While PG&E is definitely at fault here, I feel California deserves this type of treatment. With the extremely stringent regulations which place PG&E at risk for massive fines/penalty for wildfires even if they take all possible precautions, this is the logical outcome of a company trying to stay afloat.
> With the extremely stringent regulations which place PG&E at risk for massive fines/penalty for wildfires even if they take all possible precautions, this is the logical outcome of a company trying to stay afloat.
No, as noted in April by the judge overseeing PG&E’s criminal probation for it's culpability in causing the 2010 San Bruno gas explosion (probation of which it's role on the 2018 fires was ruled to be a violation), it's a result of the company knowingly maintaining an inadequate tree trimming budget while pumping out $4.5 billion to shareholders in dividends.
Sorry, if it's not PG&E it will be some guy with a cigarette, drunk campers, or lightning.
The root cause of this is hotter temperatures than the area is adapted to. They're up 3 deg F over average and rising. It's killing trees with drought paired with hotter fires than the native trees evolved to tolerate.
I don't mean to be gloomy but this is the just the beginning, it's getting much worse.
Is it though? That area is naturally a bundle of kindling. It's part of the lifecycle to burn, flourish, then burn again.
It's us grumpy humans who moved in and sought to control it who are the problem. If you live there, your infrastructure should be impervious to fire. Nothing less. Let it burn!
I think most of California understands that no system with hundreds of thousands of miles of equipment can be perfectly safe. However, from San Bruno, caused by faulty welds on installation [1], to continuing to use ancient equipment, there is plenty of room for safety increases. And PG&E is hardly struggling to stay afloat; they recorded over $0.5B of profit 18q3 [2]. Had they not twice burned down swaths of California, along with blowing up the odd city, they would be a nicely profitable company today.
> And PG&E is hardly struggling to stay afloat; they recorded over $0.5B of profit 18q3. Had they not twice burned down swaths of California, along with blowing up the odd city, they would be a nicely profitable company today.
Which is, IMO, part of the problem. A utility should not be a profit-seeking corporation. They should not be paying out dividends to investors. Aside from money set aside for an unexpected emergency, they should not have profits whatsoever; every penny should be reinvested into the system.
It's tempting to believe that you can optimize the system by removing the profit cut, but the world (including here in the US) has a lot of experience with public utilities and this doesn't appear to be the case. You can end up with a publicly owned utility that underinvests, gets lax about safety, and takes "easy" solutions instead of hard ones... but also doesn't have any incentive to cut costs, so power ends up being more expensive than it would even with the profit cut.
There is no perfect system. The social contract for private utilities is that they can run like private corporations and make a few percent profit (the public controls their pricing). With some significant failures, it tends to work. Public utilities fail too - Chernobyl would be of course be the canonical example.
> They should not be paying out dividends to investors
But... but... the power of free markets! The pension funds need safe investments!
Sarcasm aside: you are completely correct, but the US infrastructure needs so massive investments that there is no alternative to the private investment market given that many states have problems adequately funding basic cheap stuff such as schools.
> but the US infrastructure needs so massive investments that there is no alternative to the private investment market given that many states have problems adequately funding basic cheap stuff such as schools.
States would have less problem with that if they weren't bearing the costs of for-profit power.
> If the free market was in play this wouldn't be an issue.
You should try walking through a city with a freer market for taxis than you are used to. The externality of safety requires a heavily regulated market or you get freelancers and shell companies taking risks beyond their ability to cover.
Are you kidding? Try taking a taxi in a city with a monopoly given to one company. I much prefer freelancers like Uber drivers. You use fear to justify violence.
People thought that too until they ended up in accidents in their Uber and suddenly discovered the issues arising when travelling in a commercial vehicle with no commercial insurance.
Cheap electricity and convenient transportation for yourself at the cost of everyone else's health, well being and future is something a free market could offer and I'm not sure why you think I denied that.
You fail to demonstrate how more of that free market fixes safety problems. If you are suggesting the normal solution, you will end up creating stacks of regulation to force people into "free markets" for services they should buy to offset externalities such as risk to 3rd parties, which will in turn seek ways to create new externalities to cut their costs. That stack of turtles can either collapse under its own weight and need to pay usury rates or not actually address many of the externalities, or both..
I think what you don't get is that in a state the size of California, ancient and faulty equipments is part of the course. Not everything can be sparkling new w/o incurring massive costs. Also, even then California regulations will fault PG&E for any fire they may have caused despite them taking all possible precautions (including replacing old equipments).
California burning down has been occurring for centuries - PG&E or not. Now what is happening is that real people are suffering because of no electricity since PG&E is doing the most logical thing it should have done even 2 yrs back.
