There is definitely plenty of blame to go around, it’s just easier to focus on evil corporations and evil and overpaid CEO’s than to see all of the facets of the problem. Sure, you could bury power cables, but as you noted, this costs a lot more and in many cases is nearly impossible to get the rights of way to do so. There can be other engineering issues why it’s difficult to do as well, by your NIMBY example is good. As is pointing out that often it’s the government and elected officials who are a major part of the problem.
I don’t think this lets PG&E off the hook in any way, shape or form…but it’s not ‘capitalism’ that’s the root cause in this case. The government has set up this loopy half capitalist half government mandated system, where utilities like PG&E are quasi government agencies with protected and even mandated monopolies that allow price fixing and all sorts of other questionable things. As with many things in the US, this system straddles the fence between free market and government run, and gives us the worst of both worlds. One has but to look at our healthcare system to see more examples of this.
No, that was my misreading of the OP’s article–the $30 billion was the potential cost from lawsuits from the last fire. I don’t know how much securing all their lines (moving them underground?) would cost–but it wouldn’t be cheap, or quick.
Not sure what this means. Most of the customers we’re talking about are pretty far from the coast. As in hours by freeway in good traffic from the coast. My job is in Placer County, and is affected by this. I can be in Nevada faster than I can get to the coast.
To someone with a location of “within”, you are coastal. And I’m sure, an elite. Too bad for you. Flyover country sheds not a tear. Don’t live in CA if you want our sympathies.
One of the (many) underlying problems is that those coastal cities are actually safer from this kind of thing, but it’s illegal to build homes in them, so new homes get pushed out into the places that are drier and hotter and right up against the wildland.
Oh I know they only care about safety as far as it concerns their liability; that’s American business. But safety also means in my own self-interest sometimes, as in this case. They can’t charge people for power if they can’t deliver power and they look especially stupid if they can’t deliver power because they didn’t plan their power delivery business well enough to do the thing they say they do. But they know they look smarter if they don’t do the thing they say they do on purpose, rather than because their shoddy equipment caused actual damage to something and/or someone.
Speaking of safety: there are no traffic lights in the locations where power was shut off. I hear that police are acting as traffic directors in some places, but that surely has to tax the hell out of available manpower; it could mean that other things aren’t getting done. Just another cost of this fiasco.
I’m not following. Generally, at least on the West Coast, it isn’t true that you can’t build on the coast (you can’t “own” the beach, which isn’t the same thing). What we see here is urban sprawl as more people move into job centers, like Silicon Valley, and homes are built farther and farther out to accommodate that.
Sure they can. If you’re a monopoly, you can create fees like a ‘base service charge’, etc. which you add to the bill before any charges for actual electricity they use. (On my bill, those charges amount to 34% of the total electricity bill.)
Does anybody believe that PG&E is going to reimburse customers any part of their monthly ‘basic service charge’ for the days that PG&E failed to provide this basic service?
I’m not quite sure exactly what Lord Feldon was getting at, but I assume he might be talking about the regulatory and other difficulties of building new housing in many California cities.
It is incredibly difficult to build new housing, especially the type of higher-density housing needed in California, in many of California’s largest cities. In some areas, zoning ordinances prohibit or limit the building of multi-family dwellings. If you can build them, ordinances requiring a certain number of parking spaces often drive up the cost of construction and tend to make it more likely that developers will focus on larger, high-end apartments rather than smaller, middle-income housing. City councils often make the approval process for new construction incredibly arduous, expensive, and time-consuming, helping to maintain scarcity and further driving up costs. NIMBYs who want their neighborhoods to look exactly the same as they did 40 years ago will also protest against new development, and these NIMBYs are only encouraged in this behavior by the fact that the lack of new housing only causes their own housing values to skyrocket even further. And if you finally get approval to build, you might then find yourself stymied by activists demanding environmental impact studies, or a larger number of guaranteed low-income units, or some other reason to stop you.
