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Yes but they would need to have the capital and time to plan to carry out the work. They are under financial duress and will probably go bankrupt so no one will

Yes but they would need to have the capital and time to plan to carry out the work. They are under financial duress and will probably go bankrupt so no one will lend them cash. It may take years to fix everything...imagine if they did not shut down the grid and there was another fire....what would you say to that?

zucker42 7y ago
Electric lines caused fires a few weeks after the first outage. I feel like at this point PG&E is in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation (though it might have been brought on by past mismanagement).
- ncmncm 7y ago
  That is what they would like everyone to think, and indemnify them against their own negligence.
  - zucker42 7y ago
    Well the fire thing actually happened.
cgriswald 7y ago
This is a poor time to be a PG&E apologist. While there are several factors that contributed to the ignition, scale, and duration of the fires, PG&E has been found criminally negligible. People are rightly angry. They are still being victimized today for PG&Es long history of behavior. They see no evidence that PG&E is working to correct the situation. They're told, "Hey, but you don't want a fire right" as if that is the only alternative. People want reliable, safely transported power. PG&E is not delivering. And even if PG&E weren't to blame, they've fumbled on every one of these outages from a customer perspective. I was never even notified of the first outage. They communicated through Twitter and some other media. Even the one we had in common I rarely use and when I use I don't see every post. Their website was frequently down. During the second outage their website often had no information, vague information, or inaccurate information. Our neighbors got power back days before we did. We literally had parts of our neighborhood all around us with power, but we went without. And during that time they announced a third outage with the same poor-quality information. We didn't even know if we'd get power back on before the next one hit. Also during that time, they stopped having humans answering their phones. Instead they just had a machine parrot the same (lack of) information that was available on their website. So, I don't know what to tell you. The idea that "a judge made them do it" is absurd. A judge made them do the right thing or to not do the thing at all. It is their history of not doing the right thing, but still doing that thing, that lead us all here.
- harshreality 7y ago
  Being mad about the past (and PG&E did bad things in the past) doesn't have any bearing on what they're doing now. Their equipment is poorly maintained. Fire risk is high. What do you want them to do, keep running power in high risk areas, cause more fires, and go more bankrupt? CA taxpayers pay either way, either more disruption from power outages or more property destruction. Note I'm talking operationally. Clawing back money from executives and dissolving the company are not operational changes that address the risky equipment and dangerous conditions. Neither of those will address this year's or next year's problems, and that $100 million would pay for burying at most about 50 miles of transmission lines. As far as disabling the automatic reclosers, maybe they should, but I'm going to take a wild guess that that they don't do that for a reason, and not just that they are being stupid. Perhaps those breakers are tripped so frequently that not reclosing them automatically would lead to massive outages anyway, and those would be unplanned outages which would be more difficult for people to handle. Nobody is talking about letting them off the hook. They're in bankruptcy court and judge Alsup is taking things seriously. But being mad and assigning penalties isn't going to fix the fires or the blackouts any time soon. It would have been good years ago to dig through PG&E's financials and get mad years about their misuse of maintenance funds, but nobody did that, or at least nobody got sufficiently mad if they did. It's too late to be mad about prior malfeasance once a disaster materializes. Actual solutions would be to raise rates immediately by a lot, like 50-100%, and pay people starting now to go out and mitigate problems (clear vegetation) and start to coordinate repairs. Every $.01 (per kWh) rate increase generates $6 million per day assuming an average of 25,000 MW and no usage-based pricing (and completely inelastic demand). 25e6 kW times 24h times $.01/kWh
  - inferiorhuman 7y ago
    What do you want them to do Easy. Step 1: the $100 million from the safety budget that got redirected to the CEO? Get it back. With interest. Use that $100+ million to start undergrounding lines. Step 2: disable the automatic reclosers like every other California utility does during fire season. Step 3: submit a dissolution plan to the CPUC
inferiorhuman 7y ago
imagine if they did not shut down the grid and there was another fire Last time around they shut the power off for days and still managed to start 5+ fires.
PretzelFisch 7y ago
Maybe, they should have used said capital for that reason and not paying out millions in bonuses to upper management this year.

