illegal to compete with them.
It's important to recognize that this is how capitalism works if you try to apply it to natural monopolies such as physical infrastructure, along with anything else subject to inelastic demand, such as healthcare. It's exactly why it makes no sense to have entities that provide such infrastructure operate according to free markets, because either (1) there will be no competition and the "market" with one seller will abuse their position to maximize profit, or (2) you have competing systems side by side, using double the resources and space (or more) for half the efficiency (or less).
Too often people think of Capitalism as an efficiency maximizer, when in reality it is a capital concentrator. Infrastructure needs to be efficient in order to best serve the people that use it. We see time and again that energy corporations in the "free market" use their revenue to buy their competitors and lobby for looser restrictions that let them hike rates faster and higher until they've completely escaped any semblance of regulation.
Lemmy has such a bad understanding of capitalism.
that's the united states of america. Not the UK.
Lobbying isn't capitalism. The government needs to be involved in capitalism.
But finally, finally after all that. The core is energy production is not a monopoly it is a largely free market where many businesses and even many countries can create energy production in the UK. Home owners, co-ops, France nuclear, Norwegian hydro, gas, wind.
What you are talking about is electrical distribution being a natural monopoly. The National Grid (Great Britain) is largely a single monopoly but that's not where the price comes from. The UK has a lot of oversight of that and inter connectors and offshore wind leases and even maximum pricing. How are companies going to shaft consumers when the UK government limits the amount they can sell for.
Well then you need government regulation.
But that's not the bread and butter of capitalism markets. It's the edge cases