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PG&E is one of the greatest threats to safety and health of Californians. The state government should do something soon about them, ideally, take them over and

PG&E is one of the greatest threats to safety and health of Californians. The state government should do something soon about them, ideally, take them over and turn them into a non-profit. We already bail them out anytime they have a problem, but their incentives are completely out of whack with the public interest.

chris_va 8y ago
No offense, but what makes you think this would be any different if it was a zero-profit government monopoly instead of an "allowed rate of return" government monopoly? And, to be honest, any cause less than ~1000 deaths per year (and PGE is about ~20) would barely even register as a blip on the top 50 causes of death in the state. It's a tragedy, but it's hardly the greatest threat to safety and health.
- wyattpeak 8y ago
  Since the shortcuts appear to all be about cost minimisation, there would seem to be every reason to think that a zero-profit government monopoly would have handled things differently.
  - jjeaff 8y ago
    How much more money should we be willing to spend to save those 20 lives a year? A million per person, a billion? A trillion? How many lives could we save if we put that money elsewhere?
    - wyattpeak 8y ago
      You're moving the goalposts. You asked "what makes you think this would be any different". That's what makes me think it would be different. The question of cost isn't at issue.
    - rz2k 8y ago
      Probably somewhere between 60 and 200 million for the yearly lives lost. More than would mean the money is better spent on safety elsewhere such as better safety features on highways. Less than that, and spending on safety elsewhere becomes wasteful compared to spending on power infrastructure safety. The "value of a statistical life" has less to do with making thing whole in terms of not caring about deaths than it has to do with efficiently allocating safety spending. Then you have percentage of the yearly wildfires attributable to PG&E. So some percentage of let's say a couple billion in fire fighting per year, and maybe 10-50 billion in property lost. Anyway, the point is that it isn't a slippery slope discussion, and it isn't impossible to come up with an approximate number.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > No offense, but what makes you think this would be any different if it was a zero-profit government monopoly instead of an "allowed rate of return" government monopoly? The fact that we have a number of public power agencies in the non-PG&E parts of California and it is different there. It's not a hypothetical.
  - aerostable_slug 8y ago
    Those publicly owned utilities collectively have a fraction of the transmission & distribution infrastructure of PG&E alone. Most essentially serve as brokers to buy power and pay T&D charges over other people's lines. They are simply not comparable.
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  Well fuck me, time to move to California and setup shop as a serial killer. According to you I can get into three digits before anyone should even bother to care! Do I really need to explain the problems with your math?
  - chris_va 8y ago
    I'm not really a huge fan of hyperbole--I don't think it makes for useful conversations online (which are hard enough already, even on HN), and I don't believe any reasonable interpretation of my comment above supports your argument. Feel free to explain the problems with my math, whatever math there was. Tell me how ~20 people a year is the greatest public safety threat CA faces.
    - InclinedPlane 8y ago
      You just white washed the death of "fewer than a thousand people" with a specious argument, and you don't think that counts as hyperbole? Again, explain to me how your line of argument wouldn't also excuse a serial killer?
      - chris_va 8y ago
        I said the death of 20 people a year does not make it the greatest threat to public safety in the state, not that it isn't a tragedy to be mitigated. Objectively this is true, does that make you upset?
twblalock 8y ago
The problems with PG&E were caused by the government giving it a monopoly. Making it non-profit won't help. The only thing that will help is competition. Until there is competition people will have no alternative but to pay PG&E for power every month, so PG&E has no incentive to improve. If they get fined they'll just make that money back from their captive customers.
- tkel 8y ago
  The problems aren't unique to PG&E. Any company for which profit is the primary motive, they will seek to minimize costs. And safety is very expensive. Which is why PG&E has been directly implicated in the deaths of over 120 people and made homeless tens of thousands of people only in the last 2 years. I needn't get into why open markets aren't viable for many industries e.g. roads, utilities, water treatment. Eliminate the profit motive, and the service will be cheaper, safer, and directly accountable to the people. The utility can operate at cost and not jack up rates to pay shareholders or an $8M CEO salary. If there are any profits, they will be funneled directly back into the utility.
  - hueving 8y ago
    >they will seek to minimize costs. And safety is very expensive If that were true, we wouldn't have private airlines because planes would be falling out of the sky every day and nobody would fly. Increase fines for negligence or make sure they can be sued (IIRC California makes it difficult to sue PGE) if you want to fix the problem. Don't do something as stupid as making it government run so it either becomes extremely expensive, extremely unstable, and/or a tax burden for the state. >Eliminate the profit motive, and the service will be cheaper, safer, and directly accountable to the people. Eliminate the profit motive and nobody will be incentivized to improve anything. This will likely make it much more expensive in the long term. The military has no profit motive either and they spend money like it grows on trees.
    - fyfy18 8y ago
      In the UK a lot of infrastructure (e.g. energy, fixed-line telecommunications, railways) is run by for-profit companies that are heavily regulated by the government, but the service to consumers is provided by separate for-proft companies (sometimes owned by the same group who controls the infrastructure) which compete on price and the service they provide. From a consumer point of view this is good, as you have a choice over which provider you use. On the other hand the actual service you get is going to be the same from either provider, taking internet as an example, if you use the common infrastructure the speed you can get will be the same from all providers, and the only difference is in price and artificial limitations like data usage. Maybe electricity is a better example, as the electrons you receive will be exactly the same no matter which provider you use. Although the infrastructure is run for-profit, there is only so much than can be done on its own. The government regulations also limit upgrades, as they favour spending on underserved areas. This means even if you live in the most remote part of the UK you can probably get broadband internet (>1mbit), but in major cities you are getting much slower speeds than what other parts of Europe can provide (often no more than 70mbit). Most of the infrastructure was inherited when it was privatised 20-30 years ago, so all they have really done is run the infrastructure rather than build it out. A good comparison is mobile telephone infrastructure, which in the UK is exclusively owned, built and run by for-profit companies with minimal government oversight.
hueving 8y ago
The state taking over anything eliminates all incentives. That's often worse than just attempting to fix the misaligned incentives with harsher fines.
- alasdair_ 8y ago
  >The state taking over anything eliminates all incentives. And yet roads continue to be built and the CDC continues to function...
  - hueving 8y ago
    Neither of which make money! You can't have everything consuming more than it produces or you end up looking like Venezuela or (insert hyper inflation or austerity ridden country here). Also, keep in mind that the government doesn't actually build roads. They pay other companies to do it.
tkel 8y ago
Yes, it is unjust and simply bad economic policy to allow a company to privatize profits yet socialize losses.
- Ar-Curunir 8y ago
  Yet it happens again and again under neoliberal policies. Eg: 2008 bailouts.
- OpenBSD-empire 8y ago
  Buy stock in such companies and stop whining! Let those tears dribble down your future money pile!
eigenstuff 8y ago
Speaking as someone in the TVA service area: it doesn't get any better. In fact, it gets worse.

