I expect parts of the Bay Area not in the hills to not lose power because if you can't clear brush around the high-voltage lines going to urban centers, you have no business being a utility.
It's not about holding the utility "liable for fires", it is holding them liable for gross negligence by failing to perform critical or routine maintenance. These aren't difficult or impossible problems. The Camp Fire was caused by a system that was significantly overdue for upgrading: https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-e-knew-for-years-its-lines-c...
Time and again, PG&E ignored maintenance requirements and funneled profits to execs and stockholders. The San Bruno pipeline explosion was also entirely preventable: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/How-PG-E-missed-chanc...
What's more, PG&E falsified safety records as a matter of course: https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/15/us/pge-falsifying-records/ind...
So PG&E showed tidy profits by ignoring their infrastructure and doing it so completely that their people on the street simply lied about maintaining things because no one cared... until stuff began to systematically began to blow up and burn down: https://www.abc10.com/article/news/investigations/the-histor...
The problem is one of accountability. PG&E execs roll from court case to court case but face no risk of personal jail time for decisions that have caused tens to hundreds of preventable deaths: https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-pge-c...
So the courts get more and more frustrated, fining PG&E larger and larger amounts. But the utility never actually fix their known problems, they simply pass the bill back to their customers, declare bankruptcy and, at this point, turn off the power preemptively as some sort of power move to try to force government compliance.
Building codes apparently changed about a decade ago and are helping the situation, but most of our housing stock is much older. Anyhow there are signs of some political movement on the subject, such as funding for retrofitting. I'm hopeful that pick up.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.denverpost.com/2019/04/11/c...
California hasn't woken up yet so you've got Europe and the east coast who are mostly impartial observers looking at it and going "yup, while probably not ideal this is not an unreasonable outcome considering the situation."
It's much cheaper than PG&E, more reliable, and as far as I know has not started any fires.
The problem with solar is if you're going to play utility, you need batteries. The cost of the panels, installation, batteries, and maintenance add up to enough that if it were cost-effective, utilities would build out more solar. The economies of scale make it cheaper for utilities to manage.
You can sell excess power to the utility, but don't expect that to last in its current form. When 95% of customers use at least 10 kWh per day, you can bill for use and ignore the connection fee. When 50% of customers net-use almost zero, the utility still has to maintain the connection and the network, so expect either connection fee or wholesale producer prices. Net metering doesn't scale.
Now, if you're in a remote area or one prone to wildfires, solar might actually be cheaper, and PG&E might look more like Solar City for those communities.