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71 points seanobannon | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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nomercy400 ◴[] No.43463163[source]
Deregulating a basic human need and leaving it to the 'market' to solve this. This sounds a lot like other privatization efforts of the past decades.

In my country healthcare, child support, energy, national railway, postal services, public housing, banking and more have all been privatized.

I worry about this. Not for now, but for 20 years in the future, where all energy is managed by companies and the government can no longer control the market due to being 'too big too fail' and because it gave all control away.

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kccqzy ◴[] No.43463345[source]
As the article says,

> Deregulated markets, which might be better described as “differently regulated” markets, separate these concerns. Independent power producers (generators) build and sell electricity wholesale to Retail Electric Providers (REPs), who sell to households, while utilities manage the transmission and infrastructure.

On the face of it this makes sense to me. Deregulation doesn't mean there are no regulations at all. It means we split up a monolithic entity into different parts that can each be subject to competitive forces and be regulated differently.

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1. cool_dude85 ◴[] No.43464558[source]
No, only one part is subject to competitive forces (generation). The other two, transmission and distribution, are agreed by any rational party to be a textbook case of a natural monopoly and are subject to strict regulation for that reason.