chris_va 8y ago

No offense, but what makes you think this would be any different if it was a zero-profit government monopoly instead of an "allowed rate of return" government monopoly? And, to be honest, any cause less than ~1000 deaths per year (and PGE is about ~20) would barely even register as a blip on the top 50 causes of death in the state. It's a tragedy, but it's hardly the greatest threat to safety and health.

wyattpeak 8y ago
Since the shortcuts appear to all be about cost minimisation, there would seem to be every reason to think that a zero-profit government monopoly would have handled things differently.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  How much more money should we be willing to spend to save those 20 lives a year? A million per person, a billion? A trillion? How many lives could we save if we put that money elsewhere?
  - wyattpeak 8y ago
    You're moving the goalposts. You asked "what makes you think this would be any different". That's what makes me think it would be different. The question of cost isn't at issue.
  - rz2k 8y ago
    Probably somewhere between 60 and 200 million for the yearly lives lost. More than would mean the money is better spent on safety elsewhere such as better safety features on highways. Less than that, and spending on safety elsewhere becomes wasteful compared to spending on power infrastructure safety. The "value of a statistical life" has less to do with making thing whole in terms of not caring about deaths than it has to do with efficiently allocating safety spending. Then you have percentage of the yearly wildfires attributable to PG&E. So some percentage of let's say a couple billion in fire fighting per year, and maybe 10-50 billion in property lost. Anyway, the point is that it isn't a slippery slope discussion, and it isn't impossible to come up with an approximate number.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> No offense, but what makes you think this would be any different if it was a zero-profit government monopoly instead of an "allowed rate of return" government monopoly? The fact that we have a number of public power agencies in the non-PG&E parts of California and it is different there. It's not a hypothetical.
- aerostable_slug 8y ago
  Those publicly owned utilities collectively have a fraction of the transmission & distribution infrastructure of PG&E alone. Most essentially serve as brokers to buy power and pay T&D charges over other people's lines. They are simply not comparable.
InclinedPlane 8y ago
Well fuck me, time to move to California and setup shop as a serial killer. According to you I can get into three digits before anyone should even bother to care! Do I really need to explain the problems with your math?
- chris_va 8y ago
  I'm not really a huge fan of hyperbole--I don't think it makes for useful conversations online (which are hard enough already, even on HN), and I don't believe any reasonable interpretation of my comment above supports your argument. Feel free to explain the problems with my math, whatever math there was. Tell me how ~20 people a year is the greatest public safety threat CA faces.
  - InclinedPlane 8y ago
    You just white washed the death of "fewer than a thousand people" with a specious argument, and you don't think that counts as hyperbole? Again, explain to me how your line of argument wouldn't also excuse a serial killer?
    - chris_va 8y ago
      I said the death of 20 people a year does not make it the greatest threat to public safety in the state, not that it isn't a tragedy to be mitigated. Objectively this is true, does that make you upset?

