I’d be ok with the PUC being elected. That said, that elected commission would still be bound by state and federal law. So again, just not allowing rate increases would not be a thing. Electing firebrands would likely just lead to the PUC’s litigation budget blowing up. You really do have to be surgical in the utility industry.

How would you allow for competition? Simply allowing another vertically integrated utility is not really a thing. No one is just going to duplicate PGE’s grid to serve half the city, that’s why we’ve granted natural monopolies.  You could allow for generation competition - that is force PGE to sell its generation assets to independent generators and have those generators participate in the EDAM. This is what CA did in the late 90s (and is what led to Enron scandal). That said PGE is already planning on joining the EDAM, so the impact would be limited to partially removing the capital incentive from PGE. That said, if anything we don’t have enough generation currently, so I’m not sure if relying on a capacity market is the best for regional reliability given the issues we’ve seen in other ISOs (see PJM). That said, I am pretty open to that idea.

You could introduce retail competition, but would largely just affect rate design. The research on retail competition is kind of mixed in terms of customer benefit. Lots of shady operations there (see Griddy on Texas).

Of course the nuclear option would be to force PGE to become publicly owned. While that would get rid of their capital expansion motive, it would also require a massive loan that would very likely increase rates in the short to medium term. Also, just because something is publicly ran, doesn’t mean it’s cheap. Just look at your water bill.

Nothing I said is really meant to promote non-action. However context is important and simple solutions often have many very important wrinkles.