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Comment by shadykiller | Hacker News Reader

I live in Santa Clara city and my utilities except gas are provided by the city run Silicon Valley Power. It's cheaper than PG & E and i've had no reliability issues. I guess even a government run utility would perform far better than PG & E since the bar is too low.

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Silicon Valley Power still relies on some PG&E transmission lines to bring power in that is generated outside Santa Clara. My point is just that PG&E has an influence on most every electricity user in its territory (even those with community or county run local distribution grids).

Did a bit more research on SVP. They have 55 miles of transmission lines. Here's a map: https://cecgis-caenergy.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/califor...

Saying they rely on some PG&E transmission lines is a massive understatement. Also, how cool is it that you can deep link to a map showing a minor utility's transmission lines?

From wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_Power :

As of January 1, 2015, SVP and the City of Santa Clara have the lowest average system rates for electricity in California for any electric utility serving over 10,000 customers.

Even if a local utility company is privatized that doesn't automatically make it impossible for it to run well. We have many examples of both local privatized and public power companies, so we know that either system can work well if managed correctly. Given that PG&E isn't running properly as a privatized one and we have examples for how the government can do it right, we might as well take over and imitate those successes.

I'd personally have more faith in a privatized company or a government entity (rather than a public company) because the lack of ability to freely trade shares means shareholders are more aligned with the long-term mission of the company.

With public companies, the people who own the company don't even live here and they only own it to make a quick buck. They'll live in an armchair in Wall Street and short sell in a heartbeat to make quick bucks on the downturn, not realizing that their trigger-happy, short-selling behavior is actually hurting California residents who depend on the company to be funded at the worst of times to fix problems and upgrade infrastructure.

Short-selling doesn't take away money from the company. Except for startups looking to fund their current growth by issuing new stock, a dip in the stock price shouldn't affect their operations at all.

> we might as well take over and imitate those successes

Except PG&E is 100x larger than SVP and has completely different operations.

SVP doesn’t use relatively cheap-to-supply-but-higher-income urban customers to subsidize expensive-to-supply-but-lower-income rural residents, which PG&E does some of, maybe?

During the Enron-caused blackouts (of which my father was partially responsible. When working at Perot Systems, he was on the team which build the technology enabling Enron to rob Californians blind ) we lived in Santa Clara. It was nice knowing my power wouldn't go out, which was good because the daily blackouts meant my Mountain View office was closed at least once a week for a month or two.

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