twblalock 8y ago

The problems with PG&E were caused by the government giving it a monopoly. Making it non-profit won't help. The only thing that will help is competition. Until there is competition people will have no alternative but to pay PG&E for power every month, so PG&E has no incentive to improve. If they get fined they'll just make that money back from their captive customers.

tkel 8y ago
The problems aren't unique to PG&E. Any company for which profit is the primary motive, they will seek to minimize costs. And safety is very expensive. Which is why PG&E has been directly implicated in the deaths of over 120 people and made homeless tens of thousands of people only in the last 2 years. I needn't get into why open markets aren't viable for many industries e.g. roads, utilities, water treatment. Eliminate the profit motive, and the service will be cheaper, safer, and directly accountable to the people. The utility can operate at cost and not jack up rates to pay shareholders or an $8M CEO salary. If there are any profits, they will be funneled directly back into the utility.
- hueving 8y ago
  >they will seek to minimize costs. And safety is very expensive If that were true, we wouldn't have private airlines because planes would be falling out of the sky every day and nobody would fly. Increase fines for negligence or make sure they can be sued (IIRC California makes it difficult to sue PGE) if you want to fix the problem. Don't do something as stupid as making it government run so it either becomes extremely expensive, extremely unstable, and/or a tax burden for the state. >Eliminate the profit motive, and the service will be cheaper, safer, and directly accountable to the people. Eliminate the profit motive and nobody will be incentivized to improve anything. This will likely make it much more expensive in the long term. The military has no profit motive either and they spend money like it grows on trees.
  - fyfy18 8y ago
    In the UK a lot of infrastructure (e.g. energy, fixed-line telecommunications, railways) is run by for-profit companies that are heavily regulated by the government, but the service to consumers is provided by separate for-proft companies (sometimes owned by the same group who controls the infrastructure) which compete on price and the service they provide. From a consumer point of view this is good, as you have a choice over which provider you use. On the other hand the actual service you get is going to be the same from either provider, taking internet as an example, if you use the common infrastructure the speed you can get will be the same from all providers, and the only difference is in price and artificial limitations like data usage. Maybe electricity is a better example, as the electrons you receive will be exactly the same no matter which provider you use. Although the infrastructure is run for-profit, there is only so much than can be done on its own. The government regulations also limit upgrades, as they favour spending on underserved areas. This means even if you live in the most remote part of the UK you can probably get broadband internet (>1mbit), but in major cities you are getting much slower speeds than what other parts of Europe can provide (often no more than 70mbit). Most of the infrastructure was inherited when it was privatised 20-30 years ago, so all they have really done is run the infrastructure rather than build it out. A good comparison is mobile telephone infrastructure, which in the UK is exclusively owned, built and run by for-profit companies with minimal government oversight.

hueving 8y ago

The state taking over anything eliminates all incentives. That's often worse than just attempting to fix the misaligned incentives with harsher fines.

alasdair_ 8y ago
>The state taking over anything eliminates all incentives. And yet roads continue to be built and the CDC continues to function...
- hueving 8y ago
  Neither of which make money! You can't have everything consuming more than it produces or you end up looking like Venezuela or (insert hyper inflation or austerity ridden country here). Also, keep in mind that the government doesn't actually build roads. They pay other companies to do it.

tkel 8y ago

Yes, it is unjust and simply bad economic policy to allow a company to privatize profits yet socialize losses.

Ar-Curunir 8y ago
Yet it happens again and again under neoliberal policies. Eg: 2008 bailouts.
OpenBSD-empire 8y ago
Buy stock in such companies and stop whining! Let those tears dribble down your future money pile!

eigenstuff 8y ago

Speaking as someone in the TVA service area: it doesn't get any better. In fact, it gets worse.