You should look more closely at your PG&E bill. There are some hidden CA taxes in there.

Also PG&E was forced to divest most of their generation assets, so I believe that much of the grid power down there is not under PG&E's control

Edit: Finally, any Western US utility needs to bear the cost of wildfire liability. Whether that is a state-owned utility or private, the cost is still there.

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reenorap 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

PG&E is in no way a victim here. Their CEO is being paid $50M a year, and our rates got increased 6 times last year. Nevada the next state over, the prices are 20% of California's.

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ahmeneeroe-v2 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

$50M is obscene, but not really a needle mover for rate payers. You could pay the whole executive team $0 and it would save the average residential ratepayer a few bucks per month, probably less than $5 per month.

	▲	ZeroGravitas 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Do they pay him that amount because he is really good at keeping end user prices down? Or do they pay him that much because he's good at extracting as much money from the situation as possible? When given an option that would double costs and profits or halves costs and profits which is he incentivized to do?

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Ajedi32 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Victim, no. Being over regulated doesn't necessarily hurt a company if all their competitors are subject to the same regulations. It's consumers who pay the price. 5x the price, apparently, if Nevada is any indication.

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epistasis 3 days ago | parent [-]

It is under regulation that is the problem here. PG&E has caused multiple huge disasters through negligence that have caused deaths and billions in damages that they pass on to rate payers. And this is after they redirected funds