Hydro Quebec serves a far, far tinier population than California, and has equal fire hazard, if not more, and far more untamed nature than California. Yet Hydro Quebec doesn't have PG&E's issues, and delivers the least expensive power in North America.
There are reasons for the lower costs, but my point is, they maintain their lines. They cut back brush. They deal with encroachment. The problem is PG&E does not perform the maintenance they need to.
All complaints by PG&E "oh, that's so hard to do, poor us!" is just wavy hand stuff, lies, and bull.
From what I've read, they just see trimming back brush and trees as "cost", and barely do it as a cost saving measure. Don't buy their bull! The problem is 100% them. Other power suppliers do not have this problem!
It seems that numerous remote communities are diesel powered, I know this is the case in the far north (https://www.canada.ca/en/natural-resources-canada/news/2023/...). Are there any communities in California not connected to the grid even in the very remote areas? I suspect the cost of electricity and everything in these communities is very high and also subsidized.
A few other questions I'm wondering is how much of the rural infrastructure in Quebec relies on the connections to the various (remote) hydropower projects (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Quebec_M...). Are communities very far from those connections also served. I can't find a map of actual communities connected to the electric grid.
Interestingly California has over 95% of the population living in urban areas compared to 70-80% in Quebec, not really sure which that would favor.
Yes, PGE sucks. However, I still think my argument stands that the infrastructure could be much cheaper if the 95% of people living in urban California weren't paying for the rural infrastructure regardless of the nature of tree trimming costs.
The fundamental issue is further complicated by the government involvement in infrastructure expansions and funding.
In your case, if the government passes a funding bill to bring power into remote communities, why should citizens pay again?
My understanding is this based more off weather-driven demands (Marin has much less AC needs than Davis), but still, there are regional differences in pricing.
Here's the real crux of what you're suggesting though: utilities are extremely regulated in what they can do, so it's quite possible the utilities commission said they can do price discrimination off of regional load differences but not off of a more nebulous "grid impact / risk score". The latter opens up all sorts of thorny equity questions (eg is what you're describing just redlining poorer rural communities through another mechanism?)
Setting prices based on costs is not redlining. If we want to subsidize poorer people in rural communities, we can do that through a means-tested program just like we do for the urban poor.
I see no reason why people who don't live in cities should be punished or burdened with higher access fees, especially if those people can't afford to move/live elsewhere. It may cost a lot more to run utilities out to users in remote areas but it costs very little to run them to users in ultra-dense urban areas and that's where the vast majority of the users are so it should all balance out.
Kind of like the postal service. Or insurance.
If people want wealth redistribution, then do it with wealth taxes and cash.
You can't just buy fire insurance when your house is burning down, so you shouldn't be able to have "electricity insurance" when you buy a far away house
The postal service is necessary to do things like send you IRS communications, drivers licenses, jury duty, etc.
When the government no longer uses paper to communicate with people we can talk about privatizing the postal service
Electricity bills are typically separated into generation, transmission and distribution.
The problem is that electricity prices in California historically lumped a bunch of infrastructure costs into the per-unit costs for a kilowatt hour of electricity. This was an implicit subsidy for anyone whose costs to the electricity system came disproportionately more from infrastructure maintenance than from energy consumption. It has become a growing problem in recent years as rooftop solar has proliferated, since solar households are (mostly) still connected to and reliant on the grid but are consuming much less energy from the grid.
The most straightforward solution would be to split out energy consumption and infrastructure charges and bill each customer for their actual infrastructure needs and energy consumption. This is politically unpalatable because it would raise costs more than average for low-energy-consumption customers (typically lower income households).
The better solution that wouldn't hurt lower income households would be to change billing like proposed above but offer state financial assistance to low-income households in proportion to the old implied subsidies. This way the economic distortion would end but low-income groups wouldn't suffer. I don't know why California didn't do this.
The worse solution that California has selected is to charge households a fixed connection charge according to income rather than according to infrastructure costs. This maintains the economic distortions of the old billing system since it means that there is no incentive to avoid wasteful infrastructure. If you're affluent and you're going to be soaked on electricity service either way, you might as well live in a big sprawling rural property since you'll not get any economic benefit from living in more infrastructure-thrifty urban or suburban housing.
Meter cost plus demand charge is what would match usage to utility infrastructure cost.
The weirdo progressive rates will push parties to grid detach, which will not be good for the economics of the grid.