6 ms·

For people outside USA/California, PG&E serves gas and electricity to two thirds of California. They're featured in the film Erin Brockovitch for knowingly dum

by sevg 3y ago

For people outside USA/California, PG&E serves gas and electricity to two thirds of California. They're featured in the film Erin Brockovitch for knowingly dumping 1400 million litres of hexavalent chromium contaminated water in the 50s and not informing the water board until the 80s, resulting in countless cancer deaths in Hinkley, California. Their equipment has led to many wildfires (eg, approximately 40 of the 315 wildfires in PG&E's service area in 2017 and 2018 were allegedly caused by PG&E equipment). They've been guilty multiple times of criminal negligence, including for gas explosions (see comments below from epistasis and toomuchtodo). They've had controversies surrounding tax dodging, deforestation, dirty tactics to maintain monopoly, collusion with regulatory agencies, and rates that are among the highest in the US (eg, electricity rates in 2021 were 80% above the national average). Overall, a real treasure of a utility company. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Company#Disasters https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Com... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Company#Controversies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Com...

toomuchtodo 3y ago
Also of note is their handling of their fossil gas infrastructure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-pge-safety-investigation-20181214-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-pge-safety-investigat...
epistasis 3y ago
One of the many times they have killed: eight people in San Bruno in 2010 due to a gas pipeline explosion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion > On January 13, 2012, an independent audit from the State of California issued a report stating that PG&E had illegally diverted over $100 million from a fund used for safety operations, and instead used it for executive compensation and bonuses. This while charging unbelievably high rates for some of the worst reliability rates I have ever seen anywhere in the US.
- roenxi 3y ago
  That isn't really on the same scale as 1.4 billion litres of hexavalent chromium. I'm not sure if they are meant to be the same incident, but at $10 million/life, $100 million in savings at cost of 8 lives would be an appropriate design choice. We have to draw a line somewhere. I don't think that is the comparison you're trying to draw, but I'm not sure what you are trying to say, so... Life be risky. Perfect safety is not a reasonable goal.
  - epistasis 3y ago
    It's not $100M savings, it's $100M paid to executives, illegally, instead of on the safety repairs. As far as whether trading $100M is an appropriate tradeoff for 8 lives, well.... let's hope you never are in a position to make a choice between $10M and a person's life.
    - roenxi 3y ago
      > well.... let's just say that I wouldn't be spending any more time around you if I could put a face to that statement. Come on. I suspect I could be any civil engineer, assuming that I didn't remember the wrong order of magnitude. Decisions have to be made about how safe to make things. It is quite difficult to do that without putting a dollar figure on human life, and AFAIK it is order of magnitude 10 million. Otherwise when do you stop bubble wrapping infrastructure? The numbers are close enough that they probably were skimping, but we can't tell that from the outcome of 8 people dying.
      - epistasis 3y ago
        You continue ignore that money was illegally taken from safety funds to pay executive bonuses. This is not an engineering tradeoff decision. That's not even relevant, and it's weird that you would invent such a situation.
        roenxi 3y ago
        [flagged]
throwaway892238 3y ago
Every American utility company I have ever looked into has numerous crimes and controversies associated with it. It's kind of weird. I actually suspect it's due to them being publicly traded. They literally are not allowed to do things that would jeopardize the share price, so they will hurt themselves and people in order to make a minor profit increase YOY. You shouldn't need to be a capitalist enterprise (with the whole "infinite revenue growth" thing) if your purpose is just to make sure your customers - who won't ever really grow much, because, you know, only so many babies born etc - have power, water, etc. But as publicly traded companies, their first purpose is just to increase shareholder revenue. If you end up (accidentally) burning down a forest, poisoning some communities, or compromising a state election with a fake candidate, that may just be an unfortunate side effect in the service of increasing the stock price.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  The presumed legal duty to break the law in the interest of shareholders is grossly exaggerated... Nobody can sue you for failing to commit a crime on their behalf.
- epistasis 3y ago
  IMHO the problem is that utilities are like no other company in that they have a monopoly but are supposed to be reigned in by regulators. But the vast majority of regulatory bodies are either captured or incompetent at regulation. Public versus privately traded doesn't matter as much as the fundamental conflict, wherein they profit more when the costs increase, and there's no penalty for literally killing people. HIPAA violations result in jail time for executives. Meanwhile PGE illegally raids safety fund accounts to pay executive bonuses while regular people are killed due to failing infrastructure. CPUC and PGE executives need to face serious consequences, and most certainly jail time, for their malfeasance.
- asdff 3y ago
  The public companies also suffer from corruption and such. I guess there just must be some law of a universe where if you have a sufficient sized captive base of income, people who might be inclined to abuse their position to take advantage of the situation will strive to take advantage of the situation. Then it becomes not a matter of if there is any corruption, but when will you end up with a corruptible individual in a position that can be corrupted. Maybe these organizations or government bodies can be organized like a RAID away. Mirror these positions of power and use redundant pools. Identify corrupt bits by comparing results between these mirrors and hot swap the corrupted positions for a new candidate. Incrementally replace your array on schedule to avoid chance of future corruption and to mitigate batch effect.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jjav 3y ago
The PG&E rates are hard to believe for anyone outside their grip of death. From my February bill: peak: 53.0 + 18.3 = 71.3 c/kWhw partpeak: 51.3 + 11.1 = 62.4 c/kWh offpeak: 34.4 + 09.8 = 44.2 c/kWh Electricity is my third largest monthly expense (after mortgage and food) but at the current rate of increases, it'll be the second largest in a few years. This is for a tiny house with nothing special using electricity.