zucker42 7y ago

Electric lines caused fires a few weeks after the first outage. I feel like at this point PG&E is in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation (though it might have been brought on by past mismanagement).

ncmncm 7y ago
That is what they would like everyone to think, and indemnify them against their own negligence.
- zucker42 7y ago
  Well the fire thing actually happened.

cgriswald 7y ago

This is a poor time to be a PG&E apologist. While there are several factors that contributed to the ignition, scale, and duration of the fires, PG&E has been found criminally negligible. People are rightly angry. They are still being victimized today for PG&Es long history of behavior. They see no evidence that PG&E is working to correct the situation. They're told, "Hey, but you don't want a fire right" as if that is the only alternative. People want reliable, safely transported power. PG&E is not delivering. And even if PG&E weren't to blame, they've fumbled on every one of these outages from a customer perspective. I was never even notified of the first outage. They communicated through Twitter and some other media. Even the one we had in common I rarely use and when I use I don't see every post. Their website was frequently down. During the second outage their website often had no information, vague information, or inaccurate information. Our neighbors got power back days before we did. We literally had parts of our neighborhood all around us with power, but we went without. And during that time they announced a third outage with the same poor-quality information. We didn't even know if we'd get power back on before the next one hit. Also during that time, they stopped having humans answering their phones. Instead they just had a machine parrot the same (lack of) information that was available on their website. So, I don't know what to tell you. The idea that "a judge made them do it" is absurd. A judge made them do the right thing or to not do the thing at all. It is their history of not doing the right thing, but still doing that thing, that lead us all here.

harshreality 7y ago
Being mad about the past (and PG&E did bad things in the past) doesn't have any bearing on what they're doing now. Their equipment is poorly maintained. Fire risk is high. What do you want them to do, keep running power in high risk areas, cause more fires, and go more bankrupt? CA taxpayers pay either way, either more disruption from power outages or more property destruction. Note I'm talking operationally. Clawing back money from executives and dissolving the company are not operational changes that address the risky equipment and dangerous conditions. Neither of those will address this year's or next year's problems, and that $100 million would pay for burying at most about 50 miles of transmission lines. As far as disabling the automatic reclosers, maybe they should, but I'm going to take a wild guess that that they don't do that for a reason, and not just that they are being stupid. Perhaps those breakers are tripped so frequently that not reclosing them automatically would lead to massive outages anyway, and those would be unplanned outages which would be more difficult for people to handle. Nobody is talking about letting them off the hook. They're in bankruptcy court and judge Alsup is taking things seriously. But being mad and assigning penalties isn't going to fix the fires or the blackouts any time soon. It would have been good years ago to dig through PG&E's financials and get mad years about their misuse of maintenance funds, but nobody did that, or at least nobody got sufficiently mad if they did. It's too late to be mad about prior malfeasance once a disaster materializes. Actual solutions would be to raise rates immediately by a lot, like 50-100%, and pay people starting now to go out and mitigate problems (clear vegetation) and start to coordinate repairs. Every $.01 (per kWh) rate increase generates $6 million per day assuming an average of 25,000 MW and no usage-based pricing (and completely inelastic demand). 25e6 kW times 24h times $.01/kWh
- inferiorhuman 7y ago
  What do you want them to do Easy. Step 1: the $100 million from the safety budget that got redirected to the CEO? Get it back. With interest. Use that $100+ million to start undergrounding lines. Step 2: disable the automatic reclosers like every other California utility does during fire season. Step 3: submit a dissolution plan to the CPUC

inferiorhuman 7y ago

imagine if they did not shut down the grid and there was another fire Last time around they shut the power off for days and still managed to start 5+ fires.

PretzelFisch 7y ago

Maybe, they should have used said capital for that reason and not paying out millions in bonuses to upper management this year.