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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

They’re shutting down in this manner because the government came down so hard on them it put them into bankruptcy already.

California has a really strange set of thoughts here... strictly punishing power shutdowns (based on wind speeds, which are only semi-predictable) and strictly punishing not shutting down. They’re to bare the full cost of fires and deaths they cause. Unfortunate... they also regulate PG&E with the CPUC and other local governments to make it so they can’t do anything but maintain cables (not improve them).

Not to mention they have an insanely high estimate to “underground” the cables and some crazy regulations basically pushing politicians and people in general simply to avoid putting cables underground - https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/General.aspx?id=4403

What does this lead to? Well either massive fires OR no power. PG&E is just an easy scape goat for an incompetent government with too much regulation.

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Simplifying things to PGE’s current plight I do agree with you.

The larger problem is as the GP mentions the misaligned incentives. Here in Sacramento we have SMUD, which is a publicly owned utility. No shut offs here. I have a friend who’s an arborist for SMUD. Before that he was an arborist for PGE.

For years at PGE he was trying to jump to SMUD. Why? Because they place a higher value on his services. PGE, being beholden to shareholders, treated him as 1099 and paid significantly less.

PGE shuts off power in part because they don’t keep their lines clear. Because they didn’t employ enough people like my friend. And those they do employ don’t stay longer than they need to.

Short-term shareholder incentives don’t align with long-term incentives of the public in this case. It’s a problem. Pointing out that California’s government has flaws doesn’t negate that point.

The wage PG&E pays doesn't tell us anything about whether they have enough arborists though. All that anecdote tells us is that SMUD is willing to pay arborists a high wage.

I have a public electric company in upstate new york. They have more reliable service and cheaper prices. They come through every year and butcher all the trees to prevent ice storms from knocking the power out. Highly recommended 5/5.

Strictly punishing shut downs and damages makes sense to me though. They aren't really ideals that are at odds, if you consider the solution to both is to upgrade and properly maintain the infrastructure. To run a safe and effective power grid is really all that is asking for.

Perhaps you are on to something with regulations making it difficult for PG&E to upgrade the infrastructure, but I stand by the idea that it should become a public utility so that their goals align. I would say PG&E is a symptom rather than a scape goat, put any private utility in their place and the outcome would be the same.

I think we see the problem from a similar lens, I just differ in that I don't think less regulation would be the solution.

Regulation, or more accurately piss poor market design is precisely is how we got into this stupid mess. A big reason why we are here is because we first tried to limit the profit margins on the marginal cost of power/transmission which then incentivised utilities to go big on cap-ex because thigh the profit margins there were capped too the mangitude of expenditures weren't. So of course we turn around and start specifying how they can spend it when then incentivised them to cost cut and defer maintenance because that's what was most profitable given the now extreme regulatory barriers to entry.

And then of course there's the when Enron manipulation that was also just as much due to regulators not allowing the market to install new capacity where needed and forcing fixed pricing on retail distribution.

What we really need is a complete market and regulatory transition to something more sane like texas model of separating things into a generation and distribution market with more lightly regulated players.

PG&E intentionally put off upgrades for years, regardless of whether they were above ground or not.

> California has a really strange set of thoughts here... strictly punishing power shutdowns (based on wind speeds, which are only semi-predictable) and strictly punishing not shutting down.

I don't think its weird that the power utility is obligated to:

(1) provide reliable power or, failing that, proper notice of imminent disconnections (so that people don't die), and

(2) adequately maintain its infrastructure so that it doesn't burn down the state (so that people don't die)

If PG&E was honestly trying to do the things it is paid quite well to do, rather than fraudulently covering up that it is not doing them until that gets bunches of people killed and property destroyed (and doing the same thing time and again across different parts of the company), this wouldn't be a problem. When they committed 85 felonies leading to the 2018 fires, remember, they were on still on probation for federal felonies related to the San Bruno pipeline explosion.

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