That's a good point. I do remember doing problems related to extending formulae outside the radius of convergence in my final year before university, but I don't think it's fair to ask for proper complex analysis from 17-year-olds.
They're not. Rural electricity can be had in the United States for far less than PG&E's charging. Look at Hawaii, Alasaka, TVA, etc., etc. PG&E is expensive because they have to pay for negligence, homicide, stock buybacks, dividends, executive bonuses, lobbyists, and back maintenance.
It's also worth noting that PG&E's got a history of astroturfing. Back in the 00s there was a local blogger, Greg Dewar, who ran a blog called the N Judah Chronicles. Ostensibly it was a blog about Muni and transit issues, but when muni power in SF came up for a vote boy was he hopping mad. It wasn't until someone else called him out for being on the PG&E payroll that he owned up to being paid to astroturf.
1.The last time PG&E had a stock buy back was in 2006.
2. Their dividend yield was 0.8% in 2025, the average for utilities was 3% to 5%. Alaska's APTL was 2.4% to 3.4%
3. Their state lobbying for 2024 to 2025 was less than $4 million. Federal was $60k (both insignificant)
4. California AB 1054 means that almost all of their largest liabilities will be reimbursed via the state wildfire fund. They also have insurance for anything that is not covered. While this won't cover it all the amount actually owned is likely to be low.
I also checked executive bonuses and while the CEOs pay is on the higher end it's not extreme. Not sure how much other executive bonuses could really add up enough to stand on its own as a reason for high electric rates, especially since all your other main arguments seem to be incorrect or exaggerated.
Regarding "back maintenance" this is a standard expense for a utility. Do you have some evidence that it's particularly high for PG&E, taking into account the size of the state?
Why would you make the assumption that the reasons PG&E is expensive(which I haven't even checked) are mostly due to corruption, excess pay or benefits to stock holders, or that the utility has a high liability debt? Most of the reasons you gave are ones that look bad for the leadership of the utility and maybe even the state. Is it possible that due to political propaganda over the long term you default to the assumption that anything a California connected entity does is bad so much so you don't even bother gathering evidence?
Also Hawaii has much higher electric rates than CA.
(Sources for any claims I made are available if requested)
HE is claiming a residential customer will pay around $0.45/kWh which is absolutely on par with PG&E. Keep in mind that HE currently charges fixed fees for electric service, PG&E doesn't yet but will add a fixed fee of $24/mo beginning next year. It shouldn't even be close. Practical Engineering covers it but Hawaiian Electric has some of the biggest challenges of all POCOs.
Most people agree that we need utilities to be monopolies. PG&E, for all intents and purposes, is an arm of the state. Perhaps it’s private in some sense but we all know it’s the government. It has to abide by all manner of government mandates, there is no competition. If you want it to go bankrupt just let it go bankrupt. Whatever replaces it will be the same thing. I don’t have a solution but all the teeth gnashing isn’t going to change the fact that electricity is a government issue and whoever runs it will work at the behest of the California government and the voters.
Pass whatever rules you want. It isn’t going to change the fundamental nature of the org, which is a reflection of the voters. This is a government problem, through and through
> electricity is a government issue and whoever runs it will work at the behest of the California government and the voters.
That's hilarious. The CPUC is regularory-captured like nobody's business, and our governor has been in the pocket of the utility for as long as I can remember. I guess in some sick way that's "at the behest of the government", but it sure as hell isn't at the behest of voters.
Unfortunately, we rarely have choices in every aspect of political candidates in order to change this state of affairs.
Why should people in the sustainable areas keep feeding the cancerous growth of worthless degenerate parasites? Serious question, as city folk keep ratholing into more and more socially destructive technologies, technologies designed to hamstring people, they lose the relative value.
Look at youtube, tiktok. Fine that's entertainment (set aside the issue of infotainment that has already infected public education). Then look at so called "productivity apps", or language learning apps. It's one thing to waste billions of collective man-hours it's another thing to lie and tell people they are learning or being more productive when you are wasting their time.
There are no mass assembly lines in the US, city GDP has been paper GDP for a long time now. On-shoring won't work without a total collapse of every culturally-enriched city, people need to learn hardship again.
If - if - people who live in the boonies deserve to have the burying of their tens of thousands of line-miles subsidized by others, it's by taxpayers, not by electric users in efficiently-served areas.
The difference between being taxpayer-financed and user-financed is that Ellison is on the hook for 10000x as much as granny instead of 20x. If it's a public good it should be paid by the public. A six-year-old keeping the light on at night should not incur a 120% surcharge for burying the transmission lines to a mansion in St. Helena.
This is ridiculous. What could you possibly mean? Everyone decides where they live. The cost of moving is not high, the ability to secure a job never easier.
This is a luxury belief and not borne out by any sort of reality. People have been deciding where they live for millennia and it’s never been easier than today.
Well, urban areas tend to be much more expensive to live in, especially in California. And most people don’t work in tech and enjoy relatively good job prospects.
It was used correctly. What CAs wanted to sell wasn't something browsers wanted to support, and EV was the compromise. It just happens that what EV meant wasn't that useful irl.
What's the alternative, showing the company's unique registration ID?
CAs invented EVs because the wanted to sell something which could make them more money than DVs. The fact that company names aren't unique means that the whole concept was fundamentally flawed from the start: there is no identifier which is both human-readable and guaranteed to uniquely identify an entity. They wanted to sell something which can't exist. The closest thing we have got is... domain names.
The alternative would have been to have the CA use human judgement when approving EV certificates and reject applications from organizations whose names shadowed better-known firms, or to only accept applications from a select set of organizations (like, say, banks). But either of those possibilities would have increased the cost of the program and limited the pool of applicants, so CAs chose the cheap, easy path which led to EV certificates becoming meaningless.
How many CAs do you think there are? How many countries do you think they operate in?
Maybe we could augment the old EV cert indicator with a flag icon, but now there's yet another thing that users have to pay attention to. Maybe the CA/Browser Forum could run a clearinghouse for company names, but apart from trivial examples, there might very well be legitimate cases of two companies with the same name in the same country, just in different industries. Now do we augment the indicator with an industry icon too? Then the company changes its name, or forms a subsidiary relationship, or what have you. Now do we need to put "Meta (formerly Facebook)" or "Facebook (division of Meta)" etc. in the name?
There's just so many problems with the EV cert approach at Internet scale and they're largely beyond solvable with current infrastructure and end-user expectations.
How do you decide when a company is "well-known"? What's going to happen when there are two well-known companies with the same name or a very similar name? What if a well-known company in country A expands to country B, where a well-known company with that name (but active in a different industry) already exists? How are you going to deal with subsidiaries which are both legally and organizationally separate? Who gets to keep the EV when a company spins off a division but both parts retain the same name?
"Use human judgement" might work for trivial examples of fraud, but it quickly breaks down once you try applying it to the real world. Besides, how are you going to apply the same "human judgement" across hundreds of employees at dozens of CAs? If anything, you're just begging to get sued by large corporations whose complex situation fell on the wrong side of your human judgement.
Ukraine's success proves that you need to actually have people guarding ships against intrusion. This is not a new lesson ever since the Raid on the Medway.
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