California Burning

With nitwits in charge in Sacramento, no meaningful energy policy, and the dismal state of the electrical grid nationwide, and certainly in California, ratepayers are suffering. General Electric (GE) and Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) are two of the leading culprits.

In 2022 GE lost $2.2 billion on its wind turbine division. The restructured portions of the grid are losing reliable power plants to government-subsidized renewables in the always-iffy spot markets overseen by grid operators. Mark Christie of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission recently testified before the U.S. Senate: “The [energy] problem is coming…quickly. The red lights are flashing.”

Remember 2018? PG&E committed manslaughter when 84 people died in a wildfire ignited by the company’s Caribou-Palermo transmission line. The tragedy was the result of “chronic mismanagement, criminal neglect, [and] existential risk,” wrote Katherine Blunt in a masterful exposé in the Wall Street Journal.

The Caribou-Palermo equipment was nearly a century old when it collapsed and ignited a fire consuming hundreds of acres. There were three drivers: 1) inborn incentives of the monopoly utility industry; 2) electricity restructuring — and safety be damned; 3) the so-called “energy transition” to renewable, but unproven, energy generators like wind and solar.

In other words utilities make more money (Incentives) building the wind and solar plants politicians want than they do guaranteeing ratepayers safety.

This mess goes back to the administration of the hapless Gray Davis (1999-2003). Davis required utilities to keep their rates low in response to Enron (encore une fois!), which inflicted third-world style rolling blackouts on California. By 2001 the California Public Utilities Commission approved massive rate hikes. A day later PG&E filed for bankruptcy and ran the Chapter 11 gauntlet. Even the appalling London Breed, failed mayor of San Francisco, got into the act when she tried to acquire her city’s portion of PG&E’s territory—with San Fran on the ropes, why not wreck something else?

Enter bright lights like Governors Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom seeking to save us from “climate change” by paving the state with solar panels from China and bird-killing wind turbines. This has cost Californians billions.

But the incompetence continues: IN 2010 he always-deplorable PG&E neglected an old, badly welded gas pipeline that exploded in San Bruno, killing eight people, destroying 38 homes and damaging 70 others.

The American electrical grid was an amazing achievement. It is our most vital and precious piece of infrastructure. Yet it languishes in the hands of politicians, who are, at best, green dream amateurs.

We urge everyone to read Katherine Blunt’s award-winning book, California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas & Electric—and What iI Means for America’s Power Grid, now in its fourth printing.