If you had the power to make the laws however you wanted around universally needed basic services of electricity, gas, water, sewage, how would you do it?<p>Non-profit? Government run? Capitalism with minimal regulation? Capitalism with strict regulation? Profit caps? “Common carrier” type of deal to allow any player to compete in an energy market, trying to stop behemoth entities from monopolistic?<p>Very curious to hear from the non-US audience.<p>Personally, I lean towards gov run services for universal needs, like healthcare, electricity, heating, etc. But I am guessing the outcomes of whatever energy policy/regulations is the average of how the rest of society is doing.
The trouble with PG&E is that it's trying to serve two incompatible goals.<p>The shareholders want it to provide electric service for a profit in the locales where doing so is economically sensible (= urban/suburban), slowly grow its value, and throw off a stable stream of dividends. This is the basic value proposition of all for-profit utilities: low growth, low volatility, stable income.<p>The state government -- and a not insubstantial proportion of the state population -- want PG&E to be a non-profit that provides electricity at cost to everyone in its coverage area, which is to include huge swaths of forest-covered hillsides and dry rural scrubland. Every time it gets mentioned on HN (not exactly a hotbed of communism!) there's a bunch of comments about how it should be illegal for an electric utility to have any profit at all.<p>PG&E can't have it both ways. It hasn't paid a non-trivial dividend since 2017 and its share price is ~half of what it was 20 years ago, which makes it an astonishingly poor investment -- compare to Southern Company (SO) or Duke Energy (DUK). But at the same time it is legally mandated to absorb the costs of operating high-voltage lines in brushfire territory, and half its customers think it shouldn't be allowed to exist.