Privatization of public services cannot work unless the private companies have liability for their actions. This is the necessary consequence of their negligence.
This would have happened whether or not PG&E was private. People want a scapegoat and PG&E is California's.
There are tons of news stories on PG&E if you look, many unrelated to the fires. They spent millions to lie to voters when Yolo County considered switching to SMUD. They routinely backdated maintenance reports to the government. They've had explosions in gas lines, and then there's the Diablo Canyon mess.
This is the answer no one wants to hear.
For example almost 10 years ago Paradise almost burned. There was a grand jury review afterwards(that you can find online if you're willing to search some) that pointed out that the place was a tinderbox deathtrap and major changes needed to be implemented for safety.
The problem is populations in these places, along with most humans in general, like trees and shade and the idyllic beauty of nature. People would rather have a pine tree and bushes around their house, rather than a 100 foot cleared defensive parameter.
If you were that driver and charged with manslaughter I’m sure you would feel pretty upset at the injustice.
Exactly one of those is a non-anthropogenic source, lightning strike. Those tend not to occur during dry, windy conditions because of shear and needing to have enough moisture for cloud formation. Exception: when there already is a fire, pyrocumulus lightning strikes can add more ignition locations.
So far as the anthropogenic sources, we're in control of those by definition. We should try to prevent those as much as possible outside of prescribed burns. Everything burns sooner or later, but it doesn't have to go up all at once.
Much of the ecosystem depends on fire, but wildfires that do not do as much damage as the fires California has seen recently. But hey, the fires in Paradise shouldn't really be seen as a forest management problem, but rather as an intense urban conflagration. In much of Paradise, the trees survived, but fires jumped from house to house by wind-borne sparks. That was a disaster of urban planning, where evacuation routes had been made narrower in the past 10 years as population increased.
So we can't blame PG&E for all of that. But we can blame them for crappy maintenance in an area that regularly sees 100mph winds.
PG&E lines setting 1,500 fires was definitely a way to, uh, jump start whatever process might have happened anyway. One should remember that 60 people died that, many trapped by fire on the road out (where inadequate roads were another problem). So a big fire starting but simply more slowly, might have stopped this particular tragedy. Given that a few year back, a PG&E gas line exploded killing around 30 people, this is an organization I feel zero inclination to give a pass on "inevitability".
It's a weird psychology that wants to pardon resourceful corporations while continuing to fault private citizens.
My job was to—at no cost to the occupant—install home weatherization measures into low-income housing. This ranges from new doors and seals to full attic, wall, and floor insulation. We provided this service to literally dozens of homes every working day of the year.
If PG&E fails, not only are all of the contractors out of jobs, but people in need will be denied a valuable service.
California provides a similar service (LiHEAP) with substantially less funding and far fewer benefits to the resident, and much of that funding has been eliminated in the past couple of years as I understand it.
The point is that issues aren’t generally as binary as you may think. PG&E isn’t a perfect company, but asserting that nobody would be harmed by their bankruptcy is a bit naive.
Dissolving PG&E wouldn't remove the CPUC program funding, nor would it remove the work. Contracts would need to be renegotiated, but whatever utility springs up in PG&E's place (publicly or privately owned) will still need to comply with the CPUC mandates for energy efficiency, and the state funding will continue, so that work will still happen.
What about the large number of taxpaying vendors who rely on PG&E's business?
Then there are all the taxes paid by the employees, PG&E itself, and their suppliers.
[1] https://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/fires/article22...
I wouldn't blame PG&E if somebody damages their equipment and causes a fire that day or sometime soon after. But if it's been months and the equipment is still lying on the ground with bullet holes in it that proves PG&E didn't inspect it or repair it for a long time.
Not one person I knew chose PG&E instead of SMUD.
The Yolo County stuff makes me sick, just like banning municipal wi-fi.
PGE clearly isn't the only entity to blame for the disastrous destruction of the town of Paradise but it certainly seems to carry considerable blame.
I don't think that implies that then PG&E should have taken the route of ignoring fire safety and imposing electrically activated "uncontrolled burn policy" here.
I mean, PG&E lines starting, say, 15 fires rather than 1,500 in a given high-wind, low-moisture night might have given some of the 60 people who died a bit more time to escape.
Based on this a PG&E caused fire could be caused by someone running into a power pole or anything else that causes downed lines. Fires from power lines dont sound like a huge deal, and those 1500 fires are spread over PG&E's whole service area too
They initiated the shift from low pressure to high pressure without proper testing inspection or notice. I assure you that any reasonable person tasked with doing that safely would have done better. The fact that it was done so poorly indicates a critical failing of internal process.
So, no, the government did not create the electrical system and then privatize it. It was private from the get-go, and when utilities became monopolies, they were regulated.
PG&E may indeed not be entirely responsible for the wild fires but it's responsible enough that this kind of penalty is warranted - ie, trimming trees around PG&E of course was something they knew they had to do and that they failed to do (just like their failure to maintain the pipe that exploded earlier).
