> In large energy projects the bank or funder tends to take all the risk.
It’s almost like there should be a public institution that does things like this that are for society, with society taking the risks and getting the rewards. For ease, we could call it “government”.
Yes I agree that it makes sense for energy generation to be in public ownership. Although they still have to make a business case that it will actually deliver rewards. And be mindful of the costs associated with a dangerous liability. And in most countries it will be money that comes straight from debt.
The truth is that neither government or business have been that good at making these kind of decisions. I think the low recourse debt approach has some merits in that an institution is really forced to put skin in the game. And that due diligence is an integral part of making decisions. A nuclear power station that could be funded by a bank would probably be a pretty good design.
You want your power company to be run like Google? Your neighborhood is getting their electricity shut off because there aren't enough people using enough electricity in it to be worth it to the corporation.
I mean, they probably would if public services paid their engineers Google salaries. Do you think someone who can make 150k at Google is going to take a public services eng job for at minimum 50% less pay? Of course to have public service jobs like that we’d have to pay more taxes… and thus you end up with overworked engineers who are probably ok at their job but not on the same level as the big private companies
Imagine we start paying government employees Google salaries tomorrow. Could we then start firing incompetent employees and replace them with the competent ones lured by high pay? Everything I know about how politics and public sector unions work tells me that the answer is very much no. This means that this “pay them and they will come” plan can only expect to see any success many decades down the line, once enough incompetent workers leave on their own. And this is assuming your plan actually works: who’s to say that the high quality employees won’t get lazy themselves if they get Google pay with public sector job security?
Overall, this means that before we entertain your idea, we need to bust the public sector unions and fire the incompetent employees. I suspect that once you do that, you won’t even have to raise the pay so much to get large increase in public sector competence.
Google-level salaries are a recent thing in engineering. There wasn’t that much of a difference in engineering salaries between public and private sector say in the 1990s. But public services still sucked.
Nah, we need to get that public institution out of the way regulatorily so the cost of construction of these thing can drop to a fraction of what it is now, like what it costs in asia (or gwtvout of the way even more amd standardize production so we can churn them out in a factory for even less costs). The natural inclination is to add more government but at this stage in society the solution is almost always remove some government.
It’s almost like there should be a public institution that does things like this that are for society, with society taking the risks and getting the rewards. For ease, we could call it “government”.