Op-Ed: For years, PG&E produced returns for investors by cutting safety measures, increasing the risk of setting fires. That cost incentive still exists. (via latimesopinion)
This summer is yet another marked by wildfire in California. Blazes have ignited throughout the state, including a deadly one that exploded near the Oregon border in late July. The fall is likely to be worse.
Within hours, Northern California had come to a near-standstill. Hospitals in the East Bay rushed to move refrigerated medications to facilities with power. Nursing home residents were left in the dark. Businesses shuttered. As the outages persisted for days, economists estimated the losses were in the billions.
And the blackouts weren’t over yet. They would continue through the weeks ahead, with millions losing power that month. The Kincade fire in Sonoma County, caused by PG&E transmission equipment, burned 77,758 acres and destroyed 374 buildings in October 2019. The study cut to the heart of a larger question about the provision of electricity in the U.S., the majority of which is done through investor-owned utilities. If private capital is eliminated, then what? Public ownership, most often through a city or a town, is one of the only alternatives.
Public utilities are one alternative to private ownership. Nonprofit cooperatives are the other. Cooperatives were established after the Great Depression to serve regions that private utilities couldn’t — or wouldn’t — serve. Large swaths of farming and mountain communities, with residents loosely spread out over hundreds of square miles, didn’t fit the emerging business model as investor-owned power companies built out their systems.
One of the biggest challenges to a public takeover was the sheer cost of securing ownership. California would have to find tens of billions of dollars to buy out PG&E’s shareholders and acquire its assets. That would probably require establishing a new state power authority to issue bonds to finance the purchase, and the debt would fall to customers to repay over time. A cooperative would use debt financing to the same end.
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