Until there is competition people will have no alternative but to pay PG&E for power every month, so PG&E has no incentive to improve. If they get fined they'll just make that money back from their captive customers.
Eliminate the profit motive, and the service will be cheaper, safer, and directly accountable to the people. The utility can operate at cost and not jack up rates to pay shareholders or an $8M CEO salary. If there are any profits, they will be funneled directly back into the utility.
If that were true, we wouldn't have private airlines because planes would be falling out of the sky every day and nobody would fly.
Increase fines for negligence or make sure they can be sued (IIRC California makes it difficult to sue PGE) if you want to fix the problem. Don't do something as stupid as making it government run so it either becomes extremely expensive, extremely unstable, and/or a tax burden for the state.
>Eliminate the profit motive, and the service will be cheaper, safer, and directly accountable to the people.
Eliminate the profit motive and nobody will be incentivized to improve anything. This will likely make it much more expensive in the long term. The military has no profit motive either and they spend money like it grows on trees.
From a consumer point of view this is good, as you have a choice over which provider you use. On the other hand the actual service you get is going to be the same from either provider, taking internet as an example, if you use the common infrastructure the speed you can get will be the same from all providers, and the only difference is in price and artificial limitations like data usage. Maybe electricity is a better example, as the electrons you receive will be exactly the same no matter which provider you use.
Although the infrastructure is run for-profit, there is only so much than can be done on its own. The government regulations also limit upgrades, as they favour spending on underserved areas. This means even if you live in the most remote part of the UK you can probably get broadband internet (>1mbit), but in major cities you are getting much slower speeds than what other parts of Europe can provide (often no more than 70mbit).
Most of the infrastructure was inherited when it was privatised 20-30 years ago, so all they have really done is run the infrastructure rather than build it out. A good comparison is mobile telephone infrastructure, which in the UK is exclusively owned, built and run by for-profit companies with minimal government oversight.
With the exception of HS1/Channel Tunnel, the vast majority of the UK's fixed rail infrastructure (stations, tracks, land, etc) is publicly owned.
The train operating companies (TOCs) are, with some exceptions, privately owned. But because of the way they are franchised and regulated there is little competition between them, so it's quite different to the electricity or internet markets.
> taking internet as an example, if you use the common infrastructure the speed you can get will be the same from all providers
Not necessarily. Although each provider may share a common "last mile" infrastructure, ie the lines that run to your house, they must each arrange their own equipment and backhaul in the local exchange where that line terminates. Not all backhauls are equal and some providers perform better than others, especially at peak times.
> Maybe electricity is a better example, as the electrons you receive will be exactly the same no matter which provider you use.
Every unit of electricity you use has to be generated somewhere - and not all sources are equal. As a consumer, I might place a premium on low-carbon electricity, and choose a provider which promises to purchase only from wind turbines and other low-carbon sources.
The economics of airlines and monopoly energy companies are completely different. Flights are subject to intense economic pressure, the airline industry has very thin margins of profit.
You can avoid an unsafe plane but you can't avoid an unsafe statewide power company.
If that is universally the case, and there are no downsides, it would logically follow that everything needs to be nationalized.
Societies that tried that didn't fare well, though. So, clearly, it's not that simple. It may well be the case that this particular company would be better off as a non-profit, but the explanation can't be as simple as "safety" - practically everything has some safety aspect to it.
Admittedly, I don't know PG&E's history, but as a utility company that offers natural gas and electricity, I know many would call it a natural monopoly.
As such, how does competition work in a natural monopoly?
Certain things like roadways are owned by the state because it's impossible to profit from them. Perhaps the safe delivery of electricity and natural gas to consumers should be managed by the state.
And if anything PG&E and potential competitors would compete on the production of electricity / natural gas, which the state buys and safely delivers to the people.