The regulator has no accountability to anyone and just rubber-stamps everything the utilities put in front of them, allowing them to skimp on opex (maintenance) in order to turn everything into capex with cost-plus guaranteed profit. This incentivizes making everything as expensive and as brittle as possible.
Either we need to restructure the market to be more competitive, or we need to restructure the regulations and the regulator to be more performant and responsive to ratepayers. We're suffering a ruinous misalignment of incentives and the best the legislature can think of to fix it is to make it cheaper for the IOUs to borrow money.
IMO the issue is the board is appointed, and it’s just full of political allies.
We should fill boards like this with experts. For example, make a majority of the board be tenured professors of engineering and finance from the university of California with no financial connections to the industry.
God forbid you live in any of the more woody parts of California either. You'll have to have your own battery or generator anyway. As someone who plans to live in the Santa Cruz Mountains long term, I will be going completely off grid as PG&E will just cut power forever rather than fix anything.
Depending on where you live you, your neighbors and/or your predecessors likely a) voted for people who wrote laws to make that illegal b) sneered at anyone who wouldn't want to be on the grid.
They have no interest in doing good service but instead in making money. They don’t have to really answer to anyone. Supposedly the CA government could implement things to improve the lives of Californians that would influence how PG&E operates but CA politicians are bought off by this corporation. So, there we have it
PS The largest and 3rd largest holders of US equity are those CA public sector union pension funds. They have far deeper pockets than PG&E by at least 10x.
Which set things up so the money PG&E makes is a linear function in the money PG&E wastes. -- the regulations set a fixed profit margin, so to make more money PG&E need simply waste more money and pass the cost onto the public which is exactly what they are doing.
[1] https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees
Genuinely curious, how is that the case for Silicon Valley Power?
You can both be right about this. PGE is subject to rural electrification mandates.
However, the way those mandates get satisfied can vary tremendously in cost, and because by regulation investor owned utilities are compensated as a % of their capex spend, there is an incentive to use more expensive solutions, especially when those solutions induce greater dependency on their transmission infrastructure.
Furthermore, apart from expensive bespoke off-grid setups, there is inherently no competition in transmission in distribution. It's a natural monopoly.
AFAIK, municipal utilities do not have any say over how IOU monopolies deploy capital, so why should they be subject to those costs?
If we feel that rural communities deserve electrical service (don't we all deserve it?), then perhaps those should be publicly owned/financed through taxes and a competitive bidding process by private entities, not shunted into uneven electricity rates.
I don't doubt that such people exist, but rural areas are also populated by people who are priced out of expensive urban centers. Furthermore, those two groups also probably have some overlap. I also agree that those people need to have skin in the game, but I don't see a way forward without compromise.
Has anyone estimated the cost savings of relieving this mandate?