History has shown that in many cases, it's finding an efficient way to measure and charge for a resource which is the real breakthrough to utilizing the resource.
If the electricity meter hadn't been invented, or cost millions of dollars, it's doubtful your home would even have electricity today.
Very true, but that’s a fact regardless of whether market forces are a send to determine price. Ideally they should, because markets are usually good at determining relative value, but not always as for example in the case of industrial pollution. Eventually over hundreds of years we are beginning to implement some ways of factoring that onto market costs, but it’s been a long and painful process and there’s still a long way to go. For most of that time direct regulation has been the only workable answer, figuring out how to factor it into markets would have been too late.
If the electricity meter hadn't been invented, or cost millions of dollars, it's doubtful your home would even have electricity today.