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Comment by qweqwweqwe-90i | Hacker News Reader

Thanks to the "Friends of the Earth" and "Natural Resources Defense Council" for pushing us to coal, natural gas, and blackouts... Also raising rates to pay for the premature decomissioning.

' https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-scrambles-to-find-el...

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The blackouts are because of fire-risk from transmission lines, and this is largely because PGE paid out bonuses instead of paying for needed repairs to the transmission system.

This group of corrupt execs are the same people entrusted to make safety and maintenance decisions for Diablo Canyon.

While it's true that the bonus scandal is a thing, that's about trimming trees in urban areas near powerlines, and is unrelated to the problem of how one can run lines through millions of acres of forests that should never exist in California.

The state has ~150 million dead trees ready to ignite, and needs to reduce the size of its forests by roughly the size of Maine in order to get back to a safer fire risk. That is just irresponsible forest management.

When you are in that situation, needing to run power lines across a tinderbox that should have never been allowed to exist, then you're not going to be able to have reliable power no matter the bonus scandal.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/corporations/pacific-gas-el...

"PG&E paid top execs $17 million in bonuses from 2012 to 2017"

You really think 17 million would have made a difference? Is that enough money to even bury 1 mile of transmission lines at Californian's exorbitant infrastructure cost?

Why bury when all those lines needed was replacement of worn parts? Burying power cables is expensive and increases maintenance costs an order of magnitude.

Much cheaper to replace hooks that are worn through so the cables don’t fall off the tower and start a fire.

Should probably also add ground fault interruption as a protection measure too. I saw a quite-impressive video of some hardware that was going in on parts of the Australian grid that managed to turn off super-quick as the cable arced to the earth, limiting the heating energy tremendously.

Your reliance on the far-right WSJ as a source for this makes me skeptical that this is solely the fault of environmental groups.

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