It's all about USA policy for electricity generation, transmission, distribution, and retail. It gets complicated; there's some nation-level control, but mostly everything is different from region to region. From place to place, some organizations are publicly traded companies, some are government departments… just because you're an expert in your home town's system, don't assume you know how things work in the next town over, the next state over, in Texas (Texas is weird), and so on.
The book gets into the details. In my imagination, this book got started when the author, an electricity policy wonk, was explaining a spreadsheet of [ generation | transmission | distribution | retail ] organizations with a client who asked "You ever think of writing all this down?" I didn't retain those details; but some vibes remain.
E.g., public vs private power. Should your state/county/city/whatever have a power department or a monopoly power company? In theory, a power company could innovate more, motivated by profit, benefiting consumers. In practice, every time a power company makes a mistake, the state/county/city/whatever regulates the heck out of it. Take out some big loans to build a new thingy, fall behind on the loans, and go bankrupt? The state/county/city/whatever will make good, because they need to keep the electricity flowing. But they'll also apply a ton of new regulations so that it doesn't happen again. Sign up to build a few extra nuclear reactors because you believe that they'll produce power "too cheap to meter" and demand will skyrocket? When the state/county/city/whatever figures out that the power will, in fact, be more expensive than non-nuclear choices, they'll cancel the extra reactors and regulate big new projects. Oh, and the neighboring states/counties/cities/whatevers also impose regulations on their local power companies, because they saw the political disaster unfold and they don't want to get voted out of office.
So… In the long run, you probably won't get more innovation out of a monopoly company than out of a government department; voters will (reasonably) freak out when things go wrong and demand regulation.
Back when nuclear power was new, a lot of places really did sign up to build a lot of reactors, anticipating a lot of new demand that didn't materialize.
Back when nuclear power was new, the feds decided an interesting way to encourage it: if a company built a reactor and the reactor had a big accident, the feds put a cap on the liability. If I'm a citizen, this particular incentive makes me very NIMBY about nuclear reactors. What was the reasoning behind this incentive? If big, horrible accidents are rare, this guarantee doesn't affect anything, so why offer it? If big, horrible accidents are common, then I do not want a reactor near me, near my water supply, near anyone I care about…
Remember Enron? Remember how much you hated Enron? That hate was justified.
