We thoroughly approve of all of these community energy projects

Admittedly, we don't enthuse over them for the same reasons many others o but there's still something wondrous going on.

A wave of new publicly owned companies is taking on the big six energy suppliers, as local authorities search out new revenue and seek to restore faith in public services and tackle fuel poverty.

Publicly owned doesn't enthuse us, that faith in public services similarly.

No shareholders to worry about....(...)...The driving forces for these councils stepping into the complex, heavily regulated energy space are largely twofold. One is the need to create a new revenue stream in a time of austerity,

That it is a public revenue stream rather than payment to shareholders doesn't mean that the users of the energy aren't being charged to produce whichever of those two now, does it?

 Bristol Energy is biggest publicly owned energy supplier, with about 110,000 customers; Robin Hood has just over 100,000. Both have created more than 100 jobs locally, but neither has yet recovered their start-up costs.

As we've noted before covering those start up costs is rather the point of capitalists. Who lose everything if it doesn't work out - as the vast majority of business adventures don't.

However, as we say, we do thoroughly approve of the basic idea here:

Part of the reason councils are getting into energy is the barriers to market are not as great as they once were...(...)...“This is high-risk stuff. The sector is complicated. You [the council] probably don’t have the resources. You’ve probably underestimated the costs. And that’s with costs of entry falling dramatically,” he said.

Falling costs of entry can only have good effects upon the market as a whole. Major technological, even social, changes occur precisely because of the entry and exit of firms from a market. Thus a thing that we'd very much like, near a necessary precondition in fact, is ease of entry into the market. This has now been made much easier. Excellent.

That is, we've made market entry easier, people are entering the market - in whatever guise, more market players is still a good idea - and so at least one of the things we need to do about Britain's energy market has already been done. Isn't that great?