Pray Gamble & Explode (PG&E) needs to be forced into Chapter 13 dissolution and its assets sold off to companies that are actually competent. Continuing to make rate-payers bail out this incompetent and *dangerous* company is irresponsible malpractice on the part of our state government. PG&E’s rates are double or even *triple* what rates are in most areas of the country and are the #1 reason why I don’t have an electric car — buying gasoline for a hybrid car is far cheaper than paying the disastrous rates that PG&E has extorted from the rate-payers of this state. And for those of you saying “but it’s because California is so rugged!”, average electrical rates in Nevada are *HALF* those of PG&E — even though Nevada is even more sparsely populated and rugged than most of California.
This company is incompetent, dangerous, incapable of providing electrical service for rates competitive with other electric companies, keeps blowing up or burning up parts of the state due to their incompetence, and should just die, die, die, die, die, die, die, die, DIE.
— Badtux the Irate Overcharged Penguin
Badtux the Snarky Penguin 
My kneejerk reaction to any sentiment along the lines of “corporation, die!” is YES. If the corporation has some form of monopoly, then YES, PLEASE.
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A company that kills people by having gas pipelines blow up underneath their houses, or burns them to death because the company was too fucking lazy to cut trees away from power lines… Mass murder. If it was Moozlim terrrrrrriststsz with that body count, the U.SS.A would be bombing brown people in anger. If it was white-wing domestic terrorists, there would at least be nationwide publicity for a day or two until the “hopes and prayers” went away.
But Piggy’s malfeasance doesn’t get the same sort of emotional reaction. It’s like there’s a lacuna in the human imagination when it comes to corporations. We can envision a HUMAN bad actor, and hate them. But a corporation is like a squishy marshmallow in our minds. Whose blood (aside from Tux’s here) is boiling to drive a stake through the heart of something that doesn’t even have a (literal) heart?
As for giving them corporate death penalty, I’m afraid that will never be done by any government that has the power to de-register corpos. Neoliberalism has triumphed in the legal system and the human imagination. Kill a corpo? “They’re the JOB CREATORS!” is what most people would squeal, insofar as they thought about it at all. And corpos have bought the humans with the state’s monopoly on authorised use of violence (including the bloodless killing of corporate registration.) Amerika is a long way from when Judge Green could break up AT&T. I don’t know what the effective cutoff point is, but any sizeable corpo is more untouchable than a Mafia capo. What crooked megabank was held down and drowned due to massive fraud and underwater balance sheets after 2008, for example? They were bailed out, not beaten to death.
Entities including PG&E WILL fall, but only in the context of a systemic collapse that sweeps huge parts of organised civilisation down with it. Including billions of human lives worldwide, sadly.
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Approximately what would be the bill for 200 kwh’s? Where I just moved from it would be right at $50. They added a $20 surcharge across the board so frugal people like myself were penalized much more so than those who used a lot. Also the kwh rate was like a bit over 14 cents a kwh with the overall kw rate right at 27 cents a kwh. Where I’m at now the same amount is well less than $30.
Die is right. Bastards come right out and said the more you use the cheaper it is. The town I lived in for a long time owned its own electric company. There’s like maybe 30 in Colorado who do. Bought on the open market just like the big boys and even to this day believe the price per kwh is close to the same of less than 5 cents per kwh. Sell between 8.5 and 9 – less in the winter. 30% or more came from renewables.
SIEC headquartered in Pueblo,CO cares less about your thoughts and the slugs in my opinion who sit on the board are criminals. The last rate increase the public was told it was going to be between 7.5 and 9%. It was easily determined it was a lie that the increase was going to be almost 30% and it was! Not one goddamn person I spoke with including business’s gave a shit – not even a little one. Went to the paper who was putting this crap in and suggested they had a duty to inform the public what was about to happen and got thrown out. It’s true. I’m sooooo glad to be outta that shithole!
When increases in electric rate are in the news the percentage of increase is used most of the time because most people can not do the simple math on how much a kwh costs. Bottom line though is amount of the bill divided by the kwh’s used is what your rate actually is.
I just looked and my bill not yet received is $48. Electric is $31.80 – gas $16. Used 279 kwh’s. There was some ac going on. That comes out to 11.4 cents a kwh. I’ll take that any day for sure.
It’s interesting how it’s done in Mexico. Where big users are penalized a good amount to subsidize it for the little guys which is most everybody. Businesses who use a lot really take it in the shorts there.
Good luck!
