Falling panel prices lead to global solar boom, except for the US

Isn't a lot of this the government insisting that PG&E act as the de facto California wildfire insurance provider and collect the premiums out of everyone's electric bill?

You have wildfires caused by, basically, climate change causing there to be an abundance of fuel (dead wood) waiting for any spark, exacerbated by decades of the government putting out every wildfire when in the natural environment the last fire would have cleared out the dead wood before the next one, causing fuel to accumulate even more.

At that point it doesn't matter what the ignition source is, that much fuel is going to burn, soon. If it isn't some piece of PG&E equipment it will be a lightning strike or something else. But if you can pin it on the power company because a tree caught fire from falling on a power line then the fire insurance companies can sue the power company instead of filing for bankruptcy, and then all you have to do is pass on the cost to ordinary people as $500/month electric bills.

There are a bunch of places in California where humans shouldn't live that PG&E is required to provide electricity to and then getting blamed for setting fires... which I suppose it did set those fires but much of the state is being required to subsidize these inhabited uninhabitable places either through paying for fire damage or paying the incredibly expensive process of burying power lines which doesn't fundamentally alter the risk or rate of wildfires.

One of the many questionable political situations in California.

Renewables could be used to power these remote locations, or at least allow utilities to abandon them (with some warning.)

PG&E instead of constantly upgrading and maintaining their distribution system, decided to pay out dividends and buy back stock, as well as pay their CEO $50 million per year. That's why their outdated equipment kept starting fires.

They took a risk by underspending on upgrading, and we as Californians are paying for them paying out their shareholders.

Power transmission is not a technology with a high rate of change. It's basically a wire on a stick. If a tree falls on it the tree catches fire because it carries high voltage and the tree creates a path to ground. What is "upgrading their equipment" supposed to do?

Basically PG&E was horribly mismanaged for decades, that mismanagement lead to billions of dollars of damages and those costs were shifted onto the customers and the management got off scot free.

They were supposed to bury them underground but they didn't. This is a well known issue that they ignored because they didn't want to spend the money and instead paid dividends and did massive stock buybacks. Now, 20 years later, the costs have skyrocketed because of inflation.

This is a mischaracterization of the liability of PG&E for those fires. All of the PG&E-caused wildfires were due to inadequately maintained equipment operating well beyond its service life. The reduction of maintenance budgets to improve free cash flow and return capital to investors was a conscious decision by the company officers [1].

As you stated, PG&E was held liable for billions of dollars of compensation for the impacted people. This led to negative earnings zeroing out the profits of the previous decade [2]. Furthermore, the stock's price is far lower than it was during the hayday of deferred maintenance.

Since the involvement of California state government in PG&E operations, maintenance has improved dramatically. Furthermore, PG&E again has positive earnings, demonstrating that the long-term viability of the company is improved with adequate maintenance budgeting.

Now to address the counterfactual, "the fires would have happened anyway": no. The leading cause of wildfires in California in general, and impacting people and infrastructure in particular, is electrical equipment. This is empirical; after PG&E began cutting power during high-fire danger days, the number and severity of wildfires dropped dramatically [3].

1. How PG&E missed its chance to prevent the Camp Fire: Damning report on utility’s negligence, https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article24357122...

2. Pacific Gas & Electric EPS - Earnings per Share 2011-2025 | PCG, https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PCG/pacific-gas-el...

3. Human-caused ignitions spark California’s worst wildfires but get little state focus: In 2019, utilities turned off electricity during high-wind events, and California had its mildest fire season in eight years. Was that a coincidence?, https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2020/01/05/human-caused...

Burying power lines is extremely expensive and does nothing to actually prevent wildfires, which existed in California before the advent of electric utilities. You're complaining about a $50M salary while insisting that they do something ineffective that costs $20B. Then you'd get to pay the cost of burying the power lines and the cost of the fires. Is that actually better than just moving the cost of the fires back to the insurance companies to begin with?

> All of the PG&E-caused wildfires were due to inadequately maintained equipment operating well beyond its service life.

That sounds like something lawyers say when they want to sue somebody.

Who determines the "service life" of a conductive piece of metal with no moving parts?

