PG&E claims no connection between rate increases and $2.2B jump in earnings

That isn't really on the same scale as 1.4 billion litres of hexavalent chromium. I'm not sure if they are meant to be the same incident, but at $10 million/life, $100 million in savings at cost of 8 lives would be an appropriate design choice. We have to draw a line somewhere. I don't think that is the comparison you're trying to draw, but I'm not sure what you are trying to say, so...

Life be risky. Perfect safety is not a reasonable goal.

The presumed legal duty to break the law in the interest of shareholders is grossly exaggerated... Nobody can sue you for failing to commit a crime on their behalf.

IMHO the problem is that utilities are like no other company in that they have a monopoly but are supposed to be reigned in by regulators. But the vast majority of regulatory bodies are either captured or incompetent at regulation.

Public versus privately traded doesn't matter as much as the fundamental conflict, wherein they profit more when the costs increase, and there's no penalty for literally killing people.

HIPAA violations result in jail time for executives. Meanwhile PGE illegally raids safety fund accounts to pay executive bonuses while regular people are killed due to failing infrastructure.

CPUC and PGE executives need to face serious consequences, and most certainly jail time, for their malfeasance.

The public companies also suffer from corruption and such. I guess there just must be some law of a universe where if you have a sufficient sized captive base of income, people who might be inclined to abuse their position to take advantage of the situation will strive to take advantage of the situation. Then it becomes not a matter of if there is any corruption, but when will you end up with a corruptible individual in a position that can be corrupted.

Maybe these organizations or government bodies can be organized like a RAID away. Mirror these positions of power and use redundant pools. Identify corrupt bits by comparing results between these mirrors and hot swap the corrupted positions for a new candidate. Incrementally replace your array on schedule to avoid chance of future corruption and to mitigate batch effect.

"Fiduciary duty" is probably the single most damaging policy/legislative decision that was made in US history. Even though it technically doesn't force companies to chase short term gains above all else, it still creates enough perverse incentives to create a lot of harm.

Maybe every publicly traded company should be subject to a fiduciary liability: when convicted, the judge can order an imposed hit on share price, and forbid dividends for a lengthy period.

What the actual fuck. I live in Germany and pay ~35c/kWh, I thought power was supposed to be cheap in the states.

What are the two things summed? Are they really both c/kWh? Just confused because in the UK they'd be p/day and p/kWh respectively, and the numbers look 'in the right ballpark'. (Except that it would be mental to have the standing charge vary according to peak/not time.)

This comment reeks of victim blaming. Natural disasters happen literally everywhere on earth. When someone's house is destroyed by a tornado in Tornado Valley do you tell them "Oh well you were really irresponsible for living in tornado valley"? Or how about Florida, which has been hit by over 40% of US-landfall hurricanes? Do you tell the hundreds of thousands of people whose homes have been destroyed that they should have just packed up shop and moved away since they get regular hurricanes?

It's only wildfire prone due to the incompetence (corruption?) of PG&E and public forest management. Your argument only works if people aren't the cause of a significant amount of the risk.

What do you mean by "free market"?

In any case, that might be a tangential, as regulated utilities are decidedly what nobody thinks of as a free market. They are a monopoly, but trade off regulation of their pricing and investment decisions in return for the monopoly status.

Profit at any cost is absolutely a problem.

Why is the state government so adverse to nationalizing them vs allowing them to leach off of their collective customer base? $2B in profits after a rate hike? Outrageous. Who cares what it costs to nationalize at this point, y’all are already getting raked over the coals with no end in sight.

Power grid operators are basically a textbook example of a natural monopoly. In other words, it wouldn’t make sense to have multiple companies running power lines to houses. This isn’t like a coffee shop where it makes sense for there to be multiple in the same neighborhood competing on price.

I’m not sure whether you will agree wholly or partly with this, your comment can be read more than one way. But several child commenters seem to be reading it as “Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem”. So I’m going to address the ever more psychotic Reaganomics that still haven’t “trickled down” 40 years later and how that ties into the energy situation in California. He won his second term the year I was born, in California, so I watched all of this since like, 1989 and was hearing about it in the womb.

Enron is arguably the nastiest collapse of any large company due to sanctioned crime, there’s just not another word, a bunch of people went to jail.

They lobbied to get energy business de-regulated, and it was so extreme that they had the pull to get something like half the base load generation turned off, spiking the price per kilowatt hour over 4k USD at one point, fire departments were rescuing people from elevators in blackouts.