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Not sure. I guess I am even more cynical than you guys, but if PG&E were killed and broken up, who would pick up the pieces? Given that the only thing the United States can do anymore is financial “engineering” (and overpriced weapon systems), I would bet it would be someone like Bane Capital or a similar vampire squid parasite. And if you think THESE Masters of the Universe would run things better? Hahahahahahahahhahaha. They would just cut wages and extract their “management fees” and interest payments and walk, eventually.
I am also cynical about the crimes of powerline management. Have you looked at the terrain the power lines run through? Especially given climate change? What you are really demanding is absolute perfection, and is there a human institution that provides that? One problem is many of these exurban white people paradises SHOULD NOT EXIST. Paradise was a box canyon in a dry forest. The exurban rural estates in the wine country are also questionable. One missed tree….one bad transformer…and bam.
Note that I am not defending PG&E per se. I am just really, really skeptical that breaking them up will be a solution
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PG&E would not necessarily have to be split into pieces and sold to private rapecorporations. It could be put under public — i.e. “government” — ownership. “Natural monopolies” such as electricity production and transmission systems are well-fit for ownership by the population. Most of them evolved that way before they were flogged off to profit-seeking corpos — goddamned rentiers — when the neolib ideology took hold.
It happened here in the 1990s, where the government-owned State Electricity Commission (SEC, which people nicknamed “Safe, Easy, Comfortable” for its feather-bedding employment and maintenance practices) was sold off. Electricity prices here are now way high. The corpos that bought the power plants didn’t do enough maintenance of the machinery they got that was built by the government, so the coal-fired burners and generators are running into the ground. That’s ironically a good thing for the climate, because one of the three massive brown-coal plants, owned by a French corpo, shut down a couple years ago. It would have cost too much to rebuild a power plant built half a century ago, and there’e enough rooftop solar that’s been installed so its gigawatts were no longer needed.
There’s been a low-key effort in San Francisco for years to make the PG&E system serving the city part of the public domain, but it never got anywhere. Or there could be separate, regional publicly-owned utility agencies for Los Angeles, the desert south/San Diego, San Fran and the north, The Central Valley, what-have-you. A breakup would not have to be done overnight, and it could be organised in various ways. If there’s the will and wisdom amongst people with the power to do that.
A social group I’m part of, who are followers of “Archdruid” John Michael Greer’s Peak Oil/Doom blog, had a chat last Saturday with an engineer who’s now living in New Zealand, doing power system upgrade work there. He described a lot of the factors involved in planning, such as “what percentage reliability do you aim for?” There are differences between a 99% reliability standard and 99.98%, for instance. Do you put four transformers at a substation when only three are required, just in case one pops? How many times do you repeat that down the transmission line — at every substation, or one out of three. It’s also a consideration when you do maintenance. Cut trees, survey for landslips every year, every six months, yada yada. A profit-maximising corpo will do things one way, because they are legally mandated to make maximum money for shareholders and can be sued if they don’t. A government-owned agency can aim for performance, not just profit.
Trouble is, the “government is evil” mindset has taken deep root in the Amerikan mind — even with the people in government. Perhaps because they know they are evil themselves. So I don’t see any possibility of changes happening until TSHTF. And then it will be like deciding not to put oil in your car’s engine until after it seizes up and melts some pistons. You’ll still have a car, and a (slightly melted) engine block. But you’ll be stuck on the side of the road with no way to make repairs right there. It’ll be too late, and everything will be farked. Enjoy civilisation while it lasts!
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You make a lot of interesting points, Bukko. And California does actually have a successful example of a public utility-SMUD-in Sacramento (I understand it to be successful. I am sure they have their critics, too)
I like the distributed power idea, but many people lack the resources, knowledge, skills, or desire to fund, install, and maintain such systems. Solar seems an obvious goal in warmer, sunnier climates, and we are seeing an amazing number of permit applications (I work in planning permitting). But people installing the systems are almost always affluent or “together” people who can afford it. There is still a need for the centralized power system to fill in the very large gaps. Just like in a country of 300+ million urban and suburban dwellers we are not going to return to private wells and septic systems.
So…is municipal ownership the solution? It may be. But given the condition of California roads and infrastructure I wonder if it would be better? And I am not a Government if Evil guy…I am a Human Institutions Fail guy. And people ARE evil. At least, Americans are. How could a country founded on genocide, religious nuttery, and slavery NOT be? 🙂 Which you, being a follower of the Archdruid, probably share.
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