PG&E could shut off power across Bay Area on Wednesday and Thursday
berkeleyside.com
berkeleyside.com
Right now their profits and equity are privatized but losses socialized, what absolute nonsense
Just make PG&E public already, the current legal status is a joke.
State granted monopolies must serve the public good. If, as a broadcaster, I just can't manage to keep our transmitter on -- we're going to lose our license to someone who can.
Either PG&E needs to explain why they can't do appropriate line maintenance or needs to have their lines put up for bidding.
Obviously ideally they never should have let maintenance get so neglected in the first place, but here we are... how do we get out of this hole?
I'm of the opinion that the state should assume ownership of PG&E in exchange for bailout money, just as was done with some banks a decade ago. Use public funds to stop the bleeding and make headway on fixing the problems that caused all this in the first place. If that means drastic leadership changes, so be it. Once PG&E is back on its feet and has proven it can be responsible, the shares owned by the state can be sold back to the public, presumably for a tidy profit.
We should also examine the regulatory environment around all this to figure out what contributed to the current state of affairs, and try to set up PG&E's next incarnation for success.
Another interesting option could be to strip PG&E for parts, and let smaller municipalities (city, county, region) buy up the infrastructure, take care of repairs (likely with funding support from the state), and run in perpetuity in a more distributed manner. I imagine there are certain efficiencies in having ownership more centralized in theory, but clearly that hasn't worked in CA for decades.
How? Pretty easily I suppose, especially if you're blowing your safety budget on executive bonuses.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/PG-E-diverted-safety-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/31/reuters-america-update-2-pge...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bankruptcy-pg-e-idUSKCN1L...
These power-cuts are safety theater, virtue-signaling tokenism. More people will die from lack of air conditioning, medical device power and lack of communication during emergencies than will be "saved" from these pointless, alert-fatigue-inducing CYA/retribution power-cuts.
PS: Printed in Paradise, CA on recycled electrons. I'm still chipping away at the remnants of a blue wheelie bin that melted and burned into a puddle/ring on aggregate concrete. Oh and insurance wouldn't pay to replace dirt which became toxic below what was shed... more socialized costs, $600 just for that.
If the cost of maintaining and delivering service per capita to less dense areas is too high, it might be in the public good increase prices to those areas or stop service.
https://www.pge.com/en_US/safety/emergency-preparedness/natu...
Most reasonably dense areas are not affected, for some values of reasonable. If you live anywhere near a eucalyptus-fueled tinderbox, probably your power will be cut.
I noticed that in the list of counties, SF isn't there. That's fascinating. Is that because they're SFPUC? But doesn't SFPUC get power by way of PG&E transmission lines? Do they have their own generation and/or transmission capacity to survive?
Also, what about Santa Clara (the city, not the county)? They have their own electric utility too. Do THEY have enough capacity to do their own thing?
It's gonna be stuff like this that'll kickstart the next recession. Just break the back of the valley's economy and the rest will take care of itself.
Most likely San Francisco doesn't have the sorts of transmission lines PG&E is worried about. A fair chunk of the power lines in SF are underground, and there aren't that many places in SF with tons of fuel where you're going to see hot, dry, windy weather like you would in rural Napa or Contra Costa.
GP's main remark was how are these major metropolitan areas generating the electricity they are distributing? Is generation near the city, or is PG&E shying away from turning off power for thousands of business and millions of users for political reasons.
[0] A great video about electricity generation, transmission, and distribution (and subsequent in-depth videos of each step) can be found here: https://youtu.be/v1BMWczn7JM
Fossil fuels. There's a plant in Antioch and there was, up until about a decade ago, a plant in BVHP.
Is generation near the city, or is PG&E shying away from turning off power for thousands of business and millions of users for political reasons.
Oh give me a break. No, San Francisco is not being spared because it has political clout. San Francisco doesn't have the same combination of environment and poorly maintained above ground high energy transmission lines that PG&E is worried about.
