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Comment by thereisnospork | Hacker News Reader

This may be a naive question, but why aren't they being bankrupted (or hurt financially) for cutting off the power voluntarily? Their nominal job is to provide power, not doing so for reasons that aren't acts of god should open them to liability and/or (severe) penalties for violation of contract.

If the appropriate legal framework doesn't currently exist I can't imagine a 'The lights stay on' bill would be all that unpopular politically.

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> This may be a naive question, but why aren't they being bankrupted (or hurt financially) for cutting off the power voluntarily?

Well, lots of reasons, but one absolute blocker is that they are already bankrupt because of their liability for wildfires in 2017 and 2018.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Com...

No, the bankruptcy is due to the wildfires from last year.

Like all service providers in every industry, you can probably get an SLA from them if you really want one. Otherwise you're stuck with Best Effort service. If that doesnt meet your expectations, you're free to shop around and pay for better service. Choice is good.

Do they have contracts saying they will provide power 100% of the time?

Is them shutting the power off different from a tree falling on the line cutting power off? What if power went out due to some equipment failing that they didn't perform proper maintenance on?

They are a Public Utility, granted a monopoly in exchange for providing reliable power distribution. If they can't do that, they have no reason to exist at all, certainly not as a monopoly.

Remember that CA impeached the governor Gray Davis in 2000 for power outages .. I bet that PG&e is thinking of doing the same thing today to Gavin Newsom!

How do you figure that?

Point of clarification: It was a recall, not impeachment. Impeachment is an act of the legislature, recall is an act of the voters.[0]

[0].https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_gubernatorial_recal...

Furthermore, he was not recalled for the power outages. His recall was bankrolled by those he was fighting having California pay the $80Bn embezzled with the aid of Enron and Dynegy.

Arnold Schwarzneggar stole the governership, and promptly made the state pay the $80Bn. Californians paid through the nose for going along with the recall.

If Gavin gets hit with a recall, it will be more of the same. Californians will be the poorer for it. There are a lot of billionaires here, but also widespread extreme poverty. No coincidence, that.

It is very cheap to run a recall campaign in California.

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