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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile in California, PG&E underfunded maintenance, perhaps because regulators squeezed too hard? Eventually we had things like the San Bruno gas explosion and wildfires so bad that PG&E went bankrupt.

Finding the optimal amount of regulation seems difficult. It seems like too blunt an instrument. Incentives are no substitute for technical people who want to do what's right.

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Where on this chart do you see PG&E needing to cut maintenance costs before the wildfires? https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PCG/pacific-gas-el...

I don’t think that chart has enough detail to understand what happened.

Government owning the utility would be the answer. But politicians like to have a 3rd party to blame for price hikes and poor service .

I’m unconvinced that a change to new management, government-run or not, would automatically get technically competent people hired and give them the decision-making power to do things right. Sure, it might, but it’s hardly guaranteed.

I think a lot of this boils down to the fact that you can make large multiples of the amount you'd make working on this kind of thing by working on something relatively non-productive like finance, consulting, adtech, etc. A large percentage of my engineering class went into one of those. One of the smartest guys I knew there, who studied nuclear engineering, now does healthcare private equity.

The incentives are all messed up. We should do some combination of making these jobs more attractive and making those relatively extractive jobs less attractive.

If only our energy infrastructure could be run like the DMV.

How many fires were started by PG&E gas explosions vs power lines?

Thank you for pointing out why it should be a public utility that does the right thing rather then a private company who was willing to burn the state down for profit.

Public utilities can also face perverse incentives, and be run poorly.

Commercial enterprises at least can face some competition! But with infrastructure like last-mile gas pipelines, it's tricky, and the companies end up being local monopolies. Hence the trouble: a monopoly has very different incentives than a company actually competing on the market.

lol. PG&E has had a culture of malfeasance since at least the 60’s - which is why all the records on those buried pipelines and power lines were missing or never recorded at all. Despite it being a regulatory requirement.

It just got worse as they passed more and more of it into investor pockets.

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