Up until 2006 there was indeed a power plant in southeast SF. More importantly getting power from elsewhere doesn't necessarily mean creating the kinds of situations PG&E is trying to avoid by creating lengthy blackouts.
It sounds like PG&E are universally unpopular, but don't forget the contribution we have made to this.
Welcome to the carbon consequences world, courtesy of mankind. Strap in, it's going to get worse from here.
i'd guess SF wanting to buy its piece of PG&E has some role here https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-b...
naturally a power shut-off would drive support across the board for the deal, incl. the bond, etc.
I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be in this situation, but given that we are, I’d prefer the warning.
If you have enough roof, and if your consumption profile is appropriate, you can run without utility power indefinitely.
Tesla already kicked off storm watch mode for folks with Powerwalls in the areas affected to precharge them to 100% prior to the scheduled outages.
Since my previous comment where I said there will be clawbacks for lost revenue by the grid operators was downvoted, let me quote from relevant studies [1]:
"It should be noted that, in a scenario in which {such systems} undergo a significant uptake, this mechanism is unsustainable since it generates revenue shortfalls for government, municipalities and system operators. These losses of revenues need to be somehow compensated, either by increasing the network tariffs or by changing the tariff structure, e.g. switching from a volume (i.e. per kWh) remuneration to a fixed or to a capacity remuneration for the grid connection. Interestingly, this modification of the tariff structure is already ongoing in various EU countries"
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333420646_Techno-ec...
It's not necessary to oversize your system for peak load either; you can opt to instead shed large loads (AC), thereby reducing your capital costs for average system loads (lighting, refrigerator, etc).
[1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/this-is-what-th...
That does not mean there is no difference in where that budget reduction comes from. AC is typically active when it is hot, usually when there is lots of PV potential. You are using more energy when your own energy production is higher.
Suppose you do not have AC but instead electric heaters, then it is reversed. You are requiring more energy when your own production is lower.
So even if your total energy budget would be the same, the former scenario would involve less strain than the latter on energy autonomy because of how consumption would correlate in time with production or not.
From the grid's macro perspective, in an environment without much AC (or other appliances following the same consumption pattern), it has to potentially absorb (or refuse) much more energy delivered to it when demand is lower, while being able to still satisfy demand when it peaks and supply potential is reduced.
At that grid level scope, widespread AC usage, even though in aggregate using far more energy and thus net negative, might be easier to smooth out demand wise and thus easier to satisfy.
Also at 15k for a powerwall, it'd make more sense just to get a hotel for these blackouts.
Also, a Powerwall is about $7k + install, not $15k. After the tax credit, that’s about $50/month over 10 years (more if you buy two Powerwalls instead of course). $600/year is almost what you’d approach spending a few nights a year in a hotel without any of the hassle.
I wish I could get solar. My family and I will likely just be sitting around in the dark for a couple days.
California seems to always build infrastructure on the cheap.
And without grid, solar panels shut themselves off.
By legislation, not by technical necessity.
> A lot of bay area residents generate their own power, but we all rely on pg&e for interconnect.
I am aware. This is a legal thing that the legislature refuses to correct. They've granted PG&E a monopoly and won't stand up to them properly. When I was a California resident, I contacted my congressman about it almost monthly, and got the same response: sorry can't do anything
Gone by the wind ...
Arguably minimal fuss & stable. Java code written today will still run without change in 5 years. Can't say the same of other languages.
What other language would you recommend for a large eng organization of 1000+ ppl?
I've always found that Java particularly shines in team settings in a way that a lot of individual productivity languages like python and Ruby fall down atleast.
Obviously there is a broad spectrum of other languages between and beyond them, but which do you prefer?
I like Go and Rust the most these days. Not because they're perfect by any means, but they avoid a lot of traps of the other languages and scale well for the whole lifecycle of actual software development in teams.
