Unfortunately, there is very little accountability and motivation when the electric utility is owned and administered by the government.
Part of me wants to agree with this sentiment. The trouble is I've worked for too many utterly incompetent private sector companies to have much faith in them. In the long run, they all f**k up. How many private corporations survive more than one or two generations, I'm thinking of General Electric and General Motors and who knows how many others. (As an aside, what's the world's backup to Google? They won't be around forever.) I won't mention the private financial sector and their periodic spectacular excesses. The electrical power grid is not like selling mobile phones or 2x4s. Who cares if a phone manufacturer goes belly-up, just buy another brand. But the strategic importance of the grid is such that if any electrical producer or distributor ends up in difficulty, they will be saved by taxpayers in the end because there won't be any other option, so the idea that you can keep government out of it is a non-starter anyway. In my personal experience, the ability of private corporations to plan ahead more than a year or two is suspect (to be polite) so expecting them to design and maintain something as strategic as the electrical grid with its 30-50 year planning horizons is a bad bet. Yes, as soon as governments get involved things get complicated and cost more, but that's in large part because of their more complex mandate than just turning a profit next quarter. (Yes, examples of governments running things badly are legion. But let's not kid ourselves that the private sector does better.)
The really bad part of public sector excess, especially wrt Ontario Hydro, is that no one had an incentive to fix things when OH started to lose its mind. That's bad oversight, pure and simple. And there are probably as many examples of that in the private sector as in the public sector, it's just that no pays much attention to the private sector ones. Unless you were one of the employees of NORTEL, for example, whose pensions disappeared in smoke when the near-criminal cabal that ran the place exited with all the cash. Because that was a private company we delude ourselves into think that it cost us less than when a public sector enterprise goes nuts, but that's largely because no one is doing all the sums properly.
A non-bad example of what I am talking about is the western Canadian oil sector. Despite repeated resource industry boom/bust cycles, they haven't been able to stabilize their business. And after preaching to everyone about entrepreneurship and keeping the government out of their business, they somehow always turn around and beg the government for assistance when things go south. Honestly, it's farce.