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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

California has fucked up so badly by not nationalizing PG&E, and instead allow it to continue to be poorly run as a for profit enterprise while proposing and enacting suboptimal pricing dynamics and redistribution strategies for energy.

If you want to help the poor, directly subsidize solar panels and batteries for them (thorough the state and federal gov, not the investor owned utility), or community utility scale renewables and storage where on site generation and storage is infeasible.

(Designing a 20kw ground mount expansion for a friend outside of Sacramento on SMUD to work towards going off grid if needed)

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> community utility scale renewables and storage where on site generation and storage is infeasible.

This can't come soon in enough in CA where a huge number of people don't have the option of rooftop solar because they are apartment and condo dwellers and/or renters. Apparently a law was finally passed in 2022 to allow community solar [1], but Energy Sage community solar searches [2] turn up nothing in any of the populous zip codes I entered.

1. https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/electrical-ene...

2. https://www.energysage.com/local-data/community-solar/ca/

> instead allow it to continue to be poorly run as a for profit enterprise

The Californian government is famous for all its well-run programs. "The trains are always on time in California", as they say.

> California has fucked up so badly by not nationalizing PG&E

Is this…a thing California could even do? Is there some state-actionable version of nationalization that I’ve never heard of?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34017163 (citations in comment)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34015491 (thread)

Most (all?) states have Eminent domain rights. They would have to pay fair-market value, but recently PG&E was bankrupt so...

I might be wrong, but I was under the impression that eminent domain wasn’t available to states for transactions like this.

A quick search turned up this article[1] talking about an attempt to do exactly what we’re talking about here, but it was ultimately settled out of court and as far as I can tell it’s still an open question as to whether a state government can legitimately exercise eminent domain in this context.

1. https://mckinneylaw.iu.edu/ilr/pdf/vol38p55.pdf

PG&E has made every effort to capture regulators and it has paid off handsomely -- residential solar in CA is being shut down by policy.

Reducing actual demand for PG&E electricity is not in the best interest of regulators, that much is clear.

> residential solar in CA is being shut down by policy.

Residential solar is being mandated by policy, slightly reducing the incentive to build it by shaving off a portion of the per kWh charge and replacing that portion with a connection fee wouldn’t kill it even if the mandate wasn’t there. Which, again, it is.

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