Water is essential to living.
Electricity is mostly essential.
Why these two utilities are privately owned is beyond me.

If the state of the Scottish energy grid is comparable to mainland Europe, then the prices go up due to increasing cost of infrastructure.

Renewables are a lot cheaper per kWh, but require a substantialy higher up front cost in infrastructure due to their decentralized nature.

Before renewables, the electricity only ever flowed in one direction, from the power plant down to the consumers. A few centralised main powerlines could deliver most of that.

With the increase in renewables that suddenly isn't true anymore. Smal villages often are net positive, we've reached a point where even the medium voltage grid of entire regions is net positiv and the energy has to be transported somewhere else, sometimes even outside the country.

All this requires substantially more powerlines (or at least thicker ones, so still new cables). But more importantly, devices to measure the current load of the grid at all times and modernized equipment that can remotely be operated to respond to variing load.

Not to say that we should stop building renewables. All this infrastructure will be needed eventually eather way, but at least in the short term, investments will be needed regardless.

Public necessaries like energy, water, public transport etc should never have been handed over to companies to begin with in my opinion.

Yeah honestly even if we were at 100% renewables, the price has been set and people are used to it now. No company is going to voluntarily start discounting unless more competition enters the market to start a price war. So far most of the energy "competition" has gone bust.

You know why right?

The grid is constraint and because of this it makes prices really high where the congestion is. Now the logical thing is to allow a different price where there is free energy like in Scotland verse where it is constraint.

But! The issue is where it is constraint and that's south east England. And as everyone in the country knows no one gets anything in the UK unless south east England has more of it for less.

So higher prices in SE England is not going to happen. If it was the other way around I'm certain the government would say fuck the Scots they should have more wind power if they wanted cheap electricity.