these could include keeping the price of retail energy at lower levels that do not reflect cost for example through cross subsidies maintaining employment or preferring a certain generating fuel a single integrated utility does not require complex systems to dispatch multiple providers at the wholesale level or retail market platforms that allow for switching of customers between different retail providers or an elaborate access regime to ensure multiple parties can access monopoly network infrastructure on equal terms where fresh investment is required to meet demand a government can direct a utility to invest at a given time and this ensures that capacity will be adequate to meet reliability standards