system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why do electric utility companies (in the US) subsidize the cost of LED light bulbs?

In many places in the US, you can buy LED light bulbs for rather cheap. They are heavily discounted over their actual price because the local electric utility subsidizes the cost. Sometimes you'll see signage on the shelves mentioning this.

What is their incentive in doing this? It seems counter intuitive, since using these bulbs means you are going to be buying less electricity from them than if you used incandescents (or even CFLs).
gpt
(I work for a private regulated monopoly utility company)

So being a monopoly power provider has many obvious benefits.  You don't have competition, and basically as long as there are people, you'll have customers.

The reason the government sets up these situations is that they believe that it is cheaper to grant monopolies to companies in areas and regulate them heavily, than it is to have competition, considering the infrastructure (power lines) that would be required.  This isn't done everywhere, so there can be arguments against it, but it's not a completely unreasonable idea.

But there has to be downsides.  In many cases the utility companies are actually restricted in how much profit they can make, and they also are limited in how much they can raise prices, in some cases requiring state governmental permissions.

Also, they have an obligation to provide enough power for anyone.  If apples makes 2 million iPhone X, but 3 million people want them, oh well.  Or they can just raise the prices until they line up.  Not with power in these cases.  They**must** provide power to all our customers, at all our levels.  If it gets hot they must provide more power for more air conditioning.  If more people move in they must generate enough power for everyone.

But opening a new power plant is not normally profitable.  So these companies instead spend a little bit of money giving out cheaper light bulbs, which lowers the demand they have.  In addition it creates good press, which is helpful if they later have to go to state governments and ask for rates to be increased for whatever reason.

So even if you don't think highly of these companies there are good buisness reasons to do this, and also good PR reasons, and customers do benefit from them.