Java is bad for a few reasons. The JVM makes everything an object on the heap, which means you're always in a war with your garbage collector. You have to run in bigger machines with plenty of memory headroom. There's a lot of backward compatibility cruft, like the fake generics. The worst part is the people though. The language is too mainstream but not hard enough to weed out the bad coders, and they make a mess out of the code base.
For performance-critical sections, you can plug in C/C++, wrapped in Python APIs.
A 500K SLOC project in Python might be unwieldy, though.
Unfortunately there's no great way of managing all of those dependencies for build and deployment.
That’s only half true now that Java actually has a steady release cycle. There were plenty of breaking changes from 8+.
This is in contrast to the legendary backwards compatibility of 1.4 to 1.5 to 6 to 7 to 8.
A5 y.o. usually has a limited command of the natural language yet.
"We’re in an interesting transitional era where San Francisco / Delaware is obviously* wrong but incorporating on-chain and going full remote is not yet obviously right."
(i.e. he's advocating using blockchains to define your legal entity and building a distributed team worldwide for your employees.)
https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1149073637325979648?lang=...
Frankly, this smells a lot like some straight up sovereign-citizen-tier pseudolaw. If you actually try to do business this way, you're going to be in for a rude awakening when the actual court system still ends up exercising jurisdiction over you.
Legal contracts are not self-executing but carry the weight of the legal system.
Smart contracts are self executing but if a mistake is made or the contract is buggy it is essentially moot legally.
The blockchain dream (which still needs a lot of tooling and infrastructure) is that you fill out a form once, incorporation and annual maintenance is basically free, and most of the mundane legal stuff is enforced by software for very small fees. He also mentions nation-states as a configurable parameter: basically this would mean that moving your company's legal jurisdiction would be as simple as updating a form field, and nations would have to compete to retain businesses.
It's a shell company of "Northwest Registered Agent", a shadowy company that has dozens of shell companies for each state and does SEO to get them to the top when you search how to register a company in these states. They're not reputable and you should absolutely stay away from them in the future. If you see onlineaccount.net in any of the source code for the page, or if it directs you there after login, it's the same shell company.
You also actually do need a registered agent, but probably not that one. I incorporated through Clerky (which is reputable, YC uses them), but it costs much closer to $1000 than $50, and then Clerky has a partnership with CSC (Corporation Services Company) to act as the registered agent. CSC itself will try to upsell you on various services that you don't technically need.
YMMV but you are right that they aren’t a government agency.
They provide a legal agreement template between founders as well as registered agent services.
I was in SF for the deliberate rolling blackouts in 2001
EDIT: it’s different in the reason, but it’s equally preposterous to have such badly managed infrastructure
This is quite different, and the rolling blackouts were statewide.
Edit: The rolling blackouts were the result of letting Republicans draft hamfisted deregulation legislation. The resulting greed saw Texas energy companies fuck California about as hard as they could. What's happening now is also related to greed in that it's cheaper for PG&E to shut off power to prevent wildfires than it is for them to maintain their equipment. PG&E burned down huge swaths of California over the past couple years so they're being a bit more cautious now. The big difference is that while most inhabited parts of the state will want reliable power, the risk of fire is not equal. So where previously we all got fucked by PG&E's greed, now it's just those situated where PG&E runs high voltage transmission lines near combustible materials.
The problem isn't deregulation alone, it's that generation was stripped from distribution, but retail sales wasn't decoupled from distribution.
According to Texas Coalition for Affordable Power (TCAP): "deregulation cost Texans about $22 billion from 2002 to 2012. And residents in the deregulated market pay prices that are considerably higher than those who live in parts of the state that are still regulated. For example, TCAP found that the average consumer living in one of the areas that opted out of deregulation, such as Austin and San Antonio, paid $288 less in 2012 than consumers in the deregulated areas."
