This feels like a bit of a BS comparison. Consumers pay many other fees beyond wholesale electricity to actually get power. It would be much more useful to compare what actual households pay (for US by state probably rather than a meaningless average).
When comparing these to the German $0.39, it doesn’t sound all that bad and at least they are dealing with a gas price spike because of a war. What’s Californias excuse? Also, many California residents have to deal with the stupid “public safety power shutoffs” because of unmaintained/poorly designed aging infrastructure that causes wildfires.
In a word, deregulation. If you live in one of the 35 states that separated generation, transmission and retail distribution, your bill is about $40 a month more.
The idea was to create competition for power generation to lower prices. What actually happened was surge pricing and higher prices.
"Average retail electricity costs in the 35 states that have partly or entirely broken apart the generation, transmission and retail distribution of energy into separate businesses have risen faster than rates in the 15 states that have not deregulated..."
For example, Edison in SoCal publishes these rates: https://www.sce.com/residential/rates/Time-Of-Use-Residentia... ($0.36 off peak and up to $0.57 peak usage)
PG&E: https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/how-ra... ($0.36 off peak and $0.50 peak)
When comparing these to the German $0.39, it doesn’t sound all that bad and at least they are dealing with a gas price spike because of a war. What’s Californias excuse? Also, many California residents have to deal with the stupid “public safety power shutoffs” because of unmaintained/poorly designed aging infrastructure that causes wildfires.