mpanies, under government regulation — or built directly by the federal government itself. Winning the contracts to build this infrastructure has involved a combination of appropriate technology and price considerations. Consulting engineering firms and government regulators try to keep bids from being padded too much, while insuring that quality standards are not endangered and that the bidding firm will remain viable.
This type of cooperation between buyer and seller is not the norm in the ideal “free” market. However, ideal free markets have rarely been involved in building the unique structures that make up most public infrastructure, nor do we have a plausible model for a free, unregulated market to do so in the future.
The cost of power is partly derived from the costs of building energy infrastructure plus a reasonable regulated profit; historically, the pricing for infrastructure and the resultant power has been arrived at through negotiations between public utilities regulators and power companies. With the vogue for markets extending to all aspects of economic life, legislators have attempted to introduce, post hoc, market competition to reduce the price of power — but these efforts have had mixed, at times disastrous, financial consequences for utilities. While in some places it has reduced the cost of power to consumers for at least a period of time, the costs of building and maintaining infrastructure have not been fully accounted for in the rush to impose market structures on the electricity system.
The continuing push toward deregulation, which still has ideological momentum despite bitter experiences in California at the beginning of the decade, does not promote the building of new infrastructure, let alone a new, reliable replacement clean-power infrastructure. Furthermore, there are few mechanisms in the current market that would accelerate the retirement of existing fossil plants for new clean energy power plants.
While neither “cost plus reasonable profit” nor unregulated market pricing is an ideal, universal pricing mechanism, there is little in this world that is ideal and universal, especially in the hotly contested area of how to pay for vital commodities and infrastructure.
Next: promoting clean energy through policy.