In southern california too, once So Cal Edison discovered the risk of liability for fires, power has been shut down more and more for frequent high wind events.

I don't know what people expected. You provide an entity with certain incentives and it will tend to follow those incentives to their logical conclusion. If you make fires much more expensive for power providers, and you prevent them from charging any more money for the service they provide, they are going to have to reduce risk elsewherre. They'll do this either by cutting service when fire risk is the highest or by doing more maintenance, whichever is least expensive.

I'm not sure what you mean by "people expected".

The power companies muscled into place a system where they could scrimp in improvements and pocket the savings.

The disastrous result was devastating fires. The system of civil courts still existed so they wound-up liable for their despicable maneuvers and has to pay a bit back from gains. So their next maneuver was turning off their lines when winds got high rather than engaging in the now even great expense of repairing them.

PG&E is a literally criminal enterprise, found criminally (not civilly) liable for the death of more than 100 people (29 gas explosion, 85 fire, etc).

The well-known Judge Alsop rightly denounced their vicious chicanery but sadly failed to put them in receivership and forfeit the value of their shareholder's assets (IMO, shareholder assets should be forfeit and previous dividends clawed back but natural they can do that to people in nursing homes and Madoff shareholder but they can't do it to these shitheals).

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/05/28/regulators-appr...

It's a matter of externalized costs - the company could have taken slightly less profits - accounted for the known coming of climate crisis weather shifts in the decades they've had and made the proper decisions. By deciding the way they have, they bring higher regulation on themselves.

I expected the correct maintenance costs to be taken on to maintain a better than third-world power grid availability.

There is little to no fine for stopping service during the high wind events.

The incentive pushes them to shutoff, its simply cheaper than repairing the grid.