one place:

> PG&E Corp. put a cost estimate of more than $25 billion Thursday on its effort to plant thousands of miles of power lines underground in an effort to tamp down wildfire risks.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article25824965...

Shame that they're not getting better publicity as a result of this. Our main complaint about the internet companies is that they pocket the money meant to speed up networks for their subscribers. This is exactly what utility companies ought to do to prepare for the future.

They’re doing it because they went bankrupt over $30B in liability from not preparing in this fashion.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/business/energy-environme...

> PG&E sought bankruptcy protection in January 2019 after accumulating an estimated $30 billion in liability for fires started by its poorly maintained equipment. One of the blazes, the 2018 Camp Fire, killed scores of people and destroyed the town of Paradise.

It wasn’t voluntary, really.

A large part of why they're doing it because they're guaranteed a certain percentage return on investments. There's ways to fix this problem without a $25bil investment, but you won't make nearly as much profit on that.

what's a better, cheaper way to fix the wildfire problem?

We don't have a wildfire problem. There have been fires for thousands of years. There are supposed to be fires.

Our problem is people build non-fireproof homes in forests and demand the government mismanage the forest by stopping fires.

Around 90% of wild fires are caused by humans. A few of the recent major fires (the Camp Fire being one of them) were caused by power lines. So there is definitely a major human-cause component here that can be addressed.

I am all for more prescribed burns, but the people in opposition to those burns aren't the people living in the most at-risk areas.

Fires were intentionally set by humans for thousands of years. The forests evolved with them. There needs to be fire. The causes don't need to be "addressed".

People who choose to live in the Wildlands urban interface should bear the cost for undergrounding the wires they rely on IMO.

Probably politically infeasible, unfortunately.

Wildfires in California not only affect California itself, but neighboring states as well. Last year I drove from CA to CO. The wildfire smoke from California covered all of Nevada and Utah.

I don't know where you live, but if you are in CA, there is a very high chance that you live in a wildland-urban interface zone. About 45% of housing in CA would fall under this category.

These risks aren't limited to people living up in the mountains. A large chunk of the Bay Area is a wildland-urban interface.

All of this to say, preventing wild fires is in everybody's best interest and trying to pass the costs to one group or another will only delay our timeline to address these issues.

Burying power lines is just one part of the solution.

Bury power lines. Address liability, insurance, and red tape around prescribed burns so that we can actually meet our goals. Better enforcement (and more government funding) of creating defensible space around homes.

$0.35 would be a bargain. It's more like $0.40 / kWh, it's complicated depending on which rate plan you have and what time of day / year you're using power. https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/how-ra...

Meanwhile my neighbors 30 miles away are paying half that rate to SMUD. https://www.smud.org/en/Rate-Information/Compare-rates

As a bonus, SMUD doesn't generally kill people and burn down cities.

Presumably the Sacramento utility district doesn't serve high risk fire areas, so their customers don't have to subsidize people that choose to live on the wildlands-urban interface.

SMUD does operate HV lines into the Sierras as part of the Upper American River Project consisting of 11 dams and eight power generating facilities. It’s capable of powering most of Sacramento in a pinch but is typically used only when they need more capacity. Throughout the course of a year, it ends up providing about 20% of Sacramento’s power.

SMUD has very strict preventative maintenance procedures for their HV transmission lines, clearing all underbrush from below the 15KV lines almost yearly. We have not had any major incidents involving electrical fires in my lifetime that I am aware of.

They also have never had to pay out dividends unlike PG&E, or been forced to optimize for what will deliver the most value to their shareholders.

https://www.pgecorp.com/investors/shareholders/dividend_hist...

Paying damages from all the wildfires they have caused.

It's incredible. Even more so if we consider that Silicon Valley Power (serving Santa Clara) charges a fraction of that and is more reliable.

Seems unfair to compare a utility covering 18 square miles to one covering 160k+ square miles across some of the harshest terrain in the country. But I agree that PG&E charges way too much.