"Cities Weigh Taking Over From Private Utilities" to switch

Gist is private utility companies (70% of us buy from private) tend to charge too much, to shave services to enhance profits (among other things, tending to be slower to restore power after outages and to be unwilling to bury power lines), to pay their executives too much, and to be unwilling to advance to new energy sources. 

Publicly owned power tends to be cheaper and more responsive in all ways, and overall far more interested in investing in change to meet future needs now. But, although local control tends to be better in almost all ways, it's possible to be too small. Plus, change is expensive and taking control back from corporations very difficult and even occasionally legally impossible as is, some power companies powerful enough to battle even large cities.

But this movement toward return of control over their power and development of new sources to local populations is apparently a national trend, so link below to an interesting article. My local power company is a cooperative, locally owned, but here in the rural south I don't expect it to offer to mount solar panels on our sun-baked roof any time soon.