The transmission utility is not purely a transmission company. It spends money on both generation and transmission. Some generation charges leave to other companies. This is not a competitive market, but even if it were, it would only give you a bound on the cost of generation and tell you nothing about the cost of transmission.

You say solar is getting cheaper, but it is only the panels that are getting cheaper. They will continue to get even cheaper, but this is not relevant to retrofitting individual houses, where the cost is already dominated by labor. As the cost of labor dominates, economies of scale in labor will be more relevant.

To a first approximation, solar is legal for individual residences and illegal on a larger scale.

Maybe you could learn something by looking at the public filings, but you didn't look at them. By regulation, not by being public, it has to spend proportionate to its income, but whether it is spending on transmission or generation is a fiction dictated by the regulator. It may well be that its transmission operating costs are much lower than its price and that a change of prices would be viable without any improvement in efficiency. This is exactly what I would how I would expect the company to set prices if it controlled the regulator: to extract as much money as possible on transmission to minimize competition. I don't know how corrupt the regulator is, but that ignorance is exactly my point.

Even in this last comment you keep making that very distinction. The regulator dictates the price but you assert that you know what the monopoly spends.

If you just want to assert that the current set of regulations are unsustainable, then I agree. But not a single one of the comments reflects a belief that this is the topic, not even any of your comments.

Yes, if we assume that there is a competitive market for generation, price of transmission may prevent grid solar generation from being built. But you asserted that you could learn the cost of transmission from the bill.

These numbers are dictated by the regulator. What mechanism is there to make them have any relation to the real world?

That breakdown is fiction dictated by the regulator.

Why do we even believe the claims about congressional trades? It is widely believed that Hillary Clinton's commodity trading was falsified by the broker. Why not the same for stocks? These records were created once a year. It would be easy to look back at the year to choose good trades after the fact. Today we supposedly have 1 day notice of Pelosi's trades, which would be hard to fake.

If the Ziobrowski data is dominated by a few big trades, why not look at them? Are they companies that were affected by congressional action? That is the worst scenario. If not, then I see three possibilities (1) noise; (2) falsified data; or (3) as Christian says, it was a bribe of information from inside the company, not information from inside the government.

What is Chaos Theory? It sounds to me like an arbitrary grouping of results of people playing around with computers, not a coherent theory. If it were about a social group, that provides more coherence. Indeed, the people who pushed the term "Chaos" do form a social group, but I do not think this group really includes all the people included in, say, Gleick's book.

A lot of the results were things that they could have predicted from theory before computers, but they don't seem to have been predicted. In particular Lyapunov died in 1918. If the theory is his theory, then it's hard to articulate what the people with computers contributed, but it may still have been important to actually use the computers. Similarly, I think it wrong to dismiss something as just information theory, not chaos theory. The only concrete result I know is the reconstruction from symbolic dynamics, but this makes it clear how to apply information theory.