PG&E surely knows that if it lets one city do this, then more will follow quickly. It will be left with the least profitable regions and cities that can't afford to/don't have the credit for this transition. That would ultimately leave the remaining customers in an even less affordable position.
Maybe these expensive-to-serve regions need a different model of power generation.
Possibly, but that's orthogonal to my comment. Point is that there will still be cities that have to shoulder PG&E costs not because they have fires but because they can't afford to purchase and maintain their own grid, or don't have the political strength to get it done.
>Or a fancy office conference table Even smaller order of magnitude than executive comp >offsite team building exercises in Hawaii. Source this actually happens to an extent that would materially affect the balance sheet?
They add up. Private plane: https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/executives-at-pg-e-h... You hire your buddy’s company as a consultant or contractor, too. At a sweet rate.
>to an extent that would materially affect the balance sheet?
I used to live in a small town in Michigan which had city provided power using a dam. It was inexpensive and highly reliable. But every couple of years the big power company in the state would try and get the city to sell them the utility. After I moved a city council for whatever reason ended up selling. As a result the cost of electricity immediately doubled and power outages occurred regularly due to reduced maint…
I've lived in a few dozen cities (most very, very rural) in the US, and The Bay has, by far, the worst electricity out of any of them. We have longer outages as a planned practice than I'd have from ice storms knocking down half the forest or waves partially flooding the town. As an outside observer, the fact that PG&E can lie to the state and request money for maintenance, subsequently sending that money to sharehol…
You guys are getting full days without power? That’s disappointing. I’m in Australia and since moving a decade ago to a suburb with underground power, I think we’ve had maybe three or four outages that lasted long enough to notice, and all were fixed within a few hours.
Out of context Canadians are ... out of context. We are discussing utilities in California. California and Quebec could not be more different in terms of climate and fire risk. I can't wait for you to justify the claim that fire risk is the same in California and Quebec. Every place in Quebec can generally expect precipitation every other day on average and the normal number of consecutive dry days in California ever…
Quebec is 4x as large as California, has far more forested land, and is often very dry in late summer. It also has massive snowstorms, ice storms, which bring down vegetation, and ranges from -40F up to 100F yearly, depending. We can nitpick on specifics, but by no means is California more rural, or more forested. Quebec is also far less populous, and has a far more hostile environment. Hydro Quebec does well, becaus…
Don’t make shit up. Quebec fire risk is much, much lower than California. Both companies have to maintain vegetation around the lines. HQ’s risk of vegetation outages is outages for some customers on a feeder. California’s is the state burns down. It’s just not remotely the same.
I’m willing to believe HQ does it better but the challenges ahead of them are wayyyy different
Is this a problem though? Utilities will become more expensive for rural properties, but if those people are producing product that people need, they can just slightly bump prices to cover their electricity costs, which the consumers can cover with their new found savings on utilities. The real benefit is that the people who don't have any reason to actually be rural, say remote software developers, will now have to…
Thing is, it wouldn’t be _slightly_. If you’re a power company who just does rural customers, you’re probably going to be looking at charging rates so high that people simply can’t pay them.
They are currently being paid right now though. So it's possible for the population to fund it. The products being produced would go up roughly the same as the discount you got on power.
I think it's very important to define who's being optimally served when declaring a market ideology "best". Free markets are demonstrably better at servicing capital, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't equate to optimum outcomes for the proletariat (why isn't there a better word for this, I can just see the redbaiting coming from a mile away).
> Free markets are demonstrably better at servicing capital This premise is highly questionable. Certainly for competitive markets it's entirely false. Uncompetitive markets suffer largely the same failure mode as government bureaucracies, but it's not even clear that this is actually worse, because government bureaucracies are susceptible to not only charging bloated service fees for mediocre service, they can also…
If you find that premise highly questionable produce a cogent explanation for why real wages have been flat as a fucking strap for the last 40 years despite massive gains to GDP. Once you've cleared that hurdle your next task is justifying the current massively skewed (and worsening) income distribution in the US. Clear that bar and all that's left is justifying private equity eating everything from fast food franchises to the healthcare system.
Apologists love to complain that isn't the product of a true market but that dog doesn't hunt. We have the economic system we have. We call it capitalism. It produces the above mentioned (and countless other) excerable outcomes. No excuses.
I think a related thing that many people get confused by is the idea that market forces even exist. It's very rare these days to find industry segments where participants actively compete on quality or price. The whole idea is a holdover from how business was done 40 years ago.
Market forces do exist. I'm not sure why you think they do not. You are plain incorrect to claim that it is the exception for industries to compete on quality and price, at least in the U.S.
How certain are you of your position? There are 3 major mobile telecoms in the country. Their service plans and coverage are roughly comparable. There are a handful of parent corporations that own fast food franchises in the country. Their product offerings and price points are roughly the same and all opportunistically raised prices after supply side disruptions from the pandemic were largely resolved. Most consumer appliances (regardless of brand) are assembled from parts made in the same factory. Similar features, similar life expectancy, similar price. Same with packaged food brands, clothing, furniture, building materials, this list is basically endless, and a product of a few decades of unchecked corporate mergers and acquisitions and the steady march of private equity into just about every market niche in existence.
Rural electrification was needed at the time. In many cases, it no longer is (distributed generation, microgrids, etc vs large, distant generators having to transport power to residential load centers). This is very similar to how Africa will leapfrog the legacy model with cheap solar and batteries. In Australia, they have a model of colocating stationary battery storage in neighborhoods to balance buffer solar produ…
In Australia that policy was rolled out basically this year and is still in the trial stage.
The fundamentals are proven (energy arbitrage, grid services, grid forming, all with battery storage). In Australia, the economics are very favorable considering high rooftop solar penetration rates. The trial will be successful, the debate is how successful.