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Comment by g42gregory | Hacker News Reader

Why do the affected California middle-class voters keep supporting government officials that do this to them? Where is the instinct of self-preservation here?

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Administrative law judges aren’t elected. The state legislature is free to write a law nullifying this decision.

CA is a single-party state. Everything is owned/appointed by the same party/group of people. In effect, middle-class is supporting all of that. The question is why?

Do you have any solid candidates that are making this a primary or general election issue?

How could there be any candidates like that when the uni-party essentially chooses who has a chance of winning a primary?

First, many races are non-partisan primaries — the top two vote getters square off. And usually these are moderate Dem vs. a progressive.

The Republicans that run usually wind up being cranks. They generally won’t dial down the culture war stuff enough to win over votes on a “good government” argument. And the ones that do like Kevin Faulconer, aren’t very popular with state-wide Republicans.

On issues like this, the Democratic Party in California isn't unified at all, there are pro-consumer and corporate factions. Furthermore we have top-two primaries, and it isn't that rare for a primary challenge to expel a legislator.

Many are not lawyers at all, as is the case here.

What gets me is that amazing innovation was taking place, and privately financed. CA households were themselves paying out of their own pockets to build the huge additional capacity needed for EVs, for instance. All that rooftop solar really adds up. It also makes PGE's job much easier. They barely have to lift a finger these days when it's sunny and not too hot.

But PG&E and its uniparty allies like the NRDC just couldn't have it. They want control. They can't support distributed, renewable energy, because it cuts their (very badly maintained and undeserving of support) monopoly on distribution.

Classic CA decision that only serves PG&E and insiders, not the people.

Needs to be reversed by the State Legislature.

I don't particularly like PG&E but you're misrepresenting the situation. They have to lift a lot of "fingers" when it's sunny in order to keep their portion of the grid stable. Unlike base load power plants, the power supplied by household solar panels constantly fluctuates. Some sort of grid scale storage might eventually solve the problem but for today that doesn't exist.

Honestly, no. PV does fluctuate, but at PG&E scale, the fluctuation is (a) smooth and (b) predictable. Demand for energy is going up, but demand for PG&E's brand of energy is going down. But state law guarantees PG&E revenues. That's the reason for these anti-consumer moves.

In any event, surely you agree that state granted monopoly utilities are public services. They're endowed with a monopoly to serve what the people need. PG&E seems to believe it has a right to live perpetually in... I don't know... 1988? But it doesn't.

Because there's no real political competition. In other "republics" bad moves like this cause people to drift to other parties, but in California the only other choice is the Republican party and the chasm between the two party is too large for people to move in large numbers.

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