The biggest bullshit is that now that PGE knows they’re too big to fail, they don’t even have to give a shit when they piss people off. If North Berkeley residents sued in a class action suit the state of California would probably just bail them out.
The real issue here is that PG+E is responsible for wildfires caused by power lines, and they don’t have many ways to deal with it. They aren’t allowed to raise rates to pay for more anti-fire measures. They can spend their fire prevention budget smarter, but at some point the gains there are maxed out. One of the few things they can do is to shut off power during times of high fire risk.
They don't need to. They could cut back or eliminate their dividends, cut back executive compensation, stop buying back stock, etc., etc.
They cut back their line crews ages ago (plenty of cost savings there), and if San Bruno is any indication, PG&E hasn't bothered to keep records (additional cost savings) for quite a while.
1) Those options, similar to spending the fire protection budget more smartly, also cap out at some point.
2) One of the reasons things like executive compensation get out of control is because they are a rounding error vs. the overall corporate spending. Cutting that back to the bone is not likely to be materially helpful.
3) "cut back or eliminate their dividends, ... stop buying back stock"
They may as well shut down the company (which is what they are doing on a temporary basis). There is no reason for them to be shouldering increased risk if the reward is reduced compensation. If that is the way the game gets played only idiots would be willing to own and manage a power company. It is more comforting to think that power companies are being managed by intelligent and rational people.
As I said PG&E makes a really great case for municipal power.
There is no reason for them to be shouldering increased risk if the reward is reduced compensation.
Fire prevention reduces risk. Conversely, this reduced risk scenario you're talking about has resulted in PG&E going bankrupt twice this century.
As for exec compensation and buybacks, PG&E spends a few hundred million dollars annually buying back stock. The fire prevention budget doesn't need to be infinite, but $200-300 million would go a long way. KTVU identified three SVPs who make around $500,000 annually. Yes, that's not a ton of money compared to PG&E's income, but a couple extra million could easily pay for brush/fuel removal.
https://ycharts.com/companies/PCG/stock_buyback
http://www.ktvu.com/news/despite-bankruptcy-pg-e-executive-g...
Edit: Per the KTVU article, that half a mill per SVP is the base salary, so bonuses and non-cash compensation aren't included.
You might be lucky in the honeymoon period where the company is still getting entrenched, but once that is over and getting them out again is not that easy, you will gravitate to minimal service, especially in areas that require investment, and being bled dry and fleeced for wathever they can.
Large risks that would require preventive maintainable or modernization to mitigate will be ignored as the company knows they will be bailed out should it come to that.
And all this because of the neoliberale dogma that the private sector is somehow always 'better' than the public sector.
In reality large. organization of equal size have the same efficiency problems, regardless of them being public or private sector. And before you point to a leaner small private champion in a competitive field you should systemically add the cost of the dozens or even hundreds of competitors they are 'beating'.
The advantage you have when things are not in the hands of the private sector is that you can prioritise ongoing quality and value of service provisioning over maximisation of short term profit extraction.
And what makes you think you can't find a competent manager for $250k a year?
Can you name some much easier jobs that pay that much?
You'll always be outbid for the absolute best, but I see no reason you wouldn't have plenty of viable candidates when you're offering >98th percentile income for a management job.
Also being "extremely type A" doesn't sound like a difficulty, really. And I don't see how it justifies 99th percentile pay either.
And yeah, you clearly haven’t been keeping up with dev pay scales at big companies if you think it tops out at 150k. I knew people at $300k total comp a few years out of school, and senior engineers can make far more.
> And yeah, you clearly haven’t been keeping up with dev pay scales at big companies if you think it tops out at 150k.
Okay. I don't know any of these devs and just did a search.
SVPs at big companies run entire divisions of thousands of people. They make it to those levels by being workaholics and politically adept.
There are 24 year olds at LinkedIn and Facebook making $300k
For example, the CEO of PG&E before 2019 was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geisha_Williams .
