There’s nothing wrong or misleading with the way you’ve stated it. What is misleading is the continued statement that all or even most of it will continue to exist or make it into people’s pockets.

On the “continue to exist” front, if you’re going to understand anything about this debate, know that distribution utilities exist to make money, and they cut operating costs relentlessly. Most people have no clue - none - about the resources needed to run a utility. I’ve seen tens of millions spent up front on billing systems. Millions on outage management systems. Accounting systems, HR platforms, IT systems, etc. these are all going to be rebuilt from scratch with a new utility. You might get a grace period, but there’s no way they’re going to bend Avangrid over and continue to run their business systems. That’s not to mention shared staff in all of the departments listed above. I’m very skeptical that PTP will maintain anything close to the surplus that Avangrid runs.

On the “make it into people’s pockets” front, you may notice people talking about their pet attributes as this discussion unfolds. More solar, better reliability, free power on your birthday, whatever… everything costs money and feature creep is real.

And yes, I’m told that PTP will be able to borrow at costs lower than Avangrid and that’s true, except it also seems kinda bullshit, because Avangrid isn’t borrowing their whole book value AND improvements AND storm cost AND initial operating costs like PTP will be.