It's not possible to get around "totally reliable, totally safe, inexpensive; pick two" by passing a law mandating all three.
> It's not possible to get around "totally reliable, totally safe, inexpensive; pick two" by passing a law mandating all three.
Oh I'm not asking for that at all. They used to be pretty reliable, pretty safe, kind of expensive. After neglecting lines they got to pretty reliable, not very safe, kind of expensive. With the shutdowns they shift to not very reliable, pretty safe, kind of expensive. They need to go back to where they started.
They would presumably take whichever option bankrupts them the slowest, but if all the roads lead to the same destination, eventually you end up there.
> They used to be pretty reliable, pretty safe, kind of expensive. After neglecting lines they got to pretty reliable, not very safe, kind of expensive. With the shutdowns they shift to not very reliable, pretty safe, kind of expensive. They need to go back to where they started.
I don't think that's even really what happened. It's not as if the occasional power line never caught fire thirty years ago.
The reason the Camp Fire was so destructive has more to do with climate change than PG&E maintenance. It could as easily have been a cigarette or a lightning strike and it would have been the same result.
But that's likely to continue to be the case. Fires in California are going to be more severe than they used to be.
Which may justify them being more conservative or spending more on maintenance than they ever did historically. But that isn't going to be free.
It looks like their vegetation management budget was less than 2% of revenue from 2013-2017.
Doubling or tripling that, well, it wouldn't be free but it wouldn't be a huge hardship either.
There are plenty of utility companies who manage to make a profit, deliver reliable service, and not start wildfires. If PGE can't, others would be happy to step up.
It's not exactly hard to fight back against that.
Make fires cost them enormous sums of money, and make outages also cost them enormous sums of money. Give them extremely clear monetary incentives to improve as many lines as possible and make shutdowns as small as possible.