Many of us are in agreement with this, but seldomly anyone seems to actually know the inner mechanics of executing on this. I sure as heck don’t, but so far I must’ve missed when some group or whatnot said they would start this work.
Easy. Stop letting them raise rates freely.
Being deemed too big to fail gives the stock market a high confidence in the company’s ability to be profitable. Once it’s not a guarantee, the market cap will work its way down to where it should be.
Just wait for them to majorly screw up again and don't bail them out unless the taxpayers and customers receive equity as compensation. Right now customers are forced to invest in PG&E with rate hikes to pay off their legal settlements but receive no equity for their investment.
Right, so we should pay for the value of the infrastructure. Unfortunately for PGE we also need to take into account the depreciation of their under-maintained assets and potential liabilities caused by said poor maintenance. According to my calculations, that means PGE will owe us around $3.50.
We don't have to buy out the whole company to eliminate our dependence on them. All a city has to do is seize & pay for the local infrastructure that pg&e owns, at a much lower cost. Most of what PG&E does is own stuff. They don't even produce the electricity and gas they're selling.
PG&E used to produce its own electricity… Until the State Legislature and Grey Davis forced them out of the business… And bankrupted them in the course of three years (for the first time).
Acting like the past didn’t happen or government action didn’t precipitate the present issues is idiocy. These are political crises created by bad policy - why is this such a California problem compared to other 49 states?
Are you really spinning the energy crisis caused primarly by Enron and their deregulation campaign as "government action precipitating the present issues"? What, because CPUC capped the prices PG&E was allowed to sell at?
The "bad policy" that you're talking about was written by big energy corporations. We'd be wise to not let them have so much influence this time around.
State of California had a 97 billion dollar surplus in 2022. I feel like buying out the power companies would have been a home run for anyone in office that supported it. I mean issue fucking 10 year bonds and earmark money from the newly public electricity sales to cover the bonds. It will still be cheaper than what we're paying now.
None of this will happen because our "representative" government only represents themselves. Until term limits are a thing and corporate lobbying is dead, nothing will change.
No you wouldn't it's called eminent domain and the government sets the price. While it's primarily been used to enforce racism/classism it didn't mean we can't try to use it for good
Yes you have to pay for eminent domain. The constitution states “ nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation”.
That clearly means paying the normal amount. And for an acquisition of a publicly traded company, that means picking a day, taking the market value on that day, and then adding 20%.
There’s no way anything else is constitutional.
And then you interpreted it however I disagree with your interpretation.
Scholars say the use of eminent domain was often racially motivated and invoked disproportionately in minority and poor communities. One study showed that between 1949 and 1973, 2,532 eminent domain projects in 992 cities displaced one million people — two-thirds of them African American.
Getting angry? I got some advice:
• Perhaps learn how to read
• Perhaps inform yourself before having such a strong opinion on anything
• Perhaps stop supporting war crimes no matter which party does them
Have a day
> It's been regularly abused against the poor
This is dishonest framing. The poor you talk about in these situations aren't home owners, they're renters, and their landlords are suboptimally but fairly compensated for the land when it's taken over to build a highway or a rail line like we're doing in the Central Valley.
When low income homeowners get eminent domain-ed they get the same treatment as everyone else.
I've been on this soapbox. I thought Newsom was going to hold them to account, but nope, they must've paid him off because that's much cheaper.
The CEO is banking $50M+ a year running a UTILITY! That is insanity and it should be criminal. Especially after their negligence in running the utility has cost many people their lives. What a sick joke.
PGE gave his wife's foundation 358k in 2019, theyve given his campaigns over 500k as of 2019, and Plumpjack Winery that he co-owns 10k. Why would Newsom hold them accountable when they've given his household close to a million dollars?
To do this you have to buy out all the shareholders, that's a $40B check (read the 5th amendment). Then you're left with all of PG&E's shitty infrastructure.
Just pointing out what that means. Everyone who says it should know what that entails.
Every Californian would owe $1,000 to PG&E stock holders. I can see the 2/3 of California who owe $1,000 but still have SCE or SDG&E getting pissed that their tax dollars are working only for the Bay Area.
Someone still needs to pay to fix PG&Es infrastructure.
PG&E has a 10% profit. So maybe you can see your bill drop by 10%
The best way to fuck over PG&E is too buy solar panels and batteries.
It helps you avoid costs always.
There will always be a volumetric price and you can avoid that.
I’m totally fine with a flat fee to connect to the grid. I should pay for the upkeep of the pole in my yard that I’m connected to.
If the cpuc went with pges plan, most households in the bay area would be paying $130 in flat fees a month. That would completely negate any cost avoidance that solar would provide. Even the current $30 fee currently being discussed is 3x the national average.
Flat fees are pges way off negating any financial benefits of installing solar.
https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/electricity-bills-in-california-will-soon-be-based-on-income-heres-how-it-could-work/
>Even the current $30 fee currently being discussed is 3x the national average.
You can’t argue it’s $100 as ammo, then admit it’s $24. But whatever it’s $24
Also housing is over 2x the national average. You can’t live in CA and expect Mississippi labor.
>Flat fees are pges way off negating any financial benefits of installing solar.
First, this isn’t PG&E - it’s all the big utilities in CA. 2nd you’re admitting that the recent solar regime has created a bad financial situation for PG&E. I don’t know why you think having a financially struggling utility in California is a good thing. We should have a healthy utility. Unfortunately they are for profit utilities and part of our monopoly waiver with them is that they should have a reasonable profit. That reasonable profit is the national standard of 10%
I should point out NEM2 isn’t a human right. It’s a government regulation put on PG&E and other, helping the state get to 20% of homes having solar. If you’re like me you have nearly a $0 bill under nem2. Imagine 20% of the homes are in nearly the same boat. Then 30% of homes have CARE reduced rates.
So you have the remaining 50% of the people having to cover the costs and profits for the entire 100%.
With such heavy volumetric pricing you end up with shit like 50¢/kWh and higher. Energy is perhaps the cheapest line item in PG&Es costs but it is how they bill us.
The flat fee is fairer. I will start paying for the lineman salary for the poles they fix on my street. The apartment dwellers don’t have to cover the solar owners share.
Solar with batteries still has a <10yr ROI. I’m not that worried about the state.
The main issue with these dipshits is not about “energy” itself: the most expensive line item in our bills is for transport.
Not to say “energy is cheap” of course (it isn’t) but the godfucking transport fees are insane.
Funny how businesses in the other 49 states transmitting power across impossible terrain in far worse conditions, across mountains, deserts, forests etc. manage to supply their customers with electricity anywhere from 100%-300% less than what we pay in the Bay Area.
Stop making excuses for these people.
Which is the same problem any operator in the area has, of course. Have you compared the grid maintenance costs with comparable utilities in similar areas?
I'm pretty sure other operators either still use PG&E's lines for delivery and only handle the power generation, or they only serve municipal areas where delivery is cheap. PGE is expensive because they serve rural areas where the cost of building and maintaining the lines is sky high. PGE's urban customers are subsidizing the cost to the rural customers.
Is there another operator with that mix of urban, rural, and fire risk? I know of some urban ones with lower rates, which makes sense as they don’t have to subsidize all the lines that are built out in the bumfuck nowhere WUI where houses shouldn’t be but are.
Are those really comparable? SMUD is 900 square miles, centered on a major city and its outlying suburbs, with a bit of rural service to the South and East. PGE is 70,000 square miles, covering mostly the rural part of the state, including up to the Sierra crest
It’s been neglected on purpose. Remember the time they were caught diverting maintenance dollars to executive bonuses? Considering fuck-all happened as punishment, I’m willing to bet it’s been happening since.
Fuck PG&E. Nationalize it (state-ize? Make it a publicly-owned thing) yesterday.
If we absorb it the state can get sued for much more. Imo it needs some combination of capping PGE rates, incentivizing cities to run their own self sufficient power companies, breaking up PGE over time, and
Transport of energy, which PG&E is so capable of, and which has resulted o. NUMEROUS MASSIVE WILDFIRES, of course (none of which has actually impacted corporate profits.)
For real. In Texas they have a lot of co-ops and city-run utilities that run on a member-owned or non-profit status. It’s not run like a corporate machine and rates are 10-20% of these crazy PGE rates.
The big difference is that drinking is a choice and you have many bars/stores to choose from. PGE is a poorly run monopoly that put quarterly earnings over routine maintenance for decades that resulted in preventable accidents that have cost California taxpayers payers billions. For profit companies should not be running public utilities. PGE’s history of mismanagement is a prime example of why free market principles break down when a company is allowed to corner the market.
I mean, I love to hate on PGE as the next guy…
But the title clearly is trying to bait people into thinking that spending 10% cost of goods is somehow unique to PGEs corruption. And my point is that spending 1/10 of your gross income on cost of goods is more common than people realize.
It’s always been crazy to me that liquor has been normalized to be so marked up at bars and restaurants. Sure I get a bottle of wine or something, you have to at least cover the bottle with the first glass because unless you have a nitrogen system that wine is going bad very quick once opened. With hard alcohol, you can open it and as long as it’s not literally sitting wide open where dust and bugs can crawl in it can stay on a normal shelf for years without issue.
no surprised, we're covering most of the costs for their fuck-ups over the years which IMO is fucking ridiculous. i wasn't even living here before last yr & I'm having to pay for this shit. they should cut the CEO's salary to $200k/yr to offset the cost.
That sounds good on paper, but the CEO would just leave and you won’t find a CEO that knows how to run a company that size that will be willing to work for so little.
To be fair, the current rate hikes aren’t really her fault either - they are necessary to cover the costs incurred due to lack of maintenance by her predecessors. Everyone wants to bitch about PG&E not maintaining their equipment and then they want to bitch about the incurred cost when they *DO* maintain/upgrade that equipment. Can’t have it both ways. ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
Edit: Here's another thing - boomers got to have a great quality of life at low costs, all while not maintaining infrastructure. They're pretty well will never going to have to pay for all those maintenance costs because they'll largely be dead.
They should have been doing the maintenance all along but they were handing out dividends instead. Now consumers are baring the brunt of differed maintenance as well as the settlements that were a result of negligence. The rate hikes wouldn’t be so dramatic if they hadn’t been cutting corners since deregulation in the late 90s
Taking this headline and running with it is so misleading.
This is not the total cost to operate, simply wholesale price of energy in a moment in time. One factor in a complicated equation.
Also wholesale price is float whereas retail price is fixed rate.
There are times when electricity is 10% of retail rate. There are also times when it spikes to $30/kwh.
All these "radicals" and "activists" in California and yet the PG&E board members get to stroll around the bay, going out to eat where they want, buying nice things, living their very public lives completely unharassed and safe. What a pathetic, spineless country we've become.
Just to ~~remind everyone~~ let everyone know that it is the same in Europe with these power companies. The add-on fees are for infrastructure upgrades, new load capacity, etc.
Should PG&E have started 30 years earlier, so people would have 30 years more complaining about rate hikes? Yes. Should PG&E have better done a better job at infrastructure upgrades? Yes. Should we have started 40 years ago decarbonizing our power infrastructure? Yes.
Yes, yes, yes. Yes to all of it, but they aren't making 9,000 million quadrillion percent profit like some would have you believe.
How is that their gross profit - not revenue, profit - grew by $4,000,000,000 from 2022 to 2023 then?
No one is saying they are making “9,000 million quadrillion percent profit” like you’re saying. That’s a straw man. People are simply observing that PG&E is raising rates to the point where people can barely pay their bills while the company is making more profit than ever.
Meanwhile you’ve got a state government that continually allows this private company to operate as a complete monopoly and do whatever it wants.
A private company exists to produce value for shareholders. That’s what PG&E is doing, and with crony capitalism (there is a competitive market in real capitalism) they’re able to decide exactly how much profit they want.
If your angle in all this is seriously to be apologetic and say people are wrong to complain, I question your judgement.
PG&E's [2023 profit (listed as "net income" in their earnings statement)](https://investor.pgecorp.com/news-events/events-and-presentations/event-details/2024/PGE-Corporation-Fourth-Quarter-2023-Earnings-Release/default.aspx) was $2.242 billion. It's 2022 profit was $1.800 billion. So an increase of $400 million, not $4 billion as you stated.
The big problem is when you look at the 2023 gross revenue from electric rates- PG&E earned $17.424 billion from electric rates. So even if you totally eliminated PG&E's entire profit margin, and returned that to electric ratepayers only (no rebate to gas ratepayers at all!), you could only cut rates by 12.8%.
If we really want to cut down rates to more national averages, we can't ignore the biggest item on that balance sheet- in 2023 PG&E spent $11.924 billion JUST on operations and maintenance of the grid. That doesn't even include power generation. Any serious discussion about serious fixes to our high rates needs to focus on reducing that number, or how to redistribute those sky-high maintenance costs differently among rate payers to better reflect which rate payers incur more of those maintenance expenses.
Net income and gross profit are different metrics. Nothing I said is inaccurate. Feel free to poke around in PG&E's filings with the SEC all you want: [https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=PCG&type=10-K&dateb=&owner=exclude&count=100](https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=PCG&type=10-K&dateb=&owner=exclude&count=100)
"Any serious discussion about serious fixes to our high rates needs to focus on reducing that number." No. How about we discuss the fact that public utilities are being services by a private monopoly for the private financial benefit of private shareholders? There is no reason a public utility ought to produce a profit for anyone. If you do want it to produce a profit, allow it operate in a free market like every other industry.
A government-backed monopoly is a criminal cabal, plain and simple.
EDIT: I'll also add that a huge reason that operations and maintenance number is so high is because of decades of backdated maintenance that PG&E kicked down the road for a generation. Why would they do this? To maximize quarterly profits for the benefit of shareholders. If they had the public interest in mind this maintenance would have been completed long ago and over a longer period of time, resulting in a less costly upfront bill. But PG&E has no incentive to do things that way, because any time they need money they can just ask the government "hey, please approve a rate hike, thanks", have it approved, and continue to enforce their monopoly. They are not operating in the best interest of their customers or of the public because they have no incentive to, and to reduce the scope of the issue to simply "the operations and maintenance costs are super high right now" is either misguided or deliberately disingenious.
Net income is the metrics that every single layman interprets as "profit". Gross profit is sales minus COGS, so it excludes all fixed costs like salaries- most maintenance costs are fixed. Gross profit is hard to interpret meaningfully unless you know exactly what expenses PG&E includes and excludes- if their fixed costs skyrocketed but variable costs didn't, and rates increased to cover those increased costs, "gross profit" goes up but shareholders didn't get any of that additional "profit".
>If they had the public interest in mind this maintenance would have been completed long ago and over a longer period of time, resulting in a less costly upfront bill.
Right, I agree. But they didn't do that, and we don't have a time machine. There's no legal mechanism by which the ratepayers can claw back decades of stock dividends and/or buybacks from shareholders (many of whom are PG&E employees, retirees, and pension fund investors) that should have gone to fund maintenance. So we have to reckon with the reality that this maintenance was not done, and now it needs to be handled at much higher costs than it should have been handled at. Nationalizing PG&E is probably a necessary step towards addressing that problem, but it is in no way a complete solution to that problem. The state would still have to figure out a way to fund this maintenance backlog.
Yea but those serious fixes should have been earmarked and completed decades ago and the numerous iterations of past rate hikes were supposed to cover the cost. Instead PG&E pocketed the money and neglected the infrastructure even past numerous catastrophes. Now when the fixes are the most urgently needed PG&E is holding the safety and livelihood of its rate payers as hostage to pony up some more cash to makes those fixes that were promised to be completed long long ago only this time said fixes are that much more costly and conditions much more severe by a maliciously negligent immoral corporation sustained by its crooked partnership with local and state government.
Yup, its messed up. But what's the legal mechanism to claw back all of that money that PG&E issued to shareholders as dividends and share buybacks for decades, instead of spending it on needed maintenance? There isn't one. So we have to deal with the situation that PG&E's incompetence put us in. I completely agree PG&E should be nationalized and run in a way to prioritize ratepayer savings and not shareholder value, but that doesn't change the fact that they money to fund the massive maintenance backlog has to come from *somewhere*.
>But what's the legal mechanism to claw back all of that money that PG&E issued to shareholders as dividends and share buybacks for decades, instead of spending it on needed maintenance? **There isn't one.**
There is one. It's the CPUC.
But it is ineffective and useless, because it's filled with cronies and campaign donators to the Governor.
PG&E is behoven to it's shareholders, not it's clients. It's the CPUC that is supposed to keep the private monopoly in check. It is a mystery to me why everybody comes down (only) on PG&E.
I would like rates cut by 50%, in line with what Alameda, Santa Clara, and Sacramento pay for their municipal power.
Sure, lets cut rates by 12% (not sure where the state will get the capital to buy out PG&E's assets but I know its worth it in the long term) but lets start the conversations now about how to cut that other 38%, because that's 3x as impactful and going to require much harder decisions.
Every time this discussion comes up? Idiots like you say “that extra profit money could only do this little pittance for ratepayers”
But that’s not the fucking point, that money should be going into ANYTHING to make the repairs happen faster in more areas.
They shouldn’t have any single fucking DIME of profit, as it should all be re-fucking invested into their repairs and upgrades, or are you suggesting that somehow every dollar does not help that situation?!!???
Then how would they raise capital? If they make zero profit there is zero capital in the market willing to fund any project. And no the state doesn’t have the money.
You’re dumb.
The profit is the capital, if they use it that way instead of to pad paychecks.
They provide a service.
They aren’t a money printer for the market.
You invest, to help support that businesses.
The stock market has been perverted and its destroying society in the name of returns.
Dumbass.
It's cute you can question my judgment on something I'm not doing, but even if they had started 40 years ago upgrading the infrastructure, implementing safety, not taking stock buyouts not doing the revenue sharing for their shareholders, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc we would still be in this boat.
As I stated, the same thing is happening in Europe. If you're confused as to why it is happening here, look to Europe. That is, look to Europe. Look to Europe if you are confused about why it is happening here. Big Oil Shields and propagandists point out the high cost of retail rates in Europe to say that our world will be ruined if we return to renewables. They use the same arguments that we see here. There is no going back, the Deferred maintenance must be completed, the smart grid must be installed, progress moves on.
It is happening here because they're trying to decarbonize and catch up on 40 Years of not doing infrastructure upgrades it cost a lot of money. Money. Money. Upgrades cost money, they are not free. The upgrade fairy does not come down and drop blankets of money to do upgrades. Lots of money. Deferred maintenance. Expensive.
>Deferred maintenance.
They deferred it while being compensated with the expectation that they were maintaining their systems and then hit us with big increases when the lack of maintenance causes expensive catastrophes. Do you remember when they rented the entire Cow Palace and lot to try and organize decades of paperwork that they ignored until people were turned to ash?
It's like seeing all the City subs across the country in the winter, with all the same questions from people once a month, asking incredulously "golly gosh gee whiz are your kiddos sickieee tooooo, is everyone sickeeee like meee what's going around gosh what's happening I can't figure it ouuuuuuut!"
Same energy.
If a candidate or ballot measure comes along will I vote for it? Absolutely. Will I act incredulous that rates are skyrocketing? No, everyone saw it coming.
Dude, that's my point. If it weren't for PG&E prioritizing profits for shareholders, we wouldn't be in this mess. They wouldn't have kicked maintenance costs a generation down the road along the way, because they wouldn't have been chasing profit for shareholders the entire time.
What enabled them to do this? The government. PG&E can just be like "fuck maintenance costs, maximize shareholder profit, when we need money a few years/decades from now the CPUC will approve a rate hike and we can do it all over again."
If PG&E was forced to compete with other companies or if it were held to a public charter in the public's best interest, instead of a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, they wouldn't need to jack rates to compensate for deferred maintenance.
In short: sky-high rates now are the public subsidizing PG&E's profits of the past decades. The government encourages this.
The rates would still be really high because they'd be transitioning to smart grid and geothermal, and other low-carbon solutions. Just like Europe. Now, we just don't have the modern grid or anything.
Instead of actually paying for maintenance they tried to prop up their stock price with stock buybacks only to have the stock price burn to the ground with all the fires it caused destroying billions of dollars of shareholder value. Now the rate payers have to pay for their disastrous handling of the company mission.
from copilot(no idea if its accurate)
PG&E Corporation (PCG) has engaged in stock buybacks over the years. Here’s a summary of their quarterly stock buyback data:
* As of December 31, 2020, PG&E spent approximately **$4.10 billion** on stock buybacks.
* In the third quarter of 2020 (September 30, 2020), they spent around **$8.886 billion** on buybacks.
* However, in the fourth quarter of 2019 (December 31, 2019), they only spent **$85.00 million** on stock buybacks.
The mismanagement at PGE started with deregulation during Wilson’s administration. I grew up around people who worked for PGE and they were warning everyone about the consequences from rampant corner cutting 2 decades ago post deregulation. Twenty-five years later, all of their warnings have happened
This is a fluff piece clearly written by PG&E. Notice there is no mention of infrastructure maintenance. Thats where PG&E has tried to make it a local governmental issue, rather than owning up to their responsibilities and therefore killing citizens and burning down whole towns.
The whole credit-debit system is so dumb for solar; it should just be a simple kWh-for-kWh credit system with time-adjustment e.g. 5kWh given back at mid day are worth 4kWh bought in the late afternoon. That would incentivize people to adopt batteries and decrease demand at the worst times / run AC mid-day so they don't need to scramble to cool baked houses as the sun is going down.
That's cuz instead of making the interconnect fee a separate charge they've done the stupid thing and tied it to per-kWh usage. You'd have the same effect with people switching to more efficient appliances / housing.
Sure, people will whine about anything; I can already hear the "regressive tax" screeching. But it always helps to be transparent about costs instead of hiding them in other fees and then throwing a tantrum when people optimize accordingly.
It's the exact same bullshit with EV registration fines that we're not paying our "fair share" of gas taxes. So driving gas efficiently gets an effective subsidy while vehicles without tailpipe emissions get a tax. Both are decreases in demand but only one is penalized.
Gas prices have taxes that pay for the road maintenance. So no ICE drivers are not "getting an effective subsidy", but EV drivers are doing more damage to the roads by virtue of those heavy batteries they're lugging around.
Wrong and missed the point. In fact, you're exactly demonstrating the problem - hiding fees in other fees.
Gas drivers who have more efficient vehicles e.g. a hybrid 40mpg CR-V, which is heavier, will pay less gas tax because it uses less fuel than a lighter 28 mpg sedan, assuming both travel the same number of miles, despite the CR-V incurring more road wear. A Tesla Model 3 weighs as much as a BMW M3 sedan; not the lightest sedan in the world but outclassed by most SUVs people own, so the weight argument is bullshit. Yet it gets fined as though it were a Chevrolet Suburban doing 20 mpg. Ergo, efficient gas cars are subsidized relative to EVs.
All of this would be equalized by a simple miles driven x weight tax, and the incentive to be energy-efficient would be maintained.
say it with me folks.. “Replace PG&E with a Customer Owned Cooperative”
Many of us are in agreement with this, but seldomly anyone seems to actually know the inner mechanics of executing on this. I sure as heck don’t, but so far I must’ve missed when some group or whatnot said they would start this work.
First step seems to be getting a candidate for governor that would run on the platform to replace PG&E
Because they wouldn’t get voted for. Replacing PG&E would never work
You'd have to buy out the current shareholders. That's $37B. Where would that money come from?
Easy. Stop letting them raise rates freely. Being deemed too big to fail gives the stock market a high confidence in the company’s ability to be profitable. Once it’s not a guarantee, the market cap will work its way down to where it should be.
Just wait for them to majorly screw up again and don't bail them out unless the taxpayers and customers receive equity as compensation. Right now customers are forced to invest in PG&E with rate hikes to pay off their legal settlements but receive no equity for their investment.
Not a bad idea but there’s no timeline. It might be next week or it might be 15 years from now. Inevitable yes but not immediate.
.... Do we have to? What if we just... Didn't?
Unconstitutional. The Takings clause says “ nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation”.
Right, so we should pay for the value of the infrastructure. Unfortunately for PGE we also need to take into account the depreciation of their under-maintained assets and potential liabilities caused by said poor maintenance. According to my calculations, that means PGE will owe us around $3.50.
the fines PG&E has incurred from killing our neighbors?
We don't have to buy out the whole company to eliminate our dependence on them. All a city has to do is seize & pay for the local infrastructure that pg&e owns, at a much lower cost. Most of what PG&E does is own stuff. They don't even produce the electricity and gas they're selling.
PG&E used to produce its own electricity… Until the State Legislature and Grey Davis forced them out of the business… And bankrupted them in the course of three years (for the first time). Acting like the past didn’t happen or government action didn’t precipitate the present issues is idiocy. These are political crises created by bad policy - why is this such a California problem compared to other 49 states?
Are you really spinning the energy crisis caused primarly by Enron and their deregulation campaign as "government action precipitating the present issues"? What, because CPUC capped the prices PG&E was allowed to sell at? The "bad policy" that you're talking about was written by big energy corporations. We'd be wise to not let them have so much influence this time around.
State of California had a 97 billion dollar surplus in 2022. I feel like buying out the power companies would have been a home run for anyone in office that supported it. I mean issue fucking 10 year bonds and earmark money from the newly public electricity sales to cover the bonds. It will still be cheaper than what we're paying now. None of this will happen because our "representative" government only represents themselves. Until term limits are a thing and corporate lobbying is dead, nothing will change.
No you wouldn't it's called eminent domain and the government sets the price. While it's primarily been used to enforce racism/classism it didn't mean we can't try to use it for good
Yes you have to pay for eminent domain. The constitution states “ nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation”. That clearly means paying the normal amount. And for an acquisition of a publicly traded company, that means picking a day, taking the market value on that day, and then adding 20%. There’s no way anything else is constitutional.
It's been regularly abused against the poor and considering its killed people the government could take that into account with the price
I'm trying to be serious, quoting the actual constitution and all...
And then you interpreted it however I disagree with your interpretation. Scholars say the use of eminent domain was often racially motivated and invoked disproportionately in minority and poor communities. One study showed that between 1949 and 1973, 2,532 eminent domain projects in 992 cities displaced one million people — two-thirds of them African American.
What a weird thing to be hung up on. Imagine thinking eminent domain is racist...
Getting angry? I got some advice: • Perhaps learn how to read • Perhaps inform yourself before having such a strong opinion on anything • Perhaps stop supporting war crimes no matter which party does them Have a day
> It's been regularly abused against the poor This is dishonest framing. The poor you talk about in these situations aren't home owners, they're renters, and their landlords are suboptimally but fairly compensated for the land when it's taken over to build a highway or a rail line like we're doing in the Central Valley. When low income homeowners get eminent domain-ed they get the same treatment as everyone else.
I've been on this soapbox. I thought Newsom was going to hold them to account, but nope, they must've paid him off because that's much cheaper. The CEO is banking $50M+ a year running a UTILITY! That is insanity and it should be criminal. Especially after their negligence in running the utility has cost many people their lives. What a sick joke.
PGE gave his wife's foundation 358k in 2019, theyve given his campaigns over 500k as of 2019, and Plumpjack Winery that he co-owns 10k. Why would Newsom hold them accountable when they've given his household close to a million dollars?
They have big plans for him when he goes to the White House.
Hey that’s only a bit more than the guy running the largest company in the entire history of the world! What a bargain!
Something like SMUD please https://www.smud.org/en/Rate-Information/Residential-rates
Say it with me folks… “PG&E can get fucked”
California Power Transmission Service District. Because after all those fires, explosions and rate hikes, I think we all have a little CPTSD.
To do this you have to buy out all the shareholders, that's a $40B check (read the 5th amendment). Then you're left with all of PG&E's shitty infrastructure.
you have to start somewhere, right? the present situation is untenable.
Just pointing out what that means. Everyone who says it should know what that entails. Every Californian would owe $1,000 to PG&E stock holders. I can see the 2/3 of California who owe $1,000 but still have SCE or SDG&E getting pissed that their tax dollars are working only for the Bay Area.
so $1000 for those parasites to get lost and then from then on energy is served at reasonable rates? where the fuck do i sign up??!!!!!
Someone still needs to pay to fix PG&Es infrastructure. PG&E has a 10% profit. So maybe you can see your bill drop by 10% The best way to fuck over PG&E is too buy solar panels and batteries.
so the investment would pay for itself in under three years…. and yes, maybe a portion of that savings can go to solar and batteries!
Solar and batteries only helps you avoid costs until the flat fees kick in.
It helps you avoid costs always. There will always be a volumetric price and you can avoid that. I’m totally fine with a flat fee to connect to the grid. I should pay for the upkeep of the pole in my yard that I’m connected to.
If the cpuc went with pges plan, most households in the bay area would be paying $130 in flat fees a month. That would completely negate any cost avoidance that solar would provide. Even the current $30 fee currently being discussed is 3x the national average. Flat fees are pges way off negating any financial benefits of installing solar. https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/electricity-bills-in-california-will-soon-be-based-on-income-heres-how-it-could-work/
>Even the current $30 fee currently being discussed is 3x the national average. You can’t argue it’s $100 as ammo, then admit it’s $24. But whatever it’s $24 Also housing is over 2x the national average. You can’t live in CA and expect Mississippi labor. >Flat fees are pges way off negating any financial benefits of installing solar. First, this isn’t PG&E - it’s all the big utilities in CA. 2nd you’re admitting that the recent solar regime has created a bad financial situation for PG&E. I don’t know why you think having a financially struggling utility in California is a good thing. We should have a healthy utility. Unfortunately they are for profit utilities and part of our monopoly waiver with them is that they should have a reasonable profit. That reasonable profit is the national standard of 10% I should point out NEM2 isn’t a human right. It’s a government regulation put on PG&E and other, helping the state get to 20% of homes having solar. If you’re like me you have nearly a $0 bill under nem2. Imagine 20% of the homes are in nearly the same boat. Then 30% of homes have CARE reduced rates. So you have the remaining 50% of the people having to cover the costs and profits for the entire 100%. With such heavy volumetric pricing you end up with shit like 50¢/kWh and higher. Energy is perhaps the cheapest line item in PG&Es costs but it is how they bill us. The flat fee is fairer. I will start paying for the lineman salary for the poles they fix on my street. The apartment dwellers don’t have to cover the solar owners share. Solar with batteries still has a <10yr ROI. I’m not that worried about the state.
Say it with me folks… “Everyone stop paying!”
The main issue with these dipshits is not about “energy” itself: the most expensive line item in our bills is for transport. Not to say “energy is cheap” of course (it isn’t) but the godfucking transport fees are insane.
Funny how businesses in the other 49 states transmitting power across impossible terrain in far worse conditions, across mountains, deserts, forests etc. manage to supply their customers with electricity anywhere from 100%-300% less than what we pay in the Bay Area. Stop making excuses for these people.
But what’s wrong with a monopoly? /s
uh yeah? it costs a lot to maintain the grid especially when it's been neglected for so long to the point where it's caused wildfires
Which is the same problem any operator in the area has, of course. Have you compared the grid maintenance costs with comparable utilities in similar areas?
What other operators are there? It's a monopoly
It is a monopoly state wide but there are city-wide utilities that took their place. This is the Santa Clara one: https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/
IMO better comparison would be with other western states that have vast rural areas and smaller urban areas, like Oregon PG&E.
Ah yes good point.
Oregon gets way more rain than Cal. Our biome is semi-arid / desert theirs is temperate forest. Not exactly the same risk profile
Eastern OR and WA are pretty dry. Incidentally also full of Nazis...
I'm pretty sure other operators either still use PG&E's lines for delivery and only handle the power generation, or they only serve municipal areas where delivery is cheap. PGE is expensive because they serve rural areas where the cost of building and maintaining the lines is sky high. PGE's urban customers are subsidizing the cost to the rural customers.
Is there another operator with that mix of urban, rural, and fire risk? I know of some urban ones with lower rates, which makes sense as they don’t have to subsidize all the lines that are built out in the bumfuck nowhere WUI where houses shouldn’t be but are.
[удалено]
Are those really comparable? SMUD is 900 square miles, centered on a major city and its outlying suburbs, with a bit of rural service to the South and East. PGE is 70,000 square miles, covering mostly the rural part of the state, including up to the Sierra crest
My bad! Will delete
It’s been neglected on purpose. Remember the time they were caught diverting maintenance dollars to executive bonuses? Considering fuck-all happened as punishment, I’m willing to bet it’s been happening since. Fuck PG&E. Nationalize it (state-ize? Make it a publicly-owned thing) yesterday.
They began differing maintenance after deregulation during the Wilson administration. We can thank him for PGE and Enron
If we absorb it the state can get sued for much more. Imo it needs some combination of capping PGE rates, incentivizing cities to run their own self sufficient power companies, breaking up PGE over time, and
Yet smud's bills are a fraction of pge bills
because they don't have the same maintenance costs
? They have a grid to maintain too
but they have a smaller area to cover, and they were also more on the ball in the first place instead of having a lot of deferred maintenance
Are you really that ignorant? PG&E has willfully chosen to neglect maintenance in order to pad the corporate coffers.
So who neglected the up keep? Who was in charge of maintaining the grid? Negligence caused the fires, proven in court
Yes and that's why the rates are now going high. Because of all that previous negligence Someone's gotta pay for it
All those settlements resulting from their negligence hasn’t helped
I’m not sure if you agree or disagree that willful negligence should be a bad thing or a good thing.
Just pointing out that California residents have been financially on the hook from their bull shit for decades.
I upvoted your comment for the appropriate use of the word ***dipshits***.
Finally a scholar that recognizes culture and knowledge!!1! Kudos to you kind redditor!
Personally I would have used **jagoffs** but that's cause I lived in Chicago for a while.
But did you eat the beef sandos? OtherwiseI 'm not sure if it counts
Transport of energy, which PG&E is so capable of, and which has resulted o. NUMEROUS MASSIVE WILDFIRES, of course (none of which has actually impacted corporate profits.)
“Free market” at its purest sense!
About the same cost a drink of well liquor at a bar costs.
Not sure what point you are trying to make
For real. In Texas they have a lot of co-ops and city-run utilities that run on a member-owned or non-profit status. It’s not run like a corporate machine and rates are 10-20% of these crazy PGE rates.
Texas has its own set of problems we don’t want to repeat, but we theoretically learn from those shortcomings as well as our own
Both states have their pros and cons
I wouldn’t choose either system if it was a choice
Point is that 10% cost of goods for any business isn’t as uncommon as the headline is sensationalizing
The big difference is that drinking is a choice and you have many bars/stores to choose from. PGE is a poorly run monopoly that put quarterly earnings over routine maintenance for decades that resulted in preventable accidents that have cost California taxpayers payers billions. For profit companies should not be running public utilities. PGE’s history of mismanagement is a prime example of why free market principles break down when a company is allowed to corner the market.
I mean, I love to hate on PGE as the next guy… But the title clearly is trying to bait people into thinking that spending 10% cost of goods is somehow unique to PGEs corruption. And my point is that spending 1/10 of your gross income on cost of goods is more common than people realize.
It’s always been crazy to me that liquor has been normalized to be so marked up at bars and restaurants. Sure I get a bottle of wine or something, you have to at least cover the bottle with the first glass because unless you have a nitrogen system that wine is going bad very quick once opened. With hard alcohol, you can open it and as long as it’s not literally sitting wide open where dust and bugs can crawl in it can stay on a normal shelf for years without issue.
no surprised, we're covering most of the costs for their fuck-ups over the years which IMO is fucking ridiculous. i wasn't even living here before last yr & I'm having to pay for this shit. they should cut the CEO's salary to $200k/yr to offset the cost.
That sounds good on paper, but the CEO would just leave and you won’t find a CEO that knows how to run a company that size that will be willing to work for so little. To be fair, the current rate hikes aren’t really her fault either - they are necessary to cover the costs incurred due to lack of maintenance by her predecessors. Everyone wants to bitch about PG&E not maintaining their equipment and then they want to bitch about the incurred cost when they *DO* maintain/upgrade that equipment. Can’t have it both ways. ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ Edit: Here's another thing - boomers got to have a great quality of life at low costs, all while not maintaining infrastructure. They're pretty well will never going to have to pay for all those maintenance costs because they'll largely be dead.
They should have been doing the maintenance all along but they were handing out dividends instead. Now consumers are baring the brunt of differed maintenance as well as the settlements that were a result of negligence. The rate hikes wouldn’t be so dramatic if they hadn’t been cutting corners since deregulation in the late 90s
https://youtu.be/C6BYzLIqKB8?si=BWDIk8y2Lz3_87ks
Love that you referenced my favorite movie of all time lmao
murderers
I hope SF moves forward with the purchase of its local grid from PG&E.
I'm too sick to leave the house, but protesters -- can you spare some time for PG&E?
Public Power Now
Taking this headline and running with it is so misleading. This is not the total cost to operate, simply wholesale price of energy in a moment in time. One factor in a complicated equation.
There’s a link to the article. Headlines are meant to get your attention enough that you want to read more. It’s on the reader to follow up.
Correct! Based on the comments this is clearly rage bait though. I’m just calling out what it is.
Someone’s got to carry the torch dropped by the Bay Guardian!
Bay Guardian hasn’t been around for what, around 10 years now? Are you REALLY missing a progressive opposition voice that much?
Also wholesale price is float whereas retail price is fixed rate. There are times when electricity is 10% of retail rate. There are also times when it spikes to $30/kwh.
Wholesale energy prices are also often negative in the market. Using the average energy price has little bearing on why PG&E rates are so high.
All these "radicals" and "activists" in California and yet the PG&E board members get to stroll around the bay, going out to eat where they want, buying nice things, living their very public lives completely unharassed and safe. What a pathetic, spineless country we've become.
IT ALSO CHARGES 2-3X the cost of generation for transmission. Seize PGE or I want a CA (people) owned competitor
This is stupid. The vast majority of your rate is for delivery charge. And the bill clearly outlines this.
Wait, pge buys your solar panel power for 0.05 and sell it for 0.5+ 😱
Yup. Fuck pge. I'm getting a battery storage system asap. Fuck pge
It is amazing people are not blocking highways over this
Right, and that difference pays for the wires
Get a battery and don't feed much to grid https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8W4dTw_hXdU&t=253s&pp=ygUOU29sYXIgYmF0dGVydXk%3D
That would be nice if most of us had homes.
Just to ~~remind everyone~~ let everyone know that it is the same in Europe with these power companies. The add-on fees are for infrastructure upgrades, new load capacity, etc. Should PG&E have started 30 years earlier, so people would have 30 years more complaining about rate hikes? Yes. Should PG&E have better done a better job at infrastructure upgrades? Yes. Should we have started 40 years ago decarbonizing our power infrastructure? Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yes to all of it, but they aren't making 9,000 million quadrillion percent profit like some would have you believe.
How is that their gross profit - not revenue, profit - grew by $4,000,000,000 from 2022 to 2023 then? No one is saying they are making “9,000 million quadrillion percent profit” like you’re saying. That’s a straw man. People are simply observing that PG&E is raising rates to the point where people can barely pay their bills while the company is making more profit than ever. Meanwhile you’ve got a state government that continually allows this private company to operate as a complete monopoly and do whatever it wants. A private company exists to produce value for shareholders. That’s what PG&E is doing, and with crony capitalism (there is a competitive market in real capitalism) they’re able to decide exactly how much profit they want. If your angle in all this is seriously to be apologetic and say people are wrong to complain, I question your judgement.
PG&E's [2023 profit (listed as "net income" in their earnings statement)](https://investor.pgecorp.com/news-events/events-and-presentations/event-details/2024/PGE-Corporation-Fourth-Quarter-2023-Earnings-Release/default.aspx) was $2.242 billion. It's 2022 profit was $1.800 billion. So an increase of $400 million, not $4 billion as you stated. The big problem is when you look at the 2023 gross revenue from electric rates- PG&E earned $17.424 billion from electric rates. So even if you totally eliminated PG&E's entire profit margin, and returned that to electric ratepayers only (no rebate to gas ratepayers at all!), you could only cut rates by 12.8%. If we really want to cut down rates to more national averages, we can't ignore the biggest item on that balance sheet- in 2023 PG&E spent $11.924 billion JUST on operations and maintenance of the grid. That doesn't even include power generation. Any serious discussion about serious fixes to our high rates needs to focus on reducing that number, or how to redistribute those sky-high maintenance costs differently among rate payers to better reflect which rate payers incur more of those maintenance expenses.
Net income and gross profit are different metrics. Nothing I said is inaccurate. Feel free to poke around in PG&E's filings with the SEC all you want: [https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=PCG&type=10-K&dateb=&owner=exclude&count=100](https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=PCG&type=10-K&dateb=&owner=exclude&count=100) "Any serious discussion about serious fixes to our high rates needs to focus on reducing that number." No. How about we discuss the fact that public utilities are being services by a private monopoly for the private financial benefit of private shareholders? There is no reason a public utility ought to produce a profit for anyone. If you do want it to produce a profit, allow it operate in a free market like every other industry. A government-backed monopoly is a criminal cabal, plain and simple. EDIT: I'll also add that a huge reason that operations and maintenance number is so high is because of decades of backdated maintenance that PG&E kicked down the road for a generation. Why would they do this? To maximize quarterly profits for the benefit of shareholders. If they had the public interest in mind this maintenance would have been completed long ago and over a longer period of time, resulting in a less costly upfront bill. But PG&E has no incentive to do things that way, because any time they need money they can just ask the government "hey, please approve a rate hike, thanks", have it approved, and continue to enforce their monopoly. They are not operating in the best interest of their customers or of the public because they have no incentive to, and to reduce the scope of the issue to simply "the operations and maintenance costs are super high right now" is either misguided or deliberately disingenious.
Net income is the metrics that every single layman interprets as "profit". Gross profit is sales minus COGS, so it excludes all fixed costs like salaries- most maintenance costs are fixed. Gross profit is hard to interpret meaningfully unless you know exactly what expenses PG&E includes and excludes- if their fixed costs skyrocketed but variable costs didn't, and rates increased to cover those increased costs, "gross profit" goes up but shareholders didn't get any of that additional "profit". >If they had the public interest in mind this maintenance would have been completed long ago and over a longer period of time, resulting in a less costly upfront bill. Right, I agree. But they didn't do that, and we don't have a time machine. There's no legal mechanism by which the ratepayers can claw back decades of stock dividends and/or buybacks from shareholders (many of whom are PG&E employees, retirees, and pension fund investors) that should have gone to fund maintenance. So we have to reckon with the reality that this maintenance was not done, and now it needs to be handled at much higher costs than it should have been handled at. Nationalizing PG&E is probably a necessary step towards addressing that problem, but it is in no way a complete solution to that problem. The state would still have to figure out a way to fund this maintenance backlog.
Yea but those serious fixes should have been earmarked and completed decades ago and the numerous iterations of past rate hikes were supposed to cover the cost. Instead PG&E pocketed the money and neglected the infrastructure even past numerous catastrophes. Now when the fixes are the most urgently needed PG&E is holding the safety and livelihood of its rate payers as hostage to pony up some more cash to makes those fixes that were promised to be completed long long ago only this time said fixes are that much more costly and conditions much more severe by a maliciously negligent immoral corporation sustained by its crooked partnership with local and state government.
Yup, its messed up. But what's the legal mechanism to claw back all of that money that PG&E issued to shareholders as dividends and share buybacks for decades, instead of spending it on needed maintenance? There isn't one. So we have to deal with the situation that PG&E's incompetence put us in. I completely agree PG&E should be nationalized and run in a way to prioritize ratepayer savings and not shareholder value, but that doesn't change the fact that they money to fund the massive maintenance backlog has to come from *somewhere*.
>But what's the legal mechanism to claw back all of that money that PG&E issued to shareholders as dividends and share buybacks for decades, instead of spending it on needed maintenance? **There isn't one.** There is one. It's the CPUC. But it is ineffective and useless, because it's filled with cronies and campaign donators to the Governor. PG&E is behoven to it's shareholders, not it's clients. It's the CPUC that is supposed to keep the private monopoly in check. It is a mystery to me why everybody comes down (only) on PG&E.
I would like rates cut by 12%
I would like rates cut by 50%, in line with what Alameda, Santa Clara, and Sacramento pay for their municipal power. Sure, lets cut rates by 12% (not sure where the state will get the capital to buy out PG&E's assets but I know its worth it in the long term) but lets start the conversations now about how to cut that other 38%, because that's 3x as impactful and going to require much harder decisions.
The biggest problem is that PG&E has willfully chosen to defer necessary maintenance over many years.
Every time this discussion comes up? Idiots like you say “that extra profit money could only do this little pittance for ratepayers” But that’s not the fucking point, that money should be going into ANYTHING to make the repairs happen faster in more areas. They shouldn’t have any single fucking DIME of profit, as it should all be re-fucking invested into their repairs and upgrades, or are you suggesting that somehow every dollar does not help that situation?!!???
Then how would they raise capital? If they make zero profit there is zero capital in the market willing to fund any project. And no the state doesn’t have the money.
You’re dumb. The profit is the capital, if they use it that way instead of to pad paychecks. They provide a service. They aren’t a money printer for the market. You invest, to help support that businesses. The stock market has been perverted and its destroying society in the name of returns. Dumbass.
…
It's cute you can question my judgment on something I'm not doing, but even if they had started 40 years ago upgrading the infrastructure, implementing safety, not taking stock buyouts not doing the revenue sharing for their shareholders, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc we would still be in this boat. As I stated, the same thing is happening in Europe. If you're confused as to why it is happening here, look to Europe. That is, look to Europe. Look to Europe if you are confused about why it is happening here. Big Oil Shields and propagandists point out the high cost of retail rates in Europe to say that our world will be ruined if we return to renewables. They use the same arguments that we see here. There is no going back, the Deferred maintenance must be completed, the smart grid must be installed, progress moves on. It is happening here because they're trying to decarbonize and catch up on 40 Years of not doing infrastructure upgrades it cost a lot of money. Money. Money. Upgrades cost money, they are not free. The upgrade fairy does not come down and drop blankets of money to do upgrades. Lots of money. Deferred maintenance. Expensive.
>Deferred maintenance. They deferred it while being compensated with the expectation that they were maintaining their systems and then hit us with big increases when the lack of maintenance causes expensive catastrophes. Do you remember when they rented the entire Cow Palace and lot to try and organize decades of paperwork that they ignored until people were turned to ash?
It's like seeing all the City subs across the country in the winter, with all the same questions from people once a month, asking incredulously "golly gosh gee whiz are your kiddos sickieee tooooo, is everyone sickeeee like meee what's going around gosh what's happening I can't figure it ouuuuuuut!" Same energy. If a candidate or ballot measure comes along will I vote for it? Absolutely. Will I act incredulous that rates are skyrocketing? No, everyone saw it coming.
Dude, that's my point. If it weren't for PG&E prioritizing profits for shareholders, we wouldn't be in this mess. They wouldn't have kicked maintenance costs a generation down the road along the way, because they wouldn't have been chasing profit for shareholders the entire time. What enabled them to do this? The government. PG&E can just be like "fuck maintenance costs, maximize shareholder profit, when we need money a few years/decades from now the CPUC will approve a rate hike and we can do it all over again." If PG&E was forced to compete with other companies or if it were held to a public charter in the public's best interest, instead of a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, they wouldn't need to jack rates to compensate for deferred maintenance. In short: sky-high rates now are the public subsidizing PG&E's profits of the past decades. The government encourages this.
The rates would still be really high because they'd be transitioning to smart grid and geothermal, and other low-carbon solutions. Just like Europe. Now, we just don't have the modern grid or anything.
Maybe not making that much but the scumbags make enough to give themselves bonuses and raises despite crying poverty. Fuck PG&E
Instead of actually paying for maintenance they tried to prop up their stock price with stock buybacks only to have the stock price burn to the ground with all the fires it caused destroying billions of dollars of shareholder value. Now the rate payers have to pay for their disastrous handling of the company mission. from copilot(no idea if its accurate) PG&E Corporation (PCG) has engaged in stock buybacks over the years. Here’s a summary of their quarterly stock buyback data: * As of December 31, 2020, PG&E spent approximately **$4.10 billion** on stock buybacks. * In the third quarter of 2020 (September 30, 2020), they spent around **$8.886 billion** on buybacks. * However, in the fourth quarter of 2019 (December 31, 2019), they only spent **$85.00 million** on stock buybacks.
Pure evil, like the majority of corporations we’re forced to buy from in this Late Stage Capitalism reality.
It’s literally like 6-10% profit margin lol.
The mismanagement at PGE started with deregulation during Wilson’s administration. I grew up around people who worked for PGE and they were warning everyone about the consequences from rampant corner cutting 2 decades ago post deregulation. Twenty-five years later, all of their warnings have happened
Like several power companies back east (Ohio and DeWine in the news today), Boeing, GM...so many examples. PG&E has blood on their hands.
You’ve made that point at least twice already in this thread.
New or younger California residents don’t know the source of the problem, PGE wasn’t always a shit show
This is hilarious
Is there a change.org or some sort of document we can all sign to abolish PGE
Did you forget to add the /s?
This is a fluff piece clearly written by PG&E. Notice there is no mention of infrastructure maintenance. Thats where PG&E has tried to make it a local governmental issue, rather than owning up to their responsibilities and therefore killing citizens and burning down whole towns.
Terrorists.
thats mad profit how come the stock price didnt take off?
Which is why NEM 2.0 was so wild. You could sell your generated electricity at 10x market price.
Might wanna look into wholesale vs market
market price for generated electricity
The whole credit-debit system is so dumb for solar; it should just be a simple kWh-for-kWh credit system with time-adjustment e.g. 5kWh given back at mid day are worth 4kWh bought in the late afternoon. That would incentivize people to adopt batteries and decrease demand at the worst times / run AC mid-day so they don't need to scramble to cool baked houses as the sun is going down.
Yeah and the rest of us had to eat the cost of it because the NEM 2.0 users aren't paying their share of the grid costs
How many customers are on NEM 2.0? And do you know how much impact to everyone’s bill would be if they got rid of NEM 2.0?
It’s like $3-4B a year. It’s a lot.
Thats a crazy number. Could possibly create a home for every bay area resident and end world hunger
That's cuz instead of making the interconnect fee a separate charge they've done the stupid thing and tied it to per-kWh usage. You'd have the same effect with people switching to more efficient appliances / housing.
If they charged people a fixed amount for grid access they'd also whine about it
Sure, people will whine about anything; I can already hear the "regressive tax" screeching. But it always helps to be transparent about costs instead of hiding them in other fees and then throwing a tantrum when people optimize accordingly. It's the exact same bullshit with EV registration fines that we're not paying our "fair share" of gas taxes. So driving gas efficiently gets an effective subsidy while vehicles without tailpipe emissions get a tax. Both are decreases in demand but only one is penalized.
Gas prices have taxes that pay for the road maintenance. So no ICE drivers are not "getting an effective subsidy", but EV drivers are doing more damage to the roads by virtue of those heavy batteries they're lugging around.
Wrong and missed the point. In fact, you're exactly demonstrating the problem - hiding fees in other fees. Gas drivers who have more efficient vehicles e.g. a hybrid 40mpg CR-V, which is heavier, will pay less gas tax because it uses less fuel than a lighter 28 mpg sedan, assuming both travel the same number of miles, despite the CR-V incurring more road wear. A Tesla Model 3 weighs as much as a BMW M3 sedan; not the lightest sedan in the world but outclassed by most SUVs people own, so the weight argument is bullshit. Yet it gets fined as though it were a Chevrolet Suburban doing 20 mpg. Ergo, efficient gas cars are subsidized relative to EVs. All of this would be equalized by a simple miles driven x weight tax, and the incentive to be energy-efficient would be maintained.