- fmobus 3y ago
  What the actual fuck. I live in Germany and pay ~35c/kWh, I thought power was supposed to be cheap in the states.
  - samarthr1 3y ago
    In bengaluru, which is notorious for is high electricity rates, I pay an equivalent of 10c a unit. As a part of a government subsidy, my first 200 units are free too!
  - hellotomyrars 3y ago
    The US is big. It is very location dependent and whether your utility is private or public. I live in rural Washington and my rate is $0.0634/kWh. My utility is a public one and also non-generating. The power comes from a Federal agency(Bonneville Power Administration) which is is in turn overseen by the Department of Energy.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - jjav 3y ago
    I believe that PG&E, even more than high housing costs, is going to ruin California. The costs are already so astronomical and they keep rising so fast, that it's becoming more and more unreasonable to afford. Even on a silicon valley salary, those bills are shocking.
- OJFord 3y ago
  What are the two things summed? Are they really both c/kWh? Just confused because in the UK they'd be p/day and p/kWh respectively, and the numbers look 'in the right ballpark'. (Except that it would be mental to have the standing charge vary according to peak/not time.)
doctorpangloss 3y ago
> Their equipment has led to many wildfires Who are the antagonists in this story? California decided that people who live in fire areas deserve (1) the last marginal sales price of the homes in their burnt down area (2) paid by taxpayers, in disguise, through their utility bills (3) and in exchange, get what? Why should anyone be living in the places where these ancient powerlines are? The essentially infinite land the US + cars have played an important role in keeping home prices from rising to truly stratospheric levels in the urban US. So I understand that it also benefits many communities to have the escape valve of this housing. But there must be better land and better places than wildfire prone California. You have to draw the line somewhere. There are people who in the same breath say PG&E is the antagonist, that they are to blame and not the recklessness of the communities that live in these places; but then, they complain about wetland restrictions being rescinded and that taxpayers should not be paying for repeat flood victims in Florida, Louisiana, whatever, in red states. It's the same fucking thing! I don't know why the money to achieve this ridiculous compensation scheme has to meander through the utility company's liability. Obviously if it were an ordinary tax - I mean, it's a tax, that we're paying, through these utility bills - people would not do it. The only reason PG&E liability is on anyone's radar is because of some kind of complex political shenanigans that I do not understand and I wish were not a part of my community at all.
- free_bip 3y ago
  This comment reeks of victim blaming. Natural disasters happen literally everywhere on earth. When someone's house is destroyed by a tornado in Tornado Valley do you tell them "Oh well you were really irresponsible for living in tornado valley"? Or how about Florida, which has been hit by over 40% of US-landfall hurricanes? Do you tell the hundreds of thousands of people whose homes have been destroyed that they should have just packed up shop and moved away since they get regular hurricanes?
  - doctorpangloss 3y ago
    Obviously I believe that governments should support people suffering from natural disasters, and that even huge amounts of money given directly to victims are an appropriate way to deal with disasters. > Natural disasters happen literally everywhere on earth Taxes also happen literally everywhere on Earth. This is an article about rate increases, not natural disaster policies. But like natural disasters not all taxes are the same. My neighbors have voted themselves a tax benefit where they've been paying property taxes as though their homes are worth 0.01-0.05x what they are, for years. Read all about it here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13 - it's the single most important law in this state, if you live in California you ought to understand what it is. So if I bought a home in San Francisco, I would pay normal taxes like "everywhere else on Earth." But not these folks. Let's say there's an earthquake in San Francisco and a bunch of crumbling 100y old Victorians valued at $1.5m but whose owners have been paying taxes for decades on as though they were valued $40k-300k - those crumbling houses fall apart. Should we pay every resident in a crumbling Victorian they haven't maintained at all, in communities whose schools and roads and institutions they have not been paying for, yet simultaneously benefitting from their land values rise as a consequence of the human capital arriving every year and sort of have nothing to do with, and they also haven't been paying any meaningful taxes: should we give them a giant check as though they sold their home, at market prices when only 1-5% of home inventory moves a month, in that no longer existing city that wasn't earthquaked? Listen this would affect me, I mean I know I would love a check that lets me hit the "reset" button the event of a natural disaster, but there was actually no universe in which I live here and benefitted from not paying taxes for decades. That was never given to me as a literal constitutional right it was to people who basically won the lottery. So who is the antagonist? This is what I am asking you. It's so easy to come from a place like whatever community you live in, where things follow normal rules and you can be pretty confident that your neighbors deserve full and just rescue. But my neighbors have given themselves an entitlement that yielded all sorts of crappy disfunction and I'm not the only person who is sick of that bullshit. The fire prone areas in California just synthesized their bullshit into some weird ass rigamarole where other Californians pay for that bullshit through the utility company.
robocat 3y ago
Goddam weird how we treat a corporate as though it has history and morals: PG&E is not a person. Projecting past crimes and predicting future actions makes zero sense.
Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
Are companies like this not proof that the free market system does not exist? I mean how could PG&E still exist if this were the case?
- epistasis 3y ago
  What do you mean by "free market"? In any case, that might be a tangential, as regulated utilities are decidedly what nobody thinks of as a free market. They are a monopoly, but trade off regulation of their pricing and investment decisions in return for the monopoly status.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
    > What do you mean by "free market"? I mean the concept that bad actors in a market will eventually die out because new competitors will emerge that offer better value which will then get all the business.
    - beej71 3y ago
      Applicable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

