When deciding whether to break up a monopoly, does it really matter how it formed?

A government's role should be: (pick one)

1. Break up monopolies, reduce barriers to market entry, and encourage competition, or
2. Regulate the behavior of monopolies.

Net Neutrality attempts to do #2.

No, no, the other west!

Half a cent per gallon is 7,727 times MORE per gallon than a Los Angeles resident typically pays if they manage to stay in Tier 1 pricing all year.

According to your link, water is $4.832 per HFC (748 gallons), which is $0.00646 per gallon. That's more than half a cent.

Also, tiered pricing is unfortunate in the way that it rewards the wealthy (who generally use the most water) for conserving a gallon of water more than it rewards the poor for doing the same thing.

So half a cent would more than triple my water bill.

I very highly doubt that, because demand for water isn't perfectly inelastic. Nothing is.

RO of saltwater costs less than half a cent per gallon, so it's not very expensive at all.

So the plan is to install enough batteries to power the world all night long, and then for a week or two when the weather is bad?

Given that demand for electricity isn't perfectly inelastic (in fact, nothing is), your idea is actually very feasible.

Future? Socialism is already the present. Name one road anywhere in the USA that pays for itself 100% with gas taxes and user fees.

And name one Republican who doesn't support the usual practice of cities forcing developers to build more parking than what the market would build of its own accord. (Ok, that's actually dirigism which is more closely associated with Fascism than Socialism, but close enough.)

It's ironic that those who try to distance themselves the most from Socialism are among the most guilty of creating it.

There are not people waiting around for prices to go down to use electricity.

Yes, there are.

they must produce at some minimum power output levels in times when this electricity is not needed.

Where electricity is always priced at market equilibrium, all electricity is consumed and therefore "needed" by some definition of the word.

So during the ramp-up time close to sunset, the additional electricity causes the equilibrium price to fall, people consume more electricity at that time because it's cheap (perhaps to cook dinner or do laundry) and suddenly that electricity becomes "needed."

The report hinted at this solution: "The resource mix would also benefit from...demand side response capabilities to help meet real-time system conditions."