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‘This Did Not Go Well’: Inside PG&E’s Blackout Control Room

nytimes.com

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Re: ‘This Did Not Go Well’: Inside PG&E’s Blackout Control Room

#41

Post by DaveEM »

pascalxus wrote: post #16

The wildfire situation in CA was not helped by all those houses so darn close to each other.

Houses close together in an urban environment reduces risk rather than increasing it. For example, Redding Electric Utility (REU) and Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) did not shut off power to the cities they service while PG&E, which services areas outside each of those cities, did. SMUD talks about urban areas being low risk at https://www.smud.org/en/In-Our-Community/Safety-Tips/Wildfir....

Re: ‘This Did Not Go Well’: Inside PG&E’s Blackout Control Room

#42

Post by sidlls »

sargram01 wrote: post #27

I used to think power outages we’re mainly a developing country problem, this definitely changes my understanding of the tiers of maturity of countries.

Many aspects of PG&E should bring to mind developing countries: corruption, graft, incompetent management, etc. It's an embarrassing situation to be in, and both PG&E and the state government are culpable.

Re: ‘This Did Not Go Well’: Inside PG&E’s Blackout Control Room

#43

Post by kolbe »

simpsond wrote: post #28

Public utilities should not be for profit companies, especially public listed companies. They shouldn’t aim to maximize profits. If they were to instead maximize utility, they may re-invest in infrastructure more heavily and put power lines under ground. Maybe I am missing something and someone can offer a counter argument.

I think one glaring hole is that it’s very hard to incentivize people to maximize someone else’s utility. You don’t just say the words “maximize utility” and it just gets done.

Re: ‘This Did Not Go Well’: Inside PG&E’s Blackout Control Room

#45

Post by saalweachter »

simpsond wrote: post #28

Public utilities should not be for profit companies, especially public listed companies. They shouldn’t aim to maximize profits. If they were to instead maximize utility, they may re-invest in infrastructure more heavily and put power lines under ground. Maybe I am missing something and someone can offer a counter argument.

My general metric for whether something should be a function of government (or so heavily regulated by government that the distinction is moot) is "Does this business function best as a monopoly?" By default, I assume everything that does should be a government function, and everything that shouldn't should be regulated to avoid becoming a monopoly.

So by default, I would assume that electricity distribution should be a government function, but electric generation could probably work fine as a set of non-monopolies competing to feed energy into the publicly-run grid at the lowest prices.

Re: ‘This Did Not Go Well’: Inside PG&E’s Blackout Control Room

#46

Post by cranky_coder »

rb808 wrote: post #39
simpsond wrote: post #28

Public utilities should not be for profit companies, especially public listed companies. They shouldn’t aim to maximize profits. If they were to instead maximize utility, they may re-invest in infrastructure more heavily and put power lines under ground. Maybe I am missing something and someone can offer a counter argument.

You'll say that until the company is full of public service workers who dont care and electricity costs 3x as much. Pretty much every developed country has privatized electricity generation to keep prices down.

Why do we have to assume a publicly owned utility wouldn’t be able to focus on safety and efficiency at the same time? I mean, there’s data on Medicare being more efficient than private insurance[0]. Why is this different? I’m not sure I’m convinced that the profit incentive needs to exist for them to worry about costs.

[0] https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/blog/private-insurance-vs-m...

Re: ‘This Did Not Go Well’: Inside PG&E’s Blackout Control Room

#47

Post by maxerickson »

patfla wrote: post #34
simpsond wrote: post #28

Public utilities should not be for profit companies, especially public listed companies. They shouldn’t aim to maximize profits. If they were to instead maximize utility, they may re-invest in infrastructure more heavily and put power lines under ground. Maybe I am missing something and someone can offer a counter argument.

Putting power lines underground is very expensive - meaning, very nearly prohibitively so. Or actually prohibitively so when you consider that PG&E has to serve vast areas of wilderness in California. Paradise (Camp fire) was sufficiently west that I think its own power lines did not travel through Natl Forest however if I'm not mistaken it was hit by fire from the east (pushed by a wind out of the east), further up…

If there are areas that we can't afford to safely provide power to, we shouldn't provide power to those areas anymore.

This is course a bummer given the past effort to provide power to those areas, but maybe it's okay to acknowledge mistakes.

Re: ‘This Did Not Go Well’: Inside PG&E’s Blackout Control Room

#48

Post by chrisweekly »

patfla wrote: post #34
simpsond wrote: post #28

Public utilities should not be for profit companies, especially public listed companies. They shouldn’t aim to maximize profits. If they were to instead maximize utility, they may re-invest in infrastructure more heavily and put power lines under ground. Maybe I am missing something and someone can offer a counter argument.

Putting power lines underground is very expensive - meaning, very nearly prohibitively so. Or actually prohibitively so when you consider that PG&E has to serve vast areas of wilderness in California. Paradise (Camp fire) was sufficiently west that I think its own power lines did not travel through Natl Forest however if I'm not mistaken it was hit by fire from the east (pushed by a wind out of the east), further up…

Need it be an all-or-nothing proposition? I imagine there being some particular places where it'd make good sense to bury some lines.

Re: ‘This Did Not Go Well’: Inside PG&E’s Blackout Control Room

#49

Post by Scoundreller »

rb808 wrote: post #39
simpsond wrote: post #28

Public utilities should not be for profit companies, especially public listed companies. They shouldn’t aim to maximize profits. If they were to instead maximize utility, they may re-invest in infrastructure more heavily and put power lines under ground. Maybe I am missing something and someone can offer a counter argument.

You'll say that until the company is full of public service workers who dont care and electricity costs 3x as much. Pretty much every developed country has privatized electricity generation to keep prices down.

I don’t think that’s matched Americans’ experience with internet prices, and that’s with a few competitors.

Re: ‘This Did Not Go Well’: Inside PG&E’s Blackout Control Room

#50

Post by electic »

rb808 wrote: post #39
simpsond wrote: post #28

Public utilities should not be for profit companies, especially public listed companies. They shouldn’t aim to maximize profits. If they were to instead maximize utility, they may re-invest in infrastructure more heavily and put power lines under ground. Maybe I am missing something and someone can offer a counter argument.

You'll say that until the company is full of public service workers who dont care and electricity costs 3x as much. Pretty much every developed country has privatized electricity generation to keep prices down.

This isn't accurate. In the Bay Area some cities have decided to run their own public utilities instead of relying on PG&E.

For example, Santa Clara runs their own public utility[2]. The average resident pays about 10.4 cents per KWh. That's about 30 percent less than rates PG&E charges.

Also, their energy is greener and their infrastructure is better maintained.

The problem with for profit utilities is that they are incentivized to keep things as lean as possible. They neglect maintenance of their infrastructure and use that money for bonuses and dividends. You can see that played out here [1].

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/PG-E-diverted-safety-...

[2] http://www.siliconvalleypower.com/

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