> Now to address the counterfactual, "the fires would have happened anyway": no. The leading cause of wildfires in California in general, and impacting people and infrastructure in particular, is electrical equipment. This is empirical; after PG&E began cutting power during high-fire danger days, the number and severity of wildfires dropped dramatically

Nobody disputes that power lines can be an ignition source. The issue is that there are also other ignition sources and dead trees will eventually burn. Causing the fires to be less frequent actually makes the problem worse, because then when it does happen there is even more fuel, which makes the next fire bigger and harder to contain. It's the same failure mode as putting out natural wildfires and leaving all that fuel to accumulate for next time.

Removing some of the ignition sources means you're going to have fewer small fires this year, but at the cost of having bigger ones later. That's not a win.

> Who determines the "service life" of a conductive piece of metal with no moving parts?

Perhaps you might start by explaining how that question is in any way relevant to the current discussion.

The part that was found to have failed was a wire hanger that wore through as it swung in the wind (hint: a moving part) and allowed the power line to fall on the ground.

Somehow (magic or the occult probably) SC Edison and LADWP have not had failures of their physical plant which bankrupted the company. They also had higher maintenance budgets. Hmmm… nope, can’t see how these things are connected.

You are literally uttering nonsense.

No one is blaming PG&E for all wildfires. We are blaming PG&E for the wildfires THAT THEY CAUSED. These fires could have been prevented if THEY BURIED THEIR POWERLINES back in the early 2000s when it was far cheaper and like they promised. They instead decided to ditch that and instead buyback stock and pay lucrative dividends.

Burying powerlines would 100% prevent wildfires which were caused by sparking or broken power equipment, which has been the documented reason why several extremely large and fatal wild fires were caused by.

If pigs had wings they could fly, but here and in a lot of California politics rational solutions aren't what is lacking.

>wildfires caused by, basically, climate change causing there to be an abundance of fuel (dead wood)

There was a quite convincing article claiming the abundance of dead wood was due to bureaucracy more than anything else - two years of paperwork to remove a tree etc.

> Who determines the "service life" of a conductive piece of metal with no moving parts?

I think they move from the wind and eventually wear through.

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/new-images-of-pge-...

> The issue is that there are also other ignition sources and dead trees will eventually burn.

Please read citation number three from the parent post. This is not a certainty. Calfire and local agencies do a substantial amount of brush clearing, tree cutting, and when conditions are right, controlled burns. Anything that reduces the frequency of ignition events buys more time for fire control agencies to do this work.

> Please read citation number three from the parent post. This is not a certainty.

The link is essentially arguing that there are some areas with very few natural ignition sources, so most of the fires are caused by people. But that doesn't get you out of the accumulation of fuel. Even if zero of the fires were caused by power lines or nature, there would still be car fires and campfires etc., and longer durations between them causes larger accumulations of fuel.

> Calfire and local agencies do a substantial amount of brush clearing, tree cutting, and when conditions are right, controlled burns. Anything that reduces the frequency of ignition events buys more time for fire control agencies to do this work.

This isn't a case of there being a fixed amount of brush that only has to be cleared out this once and we need to buy some time to allow the work to be completed. It's a continuous process and they don't have the resources to do it everywhere. If you then prevent more of the "unscheduled" fires in the places where they can't and then more fuel accumulates there, what happens?

And what I'm saying is that "caused" is a weasel word when things have more than one cause.

To have a fire you need a spark, air and fuel. The air is there all the time. The fuel is there whenever there hasn't been a spark recently. And power lines aren't the only source of sparks.

Once the fuel is there and accumulating, you're playing roulette to see if you're going to have a smaller fire now or a bigger fire later. There is no option for "never have a fire again" in those areas, and the second option isn't inherently better than the first one.

If every line were buried, California's huge problem with fires would stop? The real cause is not the lack of prescribed burns and better forest management?

Fire danger is not a linear function. It fluctuates from year to year with rainfall. Efforts to reduce ignition events are meaningful.

Furthermore, risk to people and property is not uniformly distributed. Fire mitigation efforts are performed disproportionately near population centers. When man-made, preventable ignition causes are concentrated near towns like Paradise, responsible entities have a duty to reduce those risks.

It is not necessary to allow fires to burn houses down to fulfill a concept of accumulated fire risk. Marin County has published a series of videos showing homeowners how to landscape their properties to reduce the spread of fire.

Well isn't that defeatist. Politically impossible positions may become possible with enough outreach, especially if the position has economic advantages. Look at YIMBY.

Another intermediate possibility in California is distributed generation and storage to both reduce load on transmission and to allow transmission and distribution to be deenergized during times when fire risk is high. This could then gradually transition over into an entirely distributed system without transmission to some locations.