People calling for nationalization are focusing on the wrong thing. For the reasons you mention, utilities need regulation. Both government ownership and rate regulated private monopolies are a model that works routinely around the world. The ownership structure therefore can’t be the reason for PG&E’s problems. The problem instead seems to be California. PG&E was heavily regulated by the CPUC the whole time. What was CPUC doing wrong that the regulators in Germany, Spain, not to mention other US states are doing right? Bigger picture, why is it California that seems to suffer from all of these problems? Among the worst schools in the country. Housing prices out of control. Massive failed investments in public infrastructure? Cities running out of water?
Because they don't have a PG&E in those places. Maybe the problem is with the culture at PG&E and not with the regulators? I can't figure out if your argument is that there wasn't enough regulation in California or there was too much of it.
The downside is that the taxpayers are now forever on the hook of paying shareholder dividends for electricity.
The best outcome in this whole situation is that PG&E is sued into bankruptcy and nationalized, leaving the shareholders with nothing. Owning a government-protected monopoly-utility that is bad at its job should not be a license to print money, regardless whether or not you ponied up some cash up front. Sometimes, you make bad investments.
Especially since the CPUC is not widely understood, this structure allows elected officials to present themselves as not being responsible for the tradeoffs PG&E has to make, even as the CPUC actually makes those decisions for them.
I’d be more curious if you had a reason why you think state-owned would be worse than state-regulated.
To me it seems better for sure. A panacea? No, but better than where we’re at today
Just looking over the Wikipedia page [0] it appears PG&E has a guaranteed rate of profit and monopoly status over certain aspects of the infrastructure. The problem with governments owning businesses is that they don't respond to market signals in the form of profits. Under this regulation, PG&E is also buffered from needing to respond to market signals in the form of profits.
The intellectual justification for privatising anything is to expose it to the need to fight to make profits which then enforces a sort of discipline on resource use. Regulation that privatises a company then shields it from the need to try hard to succeed is pretty much strictly worse than nationalising.
That is a likely perspective from the sort of person who believes that the political system is bad.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Compa...
Oregon, Washington, and BC have bad fires too (not as bad, but bad nonetheless), but the rainy season comes much earlier. Here on the west coast you can set your watch to when the rainy season starts. Washington it starts within a couple weeks of early October, Oregon late October (I grew up there and never remember a dry Halloween, but it was also one of the first rains in months). California is so big it varies, but weatherman down here in the bay is saying mid-November at the earliest.
Low population in the forested areas is a factor, but less so. We just have fewer fires and they’re easier to fight.
There is also the type of trees, California is full of eucalyptus (arguably an invasive special from Australia) that constantly dumps debris in the form of oil rich bark and leaves and no natural insects are around to break it down.
Oregon and Washington don’t have that problem.
Arizona and Nevada have nothing to burn. The Nevada border is almost entirely huge mountains. It seems odd that 2 straight lines meeting at Lake Tahoe would be such a dramatic change from wet to dry, but it is. Arizona doesn’t look any different from south-East California, but that’s also probably the only part of California not affected by fires.
The Diablo/Santa Ana winds are also a big factor especially in Southern California. Those are ironically caused by the rainstorms in Oregon and Washington. The winds come in, full up the massive Great Basin of Nevada and Utah and eventually spill out over the mountains in California causing super, super dry and hot winds that can be the level of hurricanes. It’s this time of year when Oregon and Washington are getting rain and California is not that is especially precarious.
I’ve lived in both the Bay and LA for years now and I’ve actually never been awake for them. They only last a few hours and it seems only at night. I’ve seen the aftermath though, tons and tons of tree debris everywhere. In LA the palm trees even fall over and it looks like a war zone the next day.
I’m sure they’d have to make reasonable payments to the shareholders, but it’s not like PG&E is in a very good bargaining position here
Who's going to provide power to 16 million customers in California?
I’m just saying there is a path where the government can take over the utility that doesn’t require waiting until PG&E goes completely bankrupt.
Nearly all of the situations we've found ourselves in, be it power, internet, water, etc. are because we allow companies to have local monopolies over distribution systems, because we don't want to pay for the infrastructure up front, or take loans out as a towns.
It's a lot easier as a politician to say that someone else will pay for something than to say that we as a municipality are going to issue 10 year bonds or something so that we can fund an infrastructure project. We then freak out 10 years down the line when we realize we're stuck with a bad system because we sold ourselves out.
Over the past 50 years PG&E has made a game out of mis-managing the transmission infrastructure, selling it to the state, then buying it back at a discount.
California needs to own the entire utility and not just keep giving it un-warranted subsidies and gifts.
All PG&E executives should be imprisoned for the hundreds of people they have murdered in the past decade between their fires and the San Bruno explosion.
It is never in the best interest of the people to give critical public infrastructure to rent seeking flam-flam artists.
I'm not saying I fully support private roads or public roads, but the worst combination is a little bit of both...
If local municipalities or the state own the poles, you can have a better incentive system where homeowners hooking up well-maintained solar/wind to the grid helps keep the grid humming and lowers costs for everyone.
You actually don't.
When you are generating most of your own power during renewable generation peaks, and drawing power from the grid, during renewable lulls/peak usage, you are in fact using the grid as a giant, personal battery. (One that would run you in the order of ~$50,000, if you were to build one out for yourself.)
Electricity is relatively cheap, especially during peak renewable generation times. Maintaining the grid is what's expensive.
And NL is the least “socialist” place I’ve even known
You can not renew contracts when service is not satisfactory and any lawsuits are on the operator, not the taxpayer.
In a perfect world power consumers and producers can just buy and sell into the marketplace as provided through the public lines. That's a long ways off because the grid just isn't that smart but maybe one day we'll get there.