We need to go to a community coop model as we already do with most of the rural US and take the rest of it back public or best of all go to battery backed roof top solar for most of it as Tony Seba's "God point" when the cost of transmission relative to generation is a is a dead on accuracy.
Some of the following is bound to be inaccurate and I am no expert but this is what it looks like:
1. PG&E customers pay at least 370% more than rural coop customers per kilowatt hour and 2200% more per kwh hour than new utility scale battery backed solar which is at 1.1 cents a kwh. Why?!!!
2. PG&E does not actually compete it has a local monopoly and when it is forced to compete it makes the idiotic argument that it has the right to off load the costs of lost revenue onto remaining rate payers that can't afford to switch based on the even more idiotic and really criminal argument that it as a for profit company that is guaranteed a 10% return by law (law vs crime) for its rent seeker (credit card you can't pay off unnecessary investors) when all it has really done is jack up prices out of all proportion to inflate that guaranteed margin and used its ill-gotten power of private taxation to enrich fat cats while neglecting the grid such that with the difference lost on ripping off almost half of all Californians we could have had all our lines undergrounded by now and still saved a ton. We can surely see that PG&Es returns must have been something like 270% even if it didn't pay taxes on that. Now we see PG&E throwing around the likely super inflated claim that undergrounding would cost 150 billion- guessing we could reduce that by a factor of 18 and come up with about 8 billion and make it eat that, but then it couldn't hit us with supplier strikes reducing is power to hold the state hostage. For instance note that undergrounding is said to be about 3x as expensive as over heading but they continue to do it despite the risk- notice he 3x factor over rural electric kind of like he 3.7x factor?
3. PG&E still has at least 15% natural gas in its power mix. That should have been gone long ago. Of course it should have dismantled is gas burning electric plants (even new ones) but it should have had to pay to covert its gas line customers and it never should have been in on the scam of telling gas customers they had to pay for and insure its lines on their properties and not ever been allowed to try to jack up grid tie fees. It also shouldn't be able to buy imported power when we have the scam of claiming we have a green glut of solar under the duck curve when we actually have a glut of sky high fossil fuels that they are trying to subsidize by not capturing that peak solar with storage. And the chunk that it presumably imports has no transparency on its mix which means it is probably all radically higher permanently higher increasingly orders of magnitude higher dirty fossil fuels.
4. Why is it up to a for profit company to use its greedy profit calculations to decide whether to damage to disrupt lives and damage the state's economy through power shut offs that could quite possibly be a retaliatory supplier strike when it should never ever have been making any kind of profit in the absence of actual competition- at worst it should have been a bond measure (not a good idea even as a inflation/deflation hedge) and not an ongoing scam involving profits. Not only that it was allowed to use its for profit (private tax powers) to advertise and lobby against the public interest so even if this was one of those idiotic public private partnerships which always go bad (look at the defense industry which is the best case) it was clearly going bad and is another example of why we should never allow PPPs- they are the bad form of socialism and we don't need that kind of corporate welfare as glue going forward in a post labor (and by implication post capital) society. PG&E is just another useless private toll road that destroys the commons and can't be justified on the stupid 'tragedy of the commons' claims nor on the ridiculous theories put forward by Coase on utilities- look instead to Hoteling. No, we have to look at the social utility of parasites and then say no to it, when we allow gain for no actual contribution that is theft- which means we can't look at youth or people in their old age or the everyday people who actually generated the nation's wealth and to whom without exception it belongs, but we can look at defunct whip cracking rent seekers who were paid off long ago for any actual albeit nominal contribution and now just have to look at their culpability and debt (due with interest for lost opportunity cost) for decades of net negative non contribution. We have to correct this error in distribution and claw back the ill-gotten gain through disgorgement and there should be no statute of limitations.
continued next post
Some of the following is bound to be inaccurate and I am no expert but this is what it looks like:
1. PG&E customers pay at least 370% more than rural coop customers per kilowatt hour and 2200% more per kwh hour than new utility scale battery backed solar which is at 1.1 cents a kwh. Why?!!!
2. PG&E does not actually compete it has a local monopoly and when it is forced to compete it makes the idiotic argument that it has the right to off load the costs of lost revenue onto remaining rate payers that can't afford to switch based on the even more idiotic and really criminal argument that it as a for profit company that is guaranteed a 10% return by law (law vs crime) for its rent seeker (credit card you can't pay off unnecessary investors) when all it has really done is jack up prices out of all proportion to inflate that guaranteed margin and used its ill-gotten power of private taxation to enrich fat cats while neglecting the grid such that with the difference lost on ripping off almost half of all Californians we could have had all our lines undergrounded by now and still saved a ton. We can surely see that PG&Es returns must have been something like 270% even if it didn't pay taxes on that. Now we see PG&E throwing around the likely super inflated claim that undergrounding would cost 150 billion- guessing we could reduce that by a factor of 18 and come up with about 8 billion and make it eat that, but then it couldn't hit us with supplier strikes reducing is power to hold the state hostage. For instance note that undergrounding is said to be about 3x as expensive as over heading but they continue to do it despite the risk- notice he 3x factor over rural electric kind of like he 3.7x factor?
3. PG&E still has at least 15% natural gas in its power mix. That should have been gone long ago. Of course it should have dismantled is gas burning electric plants (even new ones) but it should have had to pay to covert its gas line customers and it never should have been in on the scam of telling gas customers they had to pay for and insure its lines on their properties and not ever been allowed to try to jack up grid tie fees. It also shouldn't be able to buy imported power when we have the scam of claiming we have a green glut of solar under the duck curve when we actually have a glut of sky high fossil fuels that they are trying to subsidize by not capturing that peak solar with storage. And the chunk that it presumably imports has no transparency on its mix which means it is probably all radically higher permanently higher increasingly orders of magnitude higher dirty fossil fuels.
4. Why is it up to a for profit company to use its greedy profit calculations to decide whether to damage to disrupt lives and damage the state's economy through power shut offs that could quite possibly be a retaliatory supplier strike when it should never ever have been making any kind of profit in the absence of actual competition- at worst it should have been a bond measure (not a good idea even as a inflation/deflation hedge) and not an ongoing scam involving profits. Not only that it was allowed to use its for profit (private tax powers) to advertise and lobby against the public interest so even if this was one of those idiotic public private partnerships which always go bad (look at the defense industry which is the best case) it was clearly going bad and is another example of why we should never allow PPPs- they are the bad form of socialism and we don't need that kind of corporate welfare as glue going forward in a post labor (and by implication post capital) society. PG&E is just another useless private toll road that destroys the commons and can't be justified on the stupid 'tragedy of the commons' claims nor on the ridiculous theories put forward by Coase on utilities- look instead to Hoteling. No, we have to look at the social utility of parasites and then say no to it, when we allow gain for no actual contribution that is theft- which means we can't look at youth or people in their old age or the everyday people who actually generated the nation's wealth and to whom without exception it belongs, but we can look at defunct whip cracking rent seekers who were paid off long ago for any actual albeit nominal contribution and now just have to look at their culpability and debt (due with interest for lost opportunity cost) for decades of net negative non contribution. We have to correct this error in distribution and claw back the ill-gotten gain through disgorgement and there should be no statute of limitations.
continued next post