Did we all just as a society completely forget about Enron? Enron did rolling brown outs to help boost pay, and used the excuse of demand. Now PG&E has stepped it up by doing blackouts and claiming its because of fire risk.
Well, they are going bankrupt because of the liability they bore for the massive fires their equipment triggered the last two years, so it's not too far fetched a claim.
What ulterior motive could they have for doing blackouts now?
This is not to absolve PGE of the responsibility. They apparently asked the PUC for ratepayer money, and received it, to do fire prevention maintenance, but then supposedly didn't do it, at least not enough [1]. All this while paying handsome dividends to investors (including our 401ks and pension plans). If true, that would be the bigger scandal.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/18/business/pge-...
Enron's problem was obvious, though. They controlled both the distribution lines and the generation facilities, and were allowed to participate in an energy derivatives market too. And either no caps on profits or no meaningful caps. And California let that happen. It's like letting wild cats live on your ranch and then being shocked, shocked when they start killing your cattle. Except in this case I think California was actually shocked, because the politicians were too clueless to realize what could happen.
[0] http://s1.q4cdn.com/880135780/files/doc_downloads/2019/Alsup...