Here are the PG&E filings to the SEC: http://investor.pgecorp.com/financials/annual-reports-and-pr...
2017: http://s1.q4cdn.com/880135780/files/doc_financials/2017/annu...
2018: http://s1.q4cdn.com/880135780/files/doc_financials/2017/annu...
2019: http://s1.q4cdn.com/880135780/files/doc_financials/2019/05/2...
Ultimately, if something in a company goes wrong, the buck needs to stop at the CEO and if not CEO, the board of directors. In the end I guess only we shareholders are to blame.
For lower performance between 2016 and 2018, the CEO got a raises each year (snippet from 2019 page 81):
Name and Principal Position: Geisha J. Williams(a) Chief Executive Officer and President, PG&E Corporation
year salary bonus stock award total
2018 1,079,167 0 6,400,078 1,600,003 0 40,341 170,253 9,289,842
2017 991,667 0 6,500,168 0 0 996,810 108,575 8,597,220
2016 695,833 0 2,250,072 0 610,594 519,983 87,748 4,164,230
I just quoted the base salary (a.k.a. cash) of three SVPs.
The article I linked to stated very early on that it was discussing base salary.
So if a power pole is owned by the government it suddenly becomes non-flammable? That isn't based on the laws of physics.
There is a strategy that makes countries fantastically wealthy: only do things that are profitable. Running the energy grid for no profits is not a path to broad-based success, it only results in taxpayers paying for things that have no marginal value. If it makes sense with electricity then there is no logical reason not to try the same strategy with gasoline, food and shelter. At some point the damage goes critical and Venezuela happens.
Also, buybacks aren't primarily a form of executive compensation; I'm no expert but they look like a work-around for double-tax issues in the American income tax law. A buyback is a method of transferring money -> stock holders and in this context is basically just a dividend.
I've no idea what is going on in California, obviously, but strategies like 'nationalise it!', 'stop the capitalists raising prices!' and 'Stop people profiting from their investments!' are just classic arguments that hurt everyone in the long term. Literally caused societies to collapse in extreme cases.
Those aren't natural monopolies.
For those following along at home, after blowing up a San Bruno neighborhood PG&E diverted $100 million of money earmarked for safety. Where'd that money go? Executive bonuses and dividends. They have plenty of money for improvements and there is zero need for rate increases.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/PG-E-diverted-safety-...
Twice, since deregulation. Zero times, in the century before deregulation.
As fun as it seems to be for folks to shit all over San Francisco, neither the rolling blackouts of the early 2000s nor the preemptive blackouts this week have anything to do with city or county management.
the result of letting Republicans draft hamfisted deregulation legislation
CA Republicans were powerless to "draft" anything.
You need to go back a bit further than that, back to Republican governor Pete Wilson and Republican author of the bill Jim Brulte. Wilson knowingly set up his successor (Gray Davis) to fail.
Republican governor Pete Wilson and Republican author of the bill Jim Brulte.
Again, Democrats controlled both the Assembly and Senate throughout the process, and ever since. Bill contents are amended at will both in and out of committee, and "gut-and-amend" (removing a Bill's language wholesale and replacing it with that of a completely different bill to avoid rules about committee review) is so common, that term was coined for it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis#...
The author of the bill was Senator Jim Brulte, a Republican from Rancho Cucamonga. Wilson admitted publicly that defects in the deregulation system would need fixing by "the next governor".
As for the Brulte bill, not one Democrat voted against it in either house (77-0 in the Assembly, 39-0 in the Senate). It was shepherded through by Senator Peace and Assemblymember Martinez. Peace continued to claim parentage until after the resulting disaster.
I went a day (well, 22 hours so I don't qualify for any compensation from PG&E) without power last month because PG&E is hilariously incompetent and understaffed. As was already pointed out, PG&E is predicting 5+ day outages for some folks.
https://www.sfgate.com/california-wildfires/article/PG-E-pow...