Is Silicon Valley Power not a government-granted monopoly? How does their business model differ?
Statewide utilities are bloated and inefficient, and they abuse their monopoly power. PG&E acts like the only choices are to cause fires or turn off power when it gets windy -- it faces no pressure to find a better solution because there is no competition.
Small-to-medium municipal utilities that serve smaller areas can serve their customers much better, as Silicon Valley Power demonstrates -- if people don't like it they can move to a neighboring city. In contrast, PG&E is almost impossible to avoid.
California should give more cities and counties the ability to experiment with this model. Competition between municipal utilities is better than granting a single company a monopoly on a utility millions of people depend on.
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SVP receives generation produced outside Santa Clara via transmission facilities owned and operated by PG&E under the direction of the California Independent System Operator (CAISO).
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About 2/3rd of SVP power comes from outside. If PG&E cuts certain transmission lines the good folks of Santa Clara will feel the bite, a bit lesser perhaps, but a brown-out can be willfully imposed by PG&E
The Berkeley campus is up against the East Bay hills and so there are trees all over near the campus.
This seems overly general. There's plenty of state-wide utilities in the rest the world which are fantastic in every regard including cost.
This changed in the 80s and 90s with deregulation. Some of them even turned into growth stocks or did other financial fuckery that made investors money at the cost of rotting out the business.
End of the day, local municipal utilities or co-ops almost always deliver a better level of service at a lower cost. Smaller scale makes field service more efficient and reduces overheads like executive compensation. One municipal utility I’m familiar with has a civil service scale for all staff — the head guy makes $140k.
that was my interpretation (from the context) anyways... maybe i’m wrong ^^;
And the biggest, of course, is Los Angeles Department of Water and Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Department_of_Wate...
PG&E seems to be particularly bad in terms of upkeep and frequent power failures. That is, the unintentional kind, not like the shutoffs this week.
No-one wants a job, or to keep their current job?
Compare how cops act (who are damn near impossible to fire and have a local monopoly) with how private security acts (who can be fired on a moments notice and who's customers are not locked to a particular provider).
A government entity in terms of public services tends to have "getting their job done right" at the top of the list, albeit at a lower cost when possible.
not my experience. Most government entities try to raise as much money as possible to protect their jobs and raise their salaries. gettingthe job done right is not remotely near top of the list. See SFMTA or MTA (new your public transportaion) as 2 examples. Or watch IKIRU to see the same attitude in Japan. Yes it's a movie but it rings true to people's experience that goverment never tries to "getting their job done right"
I'm not defending evil and corrupt PG&E. I'm only responding to the idea that government services are magically incentivized at "getting their job done right". Their incentives rarely align to "getting their job done right".
Other examples off the top of my head, public schools in the USA who have more money per student than pretty much every other country but have worse outcomes. I don't have a solution but clearly they are not "getting their job done right"
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp
Another example might be the USA's militarized police force killing its own citizens. Some people have arguied they're incentivized to buy all the military equipment because it raises their budgets. Again, they are not targetting "getting their job done right". And again I don't know the solution. Just pointing out making something a government serivce does not magically remove all bad incentives.
you can read I guess a right leaning POV
https://www.charleskochinstitute.org/issue-areas/criminal-ju...
or a left
https://www.vox.com/2015/5/31/17937892/ferguson-protests-pol...
Perhaps, but you didn't say "Some government services are poorly run". You said:
"not my experience. Most government entities try to raise as much money as possible to protect their jobs and raise their salaries. gettingthe job done right is not remotely near top of the list."
You have not yet given an example of this. You're just pointing to random organizations' failings and saying that they're caused by incentives specific to government, without any evidence whatsoever.
Are MTA and SFMTA's failings because they are "trying to protect their jobs" or because they have to maintain aging infrastructures in a culture that idolizes cars?
Are public schools' failings because they are "raising as much money as possible" to "raise their salaries", or are they because of mandatory religion-based curriculum, mandatory standardized testing determining funding, lack of healthcare/childcare/nutrition support for parents, and parents being incarcerated?
It's clever of you to bring up police, because you can look through my previous comments and see my political bent, but keep in mind that the discussion at hand is whether government or corporate incentives lead to better results. Looking at where the money goes when overly-militarized police purchase military equipment, I think it's hard to attribute this to government incentives as compared to corporate incentives. You can't point to corporate meddling in government causing problems, and use that as justification to put the corporation in charge.
Saying "not my experience" at the beginning is pretty disingenuous, because it's become increasingly clear that you don't have any relevant experience.
Of most universal health care systems vs. the US "mandated private" insurance - see how much of society is covered and how well.
It doesn't mean they are setup that way or that they (or the electorate) don't become captured by vested interests but it is the most effective way of keeping natural monopolies in our economy free from corruption (heavy regulation can also work).
Or they can be shielded from accountability because government bureaucracy. Imagine if the MTA were a private entity. Their contract would not be getting renewed (to put it mildly).
This is really a situation where bad incentives were created (because as far as I can tell the California state government is pretty bad at doing good incentives in general) and then people are surprised when they lead to bad behavior...
Maybe a natural monopoly would not have developed statewide. Maybe the government makes a bad situation worse by picking the wrong winner before the market decides. Maybe the government should allow competition if cities and/or private businesses are willing to give it a shot -- it works pretty well where I live.
This overt dereliction can only come from an entity that is "too big too fail". If this were one or two cities' local power companies, it would not be national news. Residents of those communities would be showing up at city meetings going "wtf", and could easily point at adjacent communities not doing such things as a reference.