by sevg 3y ago

toomuchtodo 3y ago

Also of note is their handling of their fossil gas infrastructure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-pge-safety-investigation-20181214-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-pge-safety-investigat...

epistasis 3y ago

One of the many times they have killed: eight people in San Bruno in 2010 due to a gas pipeline explosion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion > On January 13, 2012, an independent audit from the State of California issued a report stating that PG&E had illegally diverted over $100 million from a fund used for safety operations, and instead used it for executive compensation and bonuses. This while charging unbelievably high rates for some of the worst reliability rates I have ever seen anywhere in the US.

roenxi 3y ago
That isn't really on the same scale as 1.4 billion litres of hexavalent chromium. I'm not sure if they are meant to be the same incident, but at $10 million/life, $100 million in savings at cost of 8 lives would be an appropriate design choice. We have to draw a line somewhere. I don't think that is the comparison you're trying to draw, but I'm not sure what you are trying to say, so... Life be risky. Perfect safety is not a reasonable goal.
- epistasis 3y ago
  It's not $100M savings, it's $100M paid to executives, illegally, instead of on the safety repairs. As far as whether trading $100M is an appropriate tradeoff for 8 lives, well.... let's hope you never are in a position to make a choice between $10M and a person's life.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    > well.... let's just say that I wouldn't be spending any more time around you if I could put a face to that statement. Come on. I suspect I could be any civil engineer, assuming that I didn't remember the wrong order of magnitude. Decisions have to be made about how safe to make things. It is quite difficult to do that without putting a dollar figure on human life, and AFAIK it is order of magnitude 10 million. Otherwise when do you stop bubble wrapping infrastructure? The numbers are close enough that they probably were skimping, but we can't tell that from the outcome of 8 people dying.
    - epistasis 3y ago
      You continue ignore that money was illegally taken from safety funds to pay executive bonuses. This is not an engineering tradeoff decision. That's not even relevant, and it's weird that you would invent such a situation.
      - roenxi 3y ago
        [flagged]

