It's a natural monopoly - literally no competition is possible because no other player could overbuild another electricity grid in their service area.

Society should not allow a for-profit entity to operate as a monopoly (because all monopolies want to reduce service and maintenance, and raise prices as much as possible), so such a utility should be required to operate on a non-profit basis.

They were granted huge rate increases to work on things like safety and infrastructure for EVs, but wow, $2b just about matches the rate increases.

https://www.independent.com/2024/04/27/heres-the-real-reason...

For comparison average residential electricity rate for a california resident is ~ 35c/kwh

I'm not nielsbot so I obviously can't say for sure but I think I share a similar view that in an ideal world, they should only be charging what they need to survive (i.e. breakeven) in order to provide the greatest utility (pun intended) to the people.

However, it's not an ideal world, and things like disasters, grid upgrades, paradigm shifts all happen occasionally and tend to require mass amounts of capital to get through. So maybe not $0, but also probably not $2B :)

There are several non-profit organizations that act as public power utilities in California, as well as in other states.

There prices are usually significantly lower than publicly-traded public utilities, although there are exceptions, because they can still be poorly run.

One angle is they’ve been responsible for a number of major wildfires in California, so they should be reinvesting any profits in upgrades/maintenance/technology to prevent that in the future.

Electricity is not a luxury good. People need it to survive. We should not allow companies to have control over these basic necessities, since companies invariably care about profit over human wellbeing (and is mandated as such if publicly traded)

If PG&E sold hand crafted watches, sure let them do what they want. Earn the big bucks.

If PG&E puts profit above all else, what happens? Equipment that should be upgraded a long time ago fails, more power outages, dystopian stuff.

Conversely, help me understand why a for-profit company has any right to operate services for the public good?

Capitalism works in certain places, with strict rules in place. There’s lots of places where it shouldn’t apply, and those places are where we value people over $$&

Because they killed dozens of people and destroyed a town though lack of re-investment and monitoring their infrastructure.

Its not that it should exist as a private company that makes no profit; PG&E--a firm that is basically California's most prolific mass killer with a sideline in diverting ratepayer funds into lobbying against public utility districts--shouldn't exist as a private company at all,