It's tempting to believe that you can optimize the system by removing the profit cut, but the world (including here in the US) has a lot of experience with public utilities and this doesn't appear to be the case. You can end up with a publicly owned utility that underinvests, gets lax about safety, and takes "easy" solutions instead of hard ones... but also doesn't have any incentive to cut costs, so power ends up being more expensive than it would even with the profit cut.

There is no perfect system. The social contract for private utilities is that they can run like private corporations and make a few percent profit (the public controls their pricing). With some significant failures, it tends to work. Public utilities fail too - Chernobyl would be of course be the canonical example.