Capitalism sounds awesome: I hope I live to see it. But it’s not practiced in the United States in any credible way: you’re always hearing “it not what you know, it’s who you know”, “you get jobs through your network”, “the value of an Ivy university degree is the people you meet”. “The YC network is an advantage no startup should turn down”.

That’s not capitalism, that’s how to get a decent pair of shoes in East Berlin in the 1970s. Or so I’ve been told.

Our system is a capture kleptocracy with a core economic engine built around “indentured” labor, and has been since Jonestown Virginia in the 17th century. For a time people from Africa got by far the worst of it to date, that’s substantially (though by no means completely) addressed now, and now you see headline after headline (like this one) about staggering corporate profits, or stagnant wages, or both pricing traditionally solidly middle class people out of an existence in which they have any real choice about whether to work, for who, and for how much. If you’ve got a diabetic kid, and the insulin (that’s basically too cheap to meter anywhere else in the “developed” world), you don’t get to “negotiate the value of you labor on a fair, free, transparent, and competitive marketplace. That’s just one example of one friend who got popped with a pay decrease recently and has no real option but to take it.

Dumbass children(-in-law) will be hanging around the White House, doing crime no matter who wins the next Presidental Election. You see the occasional wealthy or successful person who friggin ground it out from nothing, those people exist, everyone knows a few examples, but it’s not a defensible claim that this is typical.

Jon Stewart (who for some reason is not regarded as patriotic by many in spite of choosing better treatment of 9/11 first responders and their families as his “wedge” issue, laboring tirelessly and often shaming corrupt Congresspeople by standing on their steps personally), recently interviewed Larry Summers (who brought you hits like crippling the CFTC in a no minutes hatchet job on Brooksley Born, who called the 2008 financial collapse and regulated the derivatives and would have personally prevented the collapse):

https://youtu.be/tU3rGFyN5uQ?si=E6bLq1jYxRMeqpc6

Judge for yourself, but Summers sounds pretty full of it I think, and I think there’s a grudging consensus around that.

The topic being a planned increase in unemployment (openly declared by the FOMC) to reduce wages (this is for real) to combat inflation (as defined by the CPI and a dartboard).

Stewart’s assertion, and I think, that of any humane person, is that corporate profits can’t be shattering record after record while wages are suppressed in broad daylight.

I don't think they said profit is the problem. They said it being expected increased profits year on year is the problem.

This has roughly been my experience in San Diego with SDG&E as well. We are renting with mostly older appliances, including an electric water heater that with an energy rating sticker suggesting a cost of nearly $100 month - the numbers look much better on it because they use 12c kWh lol.

We do nearly all vacuuming, washer, dryer and dishwasher on the weekends when it's cheapest. We don't use an AC or heater. But, we do cook nearly every night on an ancient electric stove and I do work from home with 1 or 2 32" monitors. It seems impossible to pay much less than $150 month.

> Are they sweeping all the state/city mandates into the delivery charge?

Nope, not on my bill.

Where in Europe is gasoline only $5/gallon, or do you mean their local rate for gasoline?

I was surprised recently when BC’s gas prices were about the same as WA’s, it’s almost always been more expensive in my lifetime.

I have a Rivian. It's equivalent to 16.7 mpg given its mi/kWh, and electricity and gasoline costs.

The cost of gas has come down in the city - around $4.30/gal for where I fill up. So yes, it’s actually cheaper to drive an ICE than an EV in SF.

Yes, Model 3 charging works out about the same sa fuelling a Prius C.

One would think solar is the answer given such price per kWh. PG&E have lobbied for NEM3 and got it, to make rooftop solar less viable, look that up!

In Florida FPL has an unlimited non peak hours EV charging plan for around $30 a month. Imagine your bill for driving each month never exceeding $30.

> Certain political parties hate anything not making a profit

Since we're talking about the one party state of California, I assume you're talking about Democrats.

Yes.

It works in much of the world. Plenty of places have have government run the power companies.... like, for example, the capital city of California, or the largest city in California (LA). And SF, another major city, is looking into having a municipal power company as well.

I grew up in a small town on the east coast, and we had a municipal electricity company. Service was better and cheaper. And we got discounts on next month's electricity if the company accidentally ran a profit the prior month.

Americans have such a visceral reaction to their own perception of communism they forget that it can work, even in America.

State-run services are not communism. Don't be obtuse.

We have state owned electricity company and it's not communism ( very loaded term )

For the current year. Not last year.

That may well be true. I suppose then we should simply post our usage. Our highest bill (at $199.88) had 327 kWh total of energy consumption and 31 "therms" (apparently about 3.27 GJ) of gas energy. I would obviously prefer they measure gas by volume or mass of it provided but overall that doesn't seem outrageous.