[zbrozek]

Ultimately the California Legislature and the CPUC (and therefore the governor who appoints them) are at-fault for rates. PG&E is a regulated monopoly, and in-theory the regulators are supposed to drive value for ratepayers. But our regulators simply do not care and do not perform. The legislature has larded a bunch of redistribution onto rates, and burdened the regulator with a bunch of conflicting goals.

The regulator has no accountability to anyone and just rubber-stamps everything the utilities put in front of them, allowing them to skimp on opex (maintenance) in order to turn everything into capex with cost-plus guaranteed profit. This incentivizes making everything as expensive and as brittle as possible.

Either we need to restructure the market to be more competitive, or we need to restructure the regulations and the regulator to be more performant and responsive to ratepayers. We're suffering a ruinous misalignment of incentives and the best the legislature can think of to fix it is to make it cheaper for the IOUs to borrow money.

[lokar]

The regulators also fail to force proper long term maintenance.

IMO the issue is the board is appointed, and it’s just full of political allies.

We should fill boards like this with experts. For example, make a majority of the board be tenured professors of engineering and finance from the university of California with no financial connections to the industry.