industry structure
For many years and in many countries there has been a desire to make the electricity supply industry perform in the same way as any other commodity, with a market place for buyers and sellers and market-driven processes for contracts, price discovery and supply. ... Traditionally the electricity supply industry has been a vertically integrated monopoly where the products and services required to produce, transmit and supply electricity have been provided by a single organisation where cost-of-service has been controlled not by economic efficiency but by price regulation which has usually been based on average costs rather than marginal costs.