How California deals with fire risks and utility costs going forward is complex question. Naturally, it's made more complex by the influence large corporations wield.
In this day and age, bankruptcy still offers the possibility of PG&E sidling rate-payers with its cost while maintaining shareholder value, despite this being exactly what bankruptcy is intended to avoid. Naturally, I'd like to see the state of California prevent this but I'm not holding my breath. IE, California theoretically could seize PG&E and run it as a public utility but it probably won't and thus little will change.
1. Lot of states have strict liability of this form for utilities.
2. California is not entirely unique in the land mass of the united states (or the world) in the issues it faces here.
It is only unique in that it has not done a good job overcoming them.
All of these viewpoints seem to start from from a position that it's impossible for PG&E to succeed (due to global warming, legal climate, etc), and then ask "what do we do in that situation".
But as mentioned, it's simply not impossible for PG&E to succeed, and also no evidence that it is particularly harder than it is in similarly situated areas.
Does not seem like a large venn set to me.
"State-wide power coverage is estimated to be completed by year 2035 after a 10 year Environmental Review and pending lawsuits from neighbors who don't want power lines in their neighborhood. The costs were originally estimated for $10 billion but are now expected to be around $40 billilon"
....
"Meanwhile a startup called SmartZap is providing cheap electricity that you can purchase through their smartphone app."
Few big issues with SMUD, MID or TID
You’ve never been to Chicago, eh?
94 just south of the circle has been under construction for like a decade. I’ve never seen anybody working.
CPS teachers are the amongst the highest paid in the country, yet the schools are the near the worst.
Taxpayer dollars fund nothing but union graft and an ineffective police force which can write traffic tickets but not solve rampant violent crime.
The old saying in my neighborhood: “call for a cop, an ambulance, and a Pizza. See which arrives first”.
Saying “the government will do it better” ignores pretty much all the evidence.
Chicago is a glaring example, but NYC, New Orleans, Detroit, Philly and most other major cities have a similar history.
I think CA running electricity as a public service would be only good as an example to others not to make the same mistake.
And I'm not saying this from a "privatized profit/socialized loss" argument standpoint. I'm saying it from a "nearly everyone is some electric utility's customer, so when you find the utility liable, the customers (i.e. everyone) ends up paying for it somehow".
If the state assumed stewardship of the grid, the liability would still go to customers through either rates or taxes. So at that point, what we're really discussing, is how you feel about/how does fully public ownership of an electric utility fare relative to a regulated private entity replete with executive compensation and capitalistic motivations?
Once you hit up the utility for all the money you can get, either you ditch the grid altogether, or everyone using the grid is going to end up paying for most of it in one way or another. Who knows, maybe California will decide to try some grand gridless experiment. But the options are limited.
That's ridiculous. Broadly, there's nothing preventing California from seizing PG&E's assets as partial compensation for the company's past behavior. Thus the state of California could run PG&E as public utility pretty quickly if it wished and then charge whatever rates it felt appropriate, making up costs with taxes or not.
The main thing that would happen is PG&E shareholders and possibly bondholders lose their investment, high paid private executives and consultants are fired and the savings to the state.
Nothing besides the fact that the state has no interest in running a power company? They could have nationalized it long ago if they wanted to.
Bankruptcy will indeed prevent that.
Bankruptcy sets a legally-defined priority of creditors, and prevents execution of judgements (it doesn't stop them being found liable and establishing a debt, but it does prevent execution of the judgement, i.e., by seizing assets to satisfy the debt.)
> you have to liquidate (almost) all of you assets.
Sure, California could bid on the assets.
Their negligence will be our problem either way. The only solution that effects justice is to confiscate the company from shareholders entirely.
PG&E has been ramping up monitoring and maintenance (tree trimming/removal/etc) over the last couple of years.
In particular with the Camp Fire, a distribution line that size requires California PUC approval to shut it down -- due to the sizable grid impact. I can't find the reference, but my understanding is is that PG&E had asked for that approval earlier in the day/week to do the shutdown/maintenance but the request lingered (it takes time).
As opposed to legislatively forcing those assets to go where they are needed.
It seems privatizing utilities was not such a wonderful thing after all.
Reality begs to differ.
Or do you think they will just leave 16 million customers without electricity?
Can you imagine ever house with 10 wire pairs coming in from the street, one from each utility?
Competition on distribution or transmission is simply not going to happen. But it can - and should - happen on generation, as it already does in a lot of markets around the world.
Once you have a distribution network or a transmission line in place, nobody will build a second one. It doesn't make any economic sense.
Even if it was a complete laissez-faire (a bad idea, IMHO), there would be no competition on transmission lines and distribution networks.
But I do agree with more competition, particularly on generation. And you can make it better by decoupling transmission from distribution, and forcing the separate operation of each, plus a state-managed electricity pool, resulting in customers buying either from the pool or directly from generators.