throwaway892238 3y ago

Every American utility company I have ever looked into has numerous crimes and controversies associated with it. It's kind of weird. I actually suspect it's due to them being publicly traded. They literally are not allowed to do things that would jeopardize the share price, so they will hurt themselves and people in order to make a minor profit increase YOY. You shouldn't need to be a capitalist enterprise (with the whole "infinite revenue growth" thing) if your purpose is just to make sure your customers - who won't ever really grow much, because, you know, only so many babies born etc - have power, water, etc. But as publicly traded companies, their first purpose is just to increase shareholder revenue. If you end up (accidentally) burning down a forest, poisoning some communities, or compromising a state election with a fake candidate, that may just be an unfortunate side effect in the service of increasing the stock price.

whatshisface 3y ago
The presumed legal duty to break the law in the interest of shareholders is grossly exaggerated... Nobody can sue you for failing to commit a crime on their behalf.
epistasis 3y ago
IMHO the problem is that utilities are like no other company in that they have a monopoly but are supposed to be reigned in by regulators. But the vast majority of regulatory bodies are either captured or incompetent at regulation. Public versus privately traded doesn't matter as much as the fundamental conflict, wherein they profit more when the costs increase, and there's no penalty for literally killing people. HIPAA violations result in jail time for executives. Meanwhile PGE illegally raids safety fund accounts to pay executive bonuses while regular people are killed due to failing infrastructure. CPUC and PGE executives need to face serious consequences, and most certainly jail time, for their malfeasance.
asdff 3y ago
The public companies also suffer from corruption and such. I guess there just must be some law of a universe where if you have a sufficient sized captive base of income, people who might be inclined to abuse their position to take advantage of the situation will strive to take advantage of the situation. Then it becomes not a matter of if there is any corruption, but when will you end up with a corruptible individual in a position that can be corrupted. Maybe these organizations or government bodies can be organized like a RAID away. Mirror these positions of power and use redundant pools. Identify corrupt bits by comparing results between these mirrors and hot swap the corrupted positions for a new candidate. Incrementally replace your array on schedule to avoid chance of future corruption and to mitigate batch effect.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jjav 3y ago

The PG&E rates are hard to believe for anyone outside their grip of death. From my February bill: peak: 53.0 + 18.3 = 71.3 c/kWhw partpeak: 51.3 + 11.1 = 62.4 c/kWh offpeak: 34.4 + 09.8 = 44.2 c/kWh Electricity is my third largest monthly expense (after mortgage and food) but at the current rate of increases, it'll be the second largest in a few years. This is for a tiny house with nothing special using electricity.

fmobus 3y ago
What the actual fuck. I live in Germany and pay ~35c/kWh, I thought power was supposed to be cheap in the states.
- samarthr1 3y ago
  In bengaluru, which is notorious for is high electricity rates, I pay an equivalent of 10c a unit. As a part of a government subsidy, my first 200 units are free too!
- hellotomyrars 3y ago
  The US is big. It is very location dependent and whether your utility is private or public. I live in rural Washington and my rate is $0.0634/kWh. My utility is a public one and also non-generating. The power comes from a Federal agency(Bonneville Power Administration) which is is in turn overseen by the Department of Energy.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jjav 3y ago
  I believe that PG&E, even more than high housing costs, is going to ruin California. The costs are already so astronomical and they keep rising so fast, that it's becoming more and more unreasonable to afford. Even on a silicon valley salary, those bills are shocking.
OJFord 3y ago
What are the two things summed? Are they really both c/kWh? Just confused because in the UK they'd be p/day and p/kWh respectively, and the numbers look 'in the right ballpark'. (Except that it would be mental to have the standing charge vary according to peak/not time.)

