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Comment by SaltyBackendGuy | Hacker News Reader

> don't blame the player, blame the game

I don't think this is a good excuse when dealing with public safety. We should, however, acknowledge all parties culpable.

"Over the past decade the company contributed around 245 times to political action committees which in turn made their own donations." [0]

The government is also to blame.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/us/pge-california-politic...

More coverage. [1] https://www.abc10.com/article/news/investigations/governor-n... (sorry for the ads)

[2] https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-aler...

Edit: Formatting

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My statement "don't blame the player, blame the game" is clearly a gross oversimplification. The damage caused by CA forest fires is a complicated multi-factor problem...contributing factors include the weather, PG&E maineance standards, politicians, fire service, and above all a lack of ability to adapt to changing weather conditions. I feel like the public narrative is hindering possible solutions.

You left out one major player: investors. Investor owned utilities like PG&E are considered a rock solid place to put your retirement funds to get a predictable rate of return. As an investor with a short term perspective, I'd be very opposed to PGE reducing or eliminating my dividend in order to fund safety and fire maintenance, i.e. give me the money now, fires be damned. If I'm giving up a dividend, I'd rather invest in a growth stock.

That's likely the force at the root of why there is so much pressure for profit over safety.

The business decisions are optimized for the demands of investors, and the total magnitude of the dividend paid to investors like many of us probably dwarfs the bonuses paid to the execs.

That system was working fine (and in lower fire risk service areas, like most areas east of the Rocky mountains, it still is) until the true unmodeled risks of poor maintenance and climate change finally manifested, and here we are on the other side.

California is a matchbox, and barring major changes in energy generation and distribution technology and infrastructure to lower the risk, it will be risky to deliver electricity here no matter who is providing it, be that PGE or a hypothetical state owned utility. The benefit of the latter is that it is freed from the financial obligation to investors, and can focus on safety and delivery.

It's not just the dividends. It's the $100 million from their safety budget that they blew on executive compensation. There's also the hundreds of millions of dollars annually that PG&E is spending on stock buybacks every year.

It's risky to deliver electricity anywhere. PG&E is reckless and dishonest above and beyond the norm.

> It's not just the dividends. It's the $100 million from their safety budget that they blew on executive compensation. There's also the hundreds of millions of dollars annually that PG&E is spending on stock buybacks.

All of those are ultimately spent for the benefit of investors, whom the executives report to via the board of directors. It doesn't change the argument that PGE's incentive structure is tilted toward their investors' demands first, and safety/ratepayers/public after that.

> It's risky to deliver electricity anywhere.

California is a uniquely risky place compared to elsewhere. It has the combination of a very heavy rainy season, causing massive vegetation growth, followed by a very long dry season. Both are being exacerbated by climate change. On top of that, California has a booming population, with people living in ever more remote fire prone areas, requiring electric transmission lines to those areas.

Areas with year round precipitation don't have nearly the same fire risk.

> PG&E is reckless and dishonest above and beyond the norm.

Perhaps, but that has more to do with answering to investors, and not the underlying physical risks.

And yet it's PG&E that's starting the record breaking fires. It's PG&E that's blowing up neighborhoods. It's PG&E that's poisoning whole towns. As it turns out PG&E is not the only electric utility company in California.

PG&E is doing things in a uniquely wrong manner.

They're not the only electric utility company in California - just the biggest by far. The second biggest is Southern California Edison, who by coincidence happen to have caused what was apparently the second largest wildfire in modern Californian history (Thomas fire in 2017). It sounds like their fire prevention shutoffs haven't been going so well either: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-11-01/southern...

All of the other Californian power companies are much smaller, and I'm not sure they're doing massively better. According to a New York Times article a few months back, the example state officials have pointed to of what PG&E should be doing, San Diego Gas & Electric, only managed to cause "far fewer fires than PG&E" thanks to their own aggressive monitoring and targetted blackouts - which is to say that they're still causing fires - and they're far smaller than PG&E.

Edison settled the lawsuits over the Thomas fire without admitting guilt. To me that seems like a good indication that there was a much less clear case for negligence than there is for PG&E. Guess who started the largest fire…

It sounds like their fire prevention shutoffs haven't been going so well either: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-11-01/southern....

Edison started a fire as they started to turn electricity back on. How many did PG&E start while the power was out? The last count I'd heard was five.

San Diego Gas & Electric, only managed to cause "far fewer fires than PG&E" thanks to their own aggressive monitoring and targetted blackouts - which is to say that they're still causing fires - and they're far smaller than PG&E.

Maybe it's time to shrink PG&E down to a manageable size? I'm not suggesting the other utilities are particularly well behaved, rather PG&E is worse. Take, for instance, fire prevention efforts. Edison disables their automatic reclosers during fire season. PG&E? lol. They're thinking about it.

> Maybe it's time to shrink PG&E down to a manageable size?

You mean shrinking the service area?

If so, some other entity will have to take over distribution in the areas removed from PG&E. It's not like those areas are going to go off-grid.

If those entities are locally owned and controlled (i.e. municipal power, as some CA cities have) it might make those more incentivized to proactively deal with maintenance issues - after all - people don't generally want to endanger their neighbors. But if it's just a slightly smaller investor-owned utility, it's not clear that they'll be incentivized any differently than PG&E is.

And remember that PG&E's size is part of what enabled it to achieve economies of scale, which in turn results in higher profits and dividends for investors.

Finally, even if you shrink PG&E, you still have the problem of maintaining transmission lines, which have been responsible for starting a number of fires. Some entity has to be responsible for maintaining those.

It's the only way to solve a problem when new players are free to enter at any time. (So, this one time things may be different, but it's not a certainty.)

Of course, part of the game rules must be player punishment, otherwise the game is severely broken. But yes, you don't fix anything by focusing on the players.

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