alt Hacker News> Electricity generation is getting cheaper all the time, transmission and generation are staying the same or getting more expensive
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, since you claim that generation is getting cheaper, staying flat, and getting more expensive all in a single sentence.
But I can tell you my energy bill hasn't gone down a single time in my entire life. In fact, it goes up every year. Getting more (clean!) supply online seems like a good idea, but then we all end up paying down that new plant's capital debt for decades anyway. Having a company such as Facebook take that hit is probably the best outcome for most.
Oops, that's a typo, should be transmission and *distrbution
Electricity costs have two components: "generation" to put power on the grid, and then the "transmission & distribution" costs which pay for the grid. You can likely see the costs split out on your bill, and the EIA tracks these costs.
Generation costs are falling, because of new technology like solar and wind and newer combined cycles natural gas turbines. However the grid itself is a bigger part of most people's bill than the generation of electricity.
Most utilities have guaranteed rates of profit on transmission and distribution costs, regulated only by PUCs. T&D tech isn't getting cheaper like solar and storage and wind are, either, so that T&D cost is likely to become and ever greater part of electricity bills, even if the PUCs are doing their job.
Generation in many places is disconnected from the grid, and when somebody makes a bad investment in a gas turbine, then the investor pays for that rather than the ratepayers. Look at Texas, for example, where even being at the center of the cheapest natural gas in a country with exceptionally cheap natural gas, solar and battery deployments hugely outpace new natural gas. That's because investors bear the risk of bad decisions rather than rate payers.
In places that let utilties gamble their ratepayers money, and where the utilities only answer to a PUC that gets effectively zero media coverage, there is a massive amount of corruption and grift and fleecing of rate payers.