I’m not arguing that the impediments to new housing are always unreasonable, but many of them are, and they prevent the one thing that would do more than anything else to improve housing affordability: the building of new housing units. Study after economic study shows that increasing supply is far better for reducing housing costs overall than solutions like rent control and mandated numbers of low-income units. Rent control certainly helps the people who manage to get rent-controlled housing, but it tends to drive up the market rates for non-regulated housing units, and has a bunch of other problematic effects, like discouraging landlords from improving their properties, and pushing some landlords to convert rental properties to upmarket condos, which tends to make things even harder to low and middle income people looking for housing.
I consider myself a lefty. I believe that everyone should have a place to live, and that people at the bottom of the economic ladder should get help in paying for it. But the way that many California cities—and many other cities in America—deal with the housing affordability crisis is a head-in-the-sand set of solutions that often makes things worse for the very people they’re trying to help.
They’re built farther and farther out because that’s the only legal way to build houses. It’s basically impossible, due to various NIMBY crap, to build homes where people want to live, so they get shoved out into places like Antioch or Brentwood where it’s 95 degrees for half the year.
For those of you who haven’t lived (don’t live in) Cali, unlike most of the rest of the country, late September and early October can be some of the hottest months of the entire year. It can be brutal heat, easily exceeding 90 and 100 degrees, and with climate change, the extreme heat has been hanging around longer. Not being able to plug in so much as a fan is going to suck bigly.
The blackouts are primarily due to PG&E mismanagement. There are a few instances of other power providers having to cut power, but the extent and duration of those outages is much smaller. There are 1.5 million people without power, and some of them will be that way for five days.
To illustrate that this is primarily a PG&E problem, we can look to some of the other power utilities in the region. SMUD, which powers Sacramento and some nearby areas, did not have outages. Roseville Energy, which powers Roseville in the neighboring county had no power outages. “But Hooker,” you say, “SMUD and RE power a primarily urban area without forested areas like where the Camp fire was last year.” Okay, we’ll overlook the rural service areas or the fact that SMUD is getting power from sources in the Sierra mountains.
Let’s look at some rural service areas, like Gridley (50 miles north of Sacramento and 50 miles south of Paradise, the town wiped out by the Camp Fire) and the Plumas Sierra Rural Electric Cooperation. These are small rural providers. Gridley is less than a quarter of the population that Paradise was. PSREC is a a multi-jurisdictional provider for rural areas in the Sierra Mountains. Neither had power disruption during the PG&E outages. Gridley being wholly surrounded by PG&E service areas and getting their power along similar pathways to PG&E. PSREC is in the mountains, which is where some of the line service issues are worst.
Finally, there’s the City of Biggs. They’re another city with their own power agency. They’re between two PG&E blackout areas, but they didn’t have to cut power. However, if you were in unincorporated Biggs, where PG&E is the power provider, you were in a blackout area.
The blackouts are PG&E’s fault for years of poor system maintenance. Just like San Bruno was their fault for years of poor system maintenance.
Didn’t PG&E already go bankrupt following the Enron fraud? Why would the “average person” have “invested their hard-earned retirement money into PG&E” again? At least, to an extent that significantly wipes out their savings.
At least for a lot of them, because their financial advisor told them it was a good ‘widows and orphans’ stock, probably due to the dividend (I’m assuming a dividend pre-bankruptcy, haven’t looked it up).
And that is one of the big problems with privatizing Social Security - the average person isn’t going to do due diligence on whoever/whatever/wherever they invest their money.
That number is much too high. The gross income is:
2014 $2.54 Billion
2015 $2.38 Billion
2016 $2.89 Billion
2017 $2.98 Billion
2018 $2.32 Billion
But then you subtract the Interest Expense and Unusual Expenses (wildfires) you get prextax income of:
2014 $1.8 Billion
2015 $861 Million
2016 $1.46 Billion
2017 $2.17 Billion
2018 $10.13 Billion loss https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/pcg/financials
So a massive maintenance program cannot be financed out of PG&E’s profits; electricity prices would have to increase substantially.