doctorpangloss 3y ago

> Their equipment has led to many wildfires Who are the antagonists in this story? California decided that people who live in fire areas deserve (1) the last marginal sales price of the homes in their burnt down area (2) paid by taxpayers, in disguise, through their utility bills (3) and in exchange, get what? Why should anyone be living in the places where these ancient powerlines are? The essentially infinite land the US + cars have played an important role in keeping home prices from rising to truly stratospheric levels in the urban US. So I understand that it also benefits many communities to have the escape valve of this housing. But there must be better land and better places than wildfire prone California. You have to draw the line somewhere. There are people who in the same breath say PG&E is the antagonist, that they are to blame and not the recklessness of the communities that live in these places; but then, they complain about wetland restrictions being rescinded and that taxpayers should not be paying for repeat flood victims in Florida, Louisiana, whatever, in red states. It's the same fucking thing! I don't know why the money to achieve this ridiculous compensation scheme has to meander through the utility company's liability. Obviously if it were an ordinary tax - I mean, it's a tax, that we're paying, through these utility bills - people would not do it. The only reason PG&E liability is on anyone's radar is because of some kind of complex political shenanigans that I do not understand and I wish were not a part of my community at all.

free_bip 3y ago
This comment reeks of victim blaming. Natural disasters happen literally everywhere on earth. When someone's house is destroyed by a tornado in Tornado Valley do you tell them "Oh well you were really irresponsible for living in tornado valley"? Or how about Florida, which has been hit by over 40% of US-landfall hurricanes? Do you tell the hundreds of thousands of people whose homes have been destroyed that they should have just packed up shop and moved away since they get regular hurricanes?
- doctorpangloss 3y ago
  Obviously I believe that governments should support people suffering from natural disasters, and that even huge amounts of money given directly to victims are an appropriate way to deal with disasters. > Natural disasters happen literally everywhere on earth Taxes also happen literally everywhere on Earth. This is an article about rate increases, not natural disaster policies. But like natural disasters not all taxes are the same. My neighbors have voted themselves a tax benefit where they've been paying property taxes as though their homes are worth 0.01-0.05x what they are, for years. Read all about it here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13 - it's the single most important law in this state, if you live in California you ought to understand what it is. So if I bought a home in San Francisco, I would pay normal taxes like "everywhere else on Earth." But not these folks. Let's say there's an earthquake in San Francisco and a bunch of crumbling 100y old Victorians valued at $1.5m but whose owners have been paying taxes for decades on as though they were valued $40k-300k - those crumbling houses fall apart. Should we pay every resident in a crumbling Victorian they haven't maintained at all, in communities whose schools and roads and institutions they have not been paying for, yet simultaneously benefitting from their land values rise as a consequence of the human capital arriving every year and sort of have nothing to do with, and they also haven't been paying any meaningful taxes: should we give them a giant check as though they sold their home, at market prices when only 1-5% of home inventory moves a month, in that no longer existing city that wasn't earthquaked? Listen this would affect me, I mean I know I would love a check that lets me hit the "reset" button the event of a natural disaster, but there was actually no universe in which I live here and benefitted from not paying taxes for decades. That was never given to me as a literal constitutional right it was to people who basically won the lottery. So who is the antagonist? This is what I am asking you. It's so easy to come from a place like whatever community you live in, where things follow normal rules and you can be pretty confident that your neighbors deserve full and just rescue. But my neighbors have given themselves an entitlement that yielded all sorts of crappy disfunction and I'm not the only person who is sick of that bullshit. The fire prone areas in California just synthesized their bullshit into some weird ass rigamarole where other Californians pay for that bullshit through the utility company.

robocat 3y ago

Goddam weird how we treat a corporate as though it has history and morals: PG&E is not a person. Projecting past crimes and predicting future actions makes zero sense.

Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago

Are companies like this not proof that the free market system does not exist? I mean how could PG&E still exist if this were the case?

epistasis 3y ago
What do you mean by "free market"? In any case, that might be a tangential, as regulated utilities are decidedly what nobody thinks of as a free market. They are a monopoly, but trade off regulation of their pricing and investment decisions in return for the monopoly status.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
  > What do you mean by "free market"? I mean the concept that bad actors in a market will eventually die out because new competitors will emerge that offer better value which will then get all the business.
  - beej71 3y ago
    Applicable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly