>> I wouldn’t trust investor owned utilities to make the generation, transmission, and distribution capacity available, either.
Your distrust is valid, IMHO. There’s too much fed money being pumped into the system to believe utilities — investor-owned or otherwise — are making rational forward-looking decisions. And that goes for many other entities besides IOU (in my locale, local government is an example).
I worked in the electric power business from 1973 to 1998 and I worked with many senior utility execs in power generation. I saw first hand how the utility executive staff morphed from being engineering and performance oriented to sucking up to the rabid environmental lobbies. There was zero pushback against the extreme environmental lobbying groups; nothing but constant caving in. There was zero pushback against the fanciful dreams of “green” energy. I got so fed up I left the power business around 2000. When the PUCs and governments said “go green,” they replied “Yes SIR!” There was virtually no honest, critical engineering and economic analysis of the feasibility of powering the country with wind and solar or of the consequences of premature retirement of fossil and nuclear plants.
It was sickening, to say the least.
Throw in DEI (government coerced or self-inflicted), and it’s hard to have faith in any companies these days.
And there’s this little problem: