Is part of the 10% profit going to these costs? Or since they're an expense it's not apart of the 10% profit?
Why on earth is a government-protected monopoly entitled to 10% margins? Or even 6% margins? It's risk-free money with a captive market.
What is the point of all this bullshit? Why not just call it a day, and run it as a crown corporation?
> The companies pointed to the January wildfires in Los Angeles County, saying they needed to provide their shareholders with more profit to get them to continue to invest in their stock because of the threat of utility-caused fires in California.
What utter nonsense. The shareholders need nothing. Take out a bloody loan.
The firm's entire concern, as reflected in the article - is it's stock price.
> Under the state’s system for setting electric rates, investors provide part of the money needed to build the infrastructure and then earn an annual return on that investment over the assets’ life, which can be 30 or 40 years.
Wait, why is this financed by investors and not lenders, like it is in the rest of the civilized world? Is this some kind of novel California-specific innovation, and if it is, what value has it produced for the world?
Indeed, how do they pick any margin? If higher is better, why not pick 1000%? If lower is better, why not pick 0%? If we want something reasonable, why not make it market based to figure out what people think when they have to stump up real resources themselves? Once profit margins are set by committee decision there is little point trying to claim that the concern is profit motivated. The profits aren't doing much useful signalling. It just sounds stupid.
Also, much of the point of having shareholders is that they take the risk. If something goes wrong, they lose their money first.
the best escape valve against PG&E and Edison is installing solar panels and a battery.
This comes down to having quality regulators on your public utility commission which is heavily state dependent.
https://www.multistate.us/insider/2025/10/27/nine-states-fac...
I have a hard time believing this; in the Bay Area, the privilege of simply having a 200A connection is $130/month.
This comes off very much as "stop being poor lol." Was that your intent?
If a household uses less than the monthly per-capita average, why not cap that baseline at something like $10?
Yes — that gap would need to be subsidized, probably through taxes. But that’s already how grid maintenance works: we socialize the fixed costs while pretending rates are purely volumetric.(and I might be overstating this slightly).
Right now we punish low-usage consumers and reward structural inefficiency. A baseline tier would at least make the incentives coherent.
If we treat baseline access as a kind of ‘civilization tax,’ the pricing shouldn’t feel punitive for low-usage households.
The problem with PG&E isn't the rate structure, which isn't all that different from utilities anywhere else in the world. It's that their costs are exceedingly high, through a combination of regulatory pressures and grift. This is exacerbated by municipal and state regulators who are pushing consumers to be more reliant on electric power (bans on gas appliances in new construction, pushes toward EVs, etc).
There are vast swathes of the country where people pay 5-10x less for electricity.
https://www.pge.com/en/newsroom/currents/energy-savings/pg-e...
shrug they claim prices re going down?
RheingoldRiver•2h ago