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Comment by chris_va | Hacker News Reader

No offense, but what makes you think this would be any different if it was a zero-profit government monopoly instead of an "allowed rate of return" government monopoly?

And, to be honest, any cause less than ~1000 deaths per year (and PGE is about ~20) would barely even register as a blip on the top 50 causes of death in the state. It's a tragedy, but it's hardly the greatest threat to safety and health.

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> No offense, but what makes you think this would be any different if it was a zero-profit government monopoly instead of an "allowed rate of return" government monopoly?

The fact that we have a number of public power agencies in the non-PG&E parts of California and it is different there. It's not a hypothetical.

Those publicly owned utilities collectively have a fraction of the transmission & distribution infrastructure of PG&E alone. Most essentially serve as brokers to buy power and pay T&D charges over other people's lines. They are simply not comparable.

Since the shortcuts appear to all be about cost minimisation, there would seem to be every reason to think that a zero-profit government monopoly would have handled things differently.

How much more money should we be willing to spend to save those 20 lives a year? A million per person, a billion? A trillion? How many lives could we save if we put that money elsewhere?

You're moving the goalposts. You asked "what makes you think this would be any different". That's what makes me think it would be different. The question of cost isn't at issue.

Probably somewhere between 60 and 200 million for the yearly lives lost. More than would mean the money is better spent on safety elsewhere such as better safety features on highways. Less than that, and spending on safety elsewhere becomes wasteful compared to spending on power infrastructure safety.

The "value of a statistical life" has less to do with making thing whole in terms of not caring about deaths than it has to do with efficiently allocating safety spending.

Then you have percentage of the yearly wildfires attributable to PG&E. So some percentage of let's say a couple billion in fire fighting per year, and maybe 10-50 billion in property lost.

Anyway, the point is that it isn't a slippery slope discussion, and it isn't impossible to come up with an approximate number.

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