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One person floods a basement with gasoline. Another comes in and throws a lit match on the floor. Who’s responsible for the fire? It’s an interesting question.

by gdubs 7y ago

One person floods a basement with gasoline. Another comes in and throws a lit match on the floor. Who’s responsible for the fire? It’s an interesting question. At the same time, while it’s statisticslly likely that fires would happen with our without PG&E, we can’t escape the fact that they’ve been responsible for quite a few of them. Paradise, California, was built very close to the wildlife-urban interface. And our federal forest management practices should be questioned. But, PG&E knew about the specific faulty equipment that ended up sparking the Camp fire. Why didn’t they prioritize fixing equipment in a dry forest adjacent to a populated area? Why did they pay dividends if so much infrastructure was failing? They’d have a much easier case to make if they could at least show an attempt to prioritize maintenance, especially in high risk areas. Then we could all say, “accidents happen.” But there’s a pattern with PG&E. When people die on a highway because of human error, or an “act of god”, it’s one thing. Just as we should except that a massive utility will never have a 0% failure rate. But when a bridge collapses, and people knew the bridge was at risk of collapse, and dividends were paid instead of spending every available dollar on upgrades...

zaroth 7y ago
> Why didn’t they prioritize fixing equipment in a dry forest adjacent to a populated area? They spend billions of dollars on maintenance each year, so obviously they prioritized fixing whatever all the equipment that they did actually fix that year. PG&E knows about tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure which is past its useful life. Towers built in 1910s and 1920s which are so old it’s hard to even get up on them to patch them. Towers they don’t even know what year they were even built. Rates are set in a political environment and those rates pay for supply, maintenance, clean energy enhancements, and dividends. Why weren’t rates set higher? What percent of rate revenue was spent on shifts to renewables? Why not go after that spending as well as dividends? Dividends were 1/15th of the revenue, to put it in perspective. As to your bridge analogy; > The U.S. has been underfunding its highway system for years, resulting in a $836 billion backlog of highway and bridge capital needs. The bulk of the backlog ($420 billion) is in repairing existing highways, while $123 billion is needed for bridge repair, $167 billion for system expansion, and $126 for system enhancement (which includes safety enhancements, operational improvements, and environmental projects). https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/roads/funding-future-need/amp/ https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/roads/funding-futur...

by gdubs 7y ago

zaroth 7y ago

> Why didn’t they prioritize fixing equipment in a dry forest adjacent to a populated area? They spend billions of dollars on maintenance each year, so obviously they prioritized fixing whatever all the equipment that they did actually fix that year. PG&E knows about tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure which is past its useful life. Towers built in 1910s and 1920s which are so old it’s hard to even get up on them to patch them. Towers they don’t even know what year they were even built. Rates are set in a political environment and those rates pay for supply, maintenance, clean energy enhancements, and dividends. Why weren’t rates set higher? What percent of rate revenue was spent on shifts to renewables? Why not go after that spending as well as dividends? Dividends were 1/15th of the revenue, to put it in perspective. As to your bridge analogy; > The U.S. has been underfunding its highway system for years, resulting in a $836 billion backlog of highway and bridge capital needs. The bulk of the backlog ($420 billion) is in repairing existing highways, while $123 billion is needed for bridge repair, $167 billion for system expansion, and $126 for system enhancement (which includes safety enhancements, operational improvements, and environmental projects). https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/roads/funding-future-need/amp/ https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/roads/funding-futur...