Can we just get public utilities back? At least if a public utility is run poorly, we can attempt to fix it via legislation.
PG&E sucks, doesn't care, and probably the people responsible are still making bank.
PG&E sucks, doesn't care, and probably the people responsible are still making bank.
When that turned out to be wrong, they need to 1) stop causing fires and 2) complete the maintenance they should have been doing.
The problem is that #2 may take years to get caught up before they can begin operating normally again.
So where they are now: they operate a high risk service during certain whether conditions, and they’re responsible if anything goes wrong.
So what should they do given their current position? (As in right now.. no “should have”s that they can’t change.) shutting down occasionally seems pretty reasonable from their point of view.
If they need to do rolling blackouts to prevent fires that's fine. Are the people that designed the system so poorly being blamed for leading us to this situation or are they being handsomely rewarded?
What the state should do is seek some kind of emergency court judgment that electric power is an essential service that PG&E is not allowed to cut off for mere financial liability reasons. Then get a court order that says PG&E has to turn it on, if they refuse, jail people until they find somebody willing to follow the court order.
Basically, if the state's doing their job, they'll tell PG&E they made their bed and now have to lie in it. Meaning they're forced to run, and if more disasters happen due to their reduced maintenance, they go bankrupt. The shareholders and bondholders are wiped out, and since it's an essential service, the state runs it using tax dollars until they can find new investors willing to take it on. In practice, this probably wouldn't happen until the state was done fixing the maintenance backlog on the taxpayers' dime.
Since homes were destroyed and lives lost as a result of their actions, the people who originally decided to skimp on maintenance might be criminally liable and end up in jail, IANAL though.
The state would have a hard time being absolved of the _increased_ liability for such a thing.
In this case, while I completely understand the bigger picture, that would be the state telling them to make unsafe decisions.
But the state-owned public utilities are just as incompetently run. For example, the state-owned water utilities are mentally disabling young kids all across the country.
There is a common problem whether state-run or just state-regulated. The government wants to keep rates low. So they refuse to perform proper maintenance and upgrades.
On KQED Forum one caller mentioned that bankruptcy allows clawbacks of payments (bonus, dividends) that are deemed improper.
Perhaps this is one way we can fund actually making PG&E state-owned.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/editorials/stor...
Public vs Private is a non-issue. Good legislators and government is the real issue.
Fire due to power lines falling? California is not Nevada, that is certainly carbon consequences.
If anything, I would expect a publicly run utility to be less efficient at capital allocation. All "excess" capital may get used up in the inefficiencies instead of investments.
Consider the challenges of city-wide transportation networks in providing service, maintaining infrastructure and investing for the future.
Alternatively, neither private nor publicly run capital is good at discounting the far future.
Sending the capital to maintenance would be a politically driven project right now for public utility. For private company even right now it is still a conflict of interests between maintenance and shareholder interests.
Consider the following regarding NY, DC & SF subway systems:
"How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways Disruptions and delays have roiled the system this year. But the crisis was long in the making, fueled by a litany of errors, a Times investigation shows." 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
"Metro sank into crisis despite decades of warnings Metro’s failure-prone subway — once considered a transportation jewel — is mired in disrepair because the transit agency neglected to heed warnings that its aging equipment and poor safety culture would someday lead to chronic breakdowns and calamities." 2016 https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/met...
"Past decisions haunt BART as it seeks voter OK for $3.5 billion bond" https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Why-BART-s-futur...
It's amazing we're debating the pros/cons of public vs private utilities while we have an example of an incredibly corrupt private utility that needs to be shutdown and with execs thrown in jail for gross negligence.
>Six of the 10 most destructive fires in California history were started by electrical equipment. PG&E’s equipment has sparked 19 major fires in 2017 and 2018. The utility was blamed for last year’s Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 86 people. SoCal Edison is under mounting scrutiny over potential links to the start of the Saddleridge fire in Sylmar. Edison’s power lines also started the 2017 Thomas fire in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties that killed two people.
Maybe they can start by replacing old, faulty equipment that is causing literally millions in damage and fatalities?
They should not have spent the decade before the fires of the last three years paying generous dividends while deferring fire safety maintenance, as they were excoriated for this April by the judge overseeing their felony criminal sentence for the San Bruno gas explosion (who had the matter before him because the PG&E actions leading to the 2017 and 2018 fires were charged as, and ruled to be, violations of their probation for that criminal conviction.)
Or, maybe, repeatedly committing deadly crimes in the operation of public utility should mean you are no longer entrusted to operate that utility, and the instrumentalities of the crime should be forfeited to the government the same way they would be from any individual criminal, with someone else (public or private) less prone to deadly criminality given the job.
The main risk is high winds swinging the lines and trees far enough to contact, the resulting short can cause fires.
For this reason there's a standard for how far back trees should be trimmed for safety. Said standard was an excuse PG&E made for an additional funding request. When funded they didn't do the work, but instead paid a dividend.
So now we have richer stock holders and a utility that's decided to turn off the power instead of trim the trees.
Because that's worked so well for our publicly owned security services (police)?
We definitely need to shake things up but bringing something under the umbrella of government doesn't magically make it not suck.