The difference with co-ops is that they don’t necessarily have to participate in the fake energy markets if they have control over the grid in a region.
So they don’t have to do the ridiculous negative price energy thing that everyone else does to keep the market functioning as both an economic entity and a grid management system.
They just need to measure usage and charge based on operating costs. It doesn’t matter if energy prices would have technically been negative for a few hours, because their motivation isn’t market price, but just operating cost. You measure usage from co-op partners, then send them a monthly bill based on how much your costs are. It’s incredibly simple.
The confounding factor is the MISO and ERCOT markets that you may need to interface with (say there’s a disaster and the co-op needs power from another provider). To interact with those you need to basically destroy any logical system of pricing and management that you may have.
Basically this meme is doubly wrong because a monopoly would actually be better than the current status quo in a lot of the country. Duke sucks, but their monopoly allows them to do basically whatever they want without having to worry about copetition or weird market rates for energy that are also meant to be grid management signals, since they run those two departments separately.
The same thing happened with Ma Bell. It turns out that for large scale systems/utilities like water, power, telecom, etc. (I’d even include web services infrastructure now), having a single central body managing and developing it is good. Breaking up those monopolies just sets us back decades and creates an unmanageable chaotic market system that should have been replaced by a non-profit centrally managed one.
We know this works. It’s why we don’t really do militias anymore and even the national guard is basically subservient to the central governing body of the military.
The difference with co-ops is that they don’t necessarily have to participate in the fake energy markets if they have control over the grid in a region.
So they don’t have to do the ridiculous negative price energy thing that everyone else does to keep the market functioning as both an economic entity and a grid management system.
They just need to measure usage and charge based on operating costs. It doesn’t matter if energy prices would have technically been negative for a few hours, because their motivation isn’t market price, but just operating cost. You measure usage from co-op partners, then send them a monthly bill based on how much your costs are. It’s incredibly simple.
The confounding factor is the MISO and ERCOT markets that you may need to interface with (say there’s a disaster and the co-op needs power from another provider). To interact with those you need to basically destroy any logical system of pricing and management that you may have.
Basically this meme is doubly wrong because a monopoly would actually be better than the current status quo in a lot of the country. Duke sucks, but their monopoly allows them to do basically whatever they want without having to worry about copetition or weird market rates for energy that are also meant to be grid management signals, since they run those two departments separately.
The same thing happened with Ma Bell. It turns out that for large scale systems/utilities like water, power, telecom, etc. (I’d even include web services infrastructure now), having a single central body managing and developing it is good. Breaking up those monopolies just sets us back decades and creates an unmanageable chaotic market system that should have been replaced by a non-profit centrally managed one.
We know this works. It’s why we don’t really do militias anymore and even the national guard is basically subservient to the central governing body of the military.
Basically central planning good. Markets bad.