PG&E outages in S.F. leave 130k without electricity
15 comments
·December 21, 2025troglo-byte
wbl
So cherry pick the nice dense area and leave the rest of the state with the hard to serve areas?
inferiorhuman
Follow the money. Who appoints people to regulate electricity in California? The governor. Who mentored California's current governor? Willie Brown. Who does Willie Brown work/lobby for? PG&E.
themafia
The California Assembly is one of the weakest legislative bodies in the entire nation. It's too disorganized to engage in any effective oversight or lawmaking. It's left to the people to come up with constitutional amendments to try to manage this enormous machine.
It's a beautiful state. There's literal mountains of opportunity here. It's lately all too easy to become irrationally angry at these con artists and their ruinous agendas.
inferiorhuman
Willie Brown hasn't been in the Assembly for decades and the governor directly controls the CPUC.
bsder
Please note that AB 1890 which deregulated and divested electricity markets was passed during the tenure of Pete Wilson with the help of a bunch of Republicans holding the legislature budget hostage.
California has been dealing with the idiocies caused by that ever since.
roenxi
One-off incidents don't really mean anything in the big picture.
However, I do recall back when there were grid problems in Texas a few years ago someone justifying the high prices California paid as due to their high grid reliability and solid regulatory framework (California pay 2x as much IIRC). I'm too far away to really get into the details but it'd be much more interesting to have a comparison on the reliability of the Californian grid compared to other US states and even countries. When it comes to high availability the diminishing returns to spending set in pretty quick and I get the impression there is a slow return to economic reality happening as voters are forcing governments to start paying attention to energy again, environmentalists or otherwise.
yongjik
Have been in California for 10+ years and I've never seen anyone describing California's electricity infra as reliable. It shows the same kind of failure that's too familiar to many Americans: a vital service is managed by a corporation that has no incentive for better services, and market forces do not work due to the nature of the service. (If the power at your home in SF goes out all the time, it's not like you can find another provider - the best you can do is move to, say, Nevada, which is not realistic for most people.)
drusenko
That claim would be hilarious and also wildly inaccurate, that OP apparently never heard of a PSPS. California’s grid is not particularly resilient or reliable, and certainly not in the 2016-2020 time frame. Also, the regulatory framework is awful and high prices are driven by a mix of 1- regulatory capture and disincentives to utilities saving money, 2- wildfire mitigation costs, 3- NIMBYism and the lack of ability to build anything quickly, and then a hodge podge of CA specific issues.
inferiorhuman
The same substation went up about a decade ago, I'd be pretty cautious about calling problems with PG&E infrastructure "one off".
California's rates were rationalized, in part, because California is taking steps to increase reliability. It's been decades seen we've seen rolling blackouts at the hands of Enron. Long-term plans to increase intra-state transmission capacity are in place and are currently being executed (you're welcome to dig them up on the ISO's site). The weather related preemptive power cuts have been pared back dramatically since their introduction. We're talking hundreds of thousands of people without power for days versus hundreds or thousands for hours.
Let's not forget that the "grid problems" you're referring to cost some ratepayers tens of thousands of dollars because that's the sort of retail electric plan that was legal in Texas.
But also please don't lump all Californians one group. PG&E rate payers are extorted for some of the highest electric rates in the nation (as are SDG&E and most IOU rate payers). Folks with access to municipal power in California pay far less.
Avicebron
I wonder if anyone in the emergency operations center has offered up the idea that there should be more than one entity providing power...
inferiorhuman
Dunno, I think it's quite reasonable to class electricity as a natural monopoly. What's less reasonable is regulatory capture. Landline telephones were insanely reliable in their heyday because they were required to be so. PG&E is reckless because they're allowed to be reckless.
Edit: For non-Americans, landline telephones were highly regulated up until '82 with AT&T having a government sanctioned monopoly.
Avicebron
Sure, and I would be lying if the libertarian bacon-wrapping of what I said was more than an litmus test and karma play, but the concept of good governance on a company like PG&E is so far out of the realm of possibility since citizen's united (and the public warping of perspective to agree with it) I don't see a very reasonable path forward to getting these (lovely, sweet, pure-hearted, well-meaning, community-oriented, positive, hard-working) people under control.
EDIT: *language, think of the children.
ChrisArchitect
Waymo fleet halts in San Francisco during power outages https://twitter.com/breaking911/status/2002568542835876194
Hoping this mega-mess pushes the city's effort to buy its own grid past the finish line. PG&E has been fighting it tooth and nail.
Not that it will necessarily make for fewer blackouts, but a ~50% rate discount would be nice. That's what users in Santa Clara pay IIRC, and SF even owns the hydro generator at O'Shaughnessy Dam.