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The customers pay their utility for all their electricity costs: transmission/distribution costs are listed separately from the energy portion of their bill. The energy portion is an agreed upon cents per kWh of load. Apple would just be providing the retail energy portion, with the utilities passing the payments from the end-users through to them. It would be a viable business model just like any other Load Serving Entity. Whether they know what they are doing sufficiently to make money is debatable, but they certainly have a cash to hire enough experts.

BINGO! The West Texas plains were a boon to wind prospectors. Every energy company with any renewable aspirations bought/leased a patch of land and threw up a wind farm. Just one problem...nobody lives in West Texas. It's open range for hundreds of miles. The very conditions that made wind possible left a very real problem. All that electricity needed to get to Dallas but the power line to Dallas was at capacity. All those wind turbines producing electricity and nowhere to send it. Storage tech was prohibitively expensive (If electricity is selling for $0.09 kWh storing it at $0.10 kWh doesn't make financial sense.) so into the earth all that electricity went. So ERCOT set out to build more capacity around 2008. Those lines went live in 2013. Combine that with technology making CSP even cheaper and you've got the next gold rush on your hands.

Full disclosure, I work for Nextera Energy. Parent company of Lone Star Transmission who operates a stretch of those transmission lines.

I wonder if those estimates include the transmission infrastructure to carry the electricity to high usage areas? The Wind Farm rush of West Texas had every energy company throwing up wind turbines to get the government subsidies. Next thing you knew there was more power generation in West Texas than the transmissions lines could carry back to Dallas where it was needed. The cost of storing electricity is more than it is worth so large amounts of electricity were being shunted directly into the ground while E.R.C.O.T. decided how to build out the new transmission lines. That project alone took 5 years and cost around 4 Billion.

You missed the key term "regulated" meaning the government would determine what they could charge. It would be like they have done with electricity deregulation. I live in Texas and here is how it was done here. The local government mandated monopoly (Houston Lighting & Power) was split into two companies. One became the owner of the infrastructure and was named CenterPoint Energy. The other became the independent seller of electricity to end users Reliant Energy. Reliant Energy must purchase electricity from power brokers and CenterPoint delivers the power to Reliant's customers. CenterPoint charges Reliant a fee for using it's lines. CenterPoint is regulated by ERCOT. Reliant is free to charge the customer whatever it likes but it now must compete with other electricity providers for the privilege. For cable companies it would be like splitting Comcast into two companies. One would own the infrastructure and be regulated and the other would simply sell programming packages and service. I also advocate this model for Telco and Cellular.

WHY DON'T WE GET SOME DAMN POWER LINES FIRST!!!!

Very good question. It's so good ERCOT asked it themselves and the first fruits of that discussion have already started coming on line. The problem is construction of those new lines will take time and the growth spurt of West Texas Wind the last few years has overwhelmed the existing grid.

Disclaimer: I work for Nextera Energy Resources (formerly FPL Energy)

According to http://mospublic.ercot.com/ercot/jsp/frequency_control.jsp Texas is currently (as of when I checked the page) using 35.3 GW. Of which, 34.9 GW is generated in-grid.

Give the electric companies 2 choices: Fix your own damn shit with your profits or we fix it and lease it back to you or nationalize you.

Sure there are people that are going to bitch because they're used to their handout. But handouts aren't going to help anyone. Make everyone work.

It's not perfect but it's a hell of a lot better than handing it over to a bunch of people who managed to already lose $700b.

[0].M-F you live in work housing or you work 4 - 10s or 7 on 7 off.

I hate to ruin your rant with what we call "facts", but the grid in the United States is not owned by private companies that you can just boss around from your ivory tower of uninformed tripe. It is an amalgamation of state-run and multi-state entities called ISOs (Independent System Operators) that both contract and coordinate with the transmission agencies in concert with privately-owned and state-owned generation assets to produce consistent and reliable power. A grid, in the strictest sense of the word, is a series of transmission lines, owned by multiple companies, that are interlinked and under the complete autonomy of the ISO. Nothing happens without the permission and direction of the ISO or FERC (and NERC as its enforcement arm). The grid is aging, but since the ultimate authority to direct replacement lies with both federal, state, and multi-state agencies, who precisely in your little world bears the fiscal burden?

May I suggest for your education:
http://www.ferc.gov/
http://www.nerc.com/

And for ISOs:
http://www.ercot.com/
http://www.caiso.com/
http://www.nyiso.com/public/index.jsp
http://www.pjm.com/index.jsp
http://www.midwestiso.org/home

Find the one that serves your area, and berate them with your uninformed bile since you obviously understand all of this better than anyone else.

Or do you?

A few links with information about the Feb. grid event: Blog post that sums up the ERCOT operations report.