I'm not an infrastructure professional, I'm in automation and manufacturing, but all too often I come across equipment that must never be shut down and must be functional 100% of the time, but which has been run long past its service life. Windows 98 or XP computers on their 9th resurrection due to parts from eBay, castings full of helicoils, electrical cabinets with wires strung across like cobwebs... If the business was successful before the machine was built, downtime now costs tens of thousands of dollars per hour, and the whole machine cost 500,000 dollars 100,000 hours ago, maybe someone should start thinking about building a replacement (or, better, a pair of replacements) and phasing this one out?

I know the front office likes to write off machine depreciation as a tax deduction. With a 10 year useful life on a $500k machine, you get $50k in tax deductions. In the 11th year, you get no tax deduction, but the machine is still making money.

I feel strongly that there ought to be some kind of financial penalty for operating a machine that's depreciated beyond its claimed useful life - not a direct tax penalty, but some kind of non-cash-expense liability that subtracts from the big positive number on the front page of the quarterly financials which the CEO uses to claim they deserve a bonus.

PG&E's more regulated than just painting them as a for-profit business with $550M in the black would suggest. They have maintenance and capital expenditures that they need to make. But those regulated books didn't show the single-point-of-failure risks and long-past-useful-life liabilities, and they should!