Alex,
>
>At least in our country, it was known for years that the infrastructure needs fixing. Fixing costs money. Lots of money. Ask the politicians.

But in the case of the U.S. (and we're well underway to the same path here) the politicians have only an indirect influence on electrical infrastructure status/cpacity, don't they?

Seems to me that pre-deregulation politicians had significantly more influence (trying to avoid the use of the word power here) in that regulators were governmental beasts and they included such items as inspections (state-of-repair) and planning for growth in their mandate.

Since deregulation the planning departments were burdens and so were disbanded and repairs were deferred until trouble happened. This allowed that repair staff counts be dramatically reduced. No planning and skeleton repair staff gave greater profit pictures at the peril of FUTURE service.
Now the FUTURE, for many of them, has arrived, and they are looking to government to bail them out by providing the cash needed to effect the infrastructure upgrades that should have been included in their own budgets in the first place!

The airlines' executives were guilty of poor decision-making that resulted in the need for huge government bail-outs (9/11 gave them a legitimate LOOKING excuse, but industry indsiders know that there was serious trouble brewing well before that).
The electrical utilities executives are guilty of poor decision-making in that they forgot the essentials of their business and placed share prices above those necessary activities and now they too are about to be handed huge sums to fix their infrastructure.
Since the government won't help out an individual who didn't properly maintain his car or furnace or chimney or stove or fridge or ??? or who spent more than he took in, I wonder why they should hand out money to businesses guilty of the same things?
Seems to me that such utilities should be left to fend for themselves. If they can't hack it then they should sell to someone who can. If that sale has to be at a loss, then that is what they reaped to start with.

Jim