At least in the us - the only way a utility can really make more money is by spending more money (as they get a return from the utility commission on a vested capital - massive oversimplification) but it means utilities are not incentivized to spend less rather than more…
Same in Australia, after they were corporatised (turned into companies run for profit rather than run as a service by some level of government) it was recognised that as natural monopolies there would need to be some sort of regulation on how much money they could recover, it was decided a method based on their costs was best, so they spent bad money agter good im expanding the network hugely (based on crazy projections of growth in demand to nowhere) rather than building resilience into the network and lowering their costs.
And that’s not even the cost of marketisation, that’s just the regulated network costs.
The government employees who approve or deny the utility’s priced have an incentive to not approve higher prices. Their bosses are usually elected, and higher utility prices are very unpopular.
I was told by a former southern company exec that the McKinsey did a study for them and their largest competitive advantage was regulatory capture in the states in which they operate - unfortunately I think the politicians are more beholden to the utilities than their constituents..
