re: Why is Entergy my only choice for electricity? How is that not a monopoly?

Is that not like saying the only grocery store in a town is a monopoly?

At least it isn't Shinra Electric

The power is going to come from the same place either way. They aren't running separate power lines and transformers to your house. (or do they?)

ERCOT is unregulated. That's most of Texas except the east side along the Sabine. The rest of the infrastructure is controlled in an open market system where you can "choose" who your supplier is. That doesn't exactly make things cheaper though. It makes energy prices as volatile as any market. Generation (coal, gas, wind, solar, etc) is on the market as sellers and the distribution companies you contract with are the buyers (generally. sometimes, buyers can also be generators to supplement their generation). Infrastructure cost is included and the market is regulated somewhat to keep things from getting too out of control like during major heat waves.

In louisiana and most other places, there is a generation market (MISO as of 2012) but it's solely a generation market that is price set by the regulator as a means to create more/less power at certain load points. It's pretty sophisticated. Entergy owns generation, distribution, and transmission. But the entities must remain separate and cannot communicate and prices or future plans. Cleco does this as well. They own all 3. NRG used to be in the market and had contracts with local coops like DEMCO and that was more stable than anything. The price wouldn't change for years. The head of all of this is the LPSC. Nothing gets done without their say so, price to customer included.

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Why is Entergy my only choice for electricity? How is that not a monopoly?

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If Entergy is your only choice, it is because it is the only electric utility with facilities in your service area. If there were others, under some fairly narrow circumstances, you might be able to select your provider. In Louisiana, except for those narrow circumstances, true customer choice is not available. Although customer choice may sound good, in the few states where it is available, retail power costs have increased significantly over the low retail rates available in Louisiana. There are three investor owned retail electric utilities, ten customer owned electric co-ops and a number of municipal electric systems in Louisiana. With the exception of the municipal systems, electric rates, services and charges are regulated by the Louisiana Public Service Commission. The LPSC allows regulated utilities to earn a reasonable rate of return on their system investments. In most instances, each utility owns its own distribution lines, poles, substations and other equipment. Because of the fairly extensive State and federal regulation and oversight afforded electric utilities, they are allowed to operate as quasi-monopolies.

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In most instances, each utility owns its own distribution lines, poles, substations and other equipment.

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Not quite. Entergy and Cleco are the main "large" distribution lines. Usually anything over 69k is one of those two. It switches to the local co-op or municipalities or even individual industrial plants somewhere below that number unless you are also the distributer like Cleco and Entergy can be in many areas. Point being that for the most part in the louisiana, the generation is coming from either Cleco or Entergy and while it starts on lines owned by those two, it changes at a substation to who your distributer is. The distributer owns the meter at your house.

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With some exceptions, Entergy, Cleco and AEP own the transmission lines from generating stations or delivery points to substations and the distribution utilities own the distribution lines coming out of the low side of the substation to the retail customers. Whatever that voltage is, the line coming out on the low side is almost always owned by the distribution entity.

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This is exactly what I was trying to say with the distribution entity being Entergy and Cleco in some cases.

Entergy is trash.

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6.88 a KWH is an arse raping.

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Are you talking $6.88? That is lower than the wholesale price right now. And last night I started thinking that is the true reason for the outages.

Because Entergy customers footed the bill for the billions and billions of dollars in infrastructure investments it takes for you to turn on a light bulb. If you don't want to buy from a utility, you are free to build your own infrastructure at your house using a generator and wires, but then you'd be responsible for fuel and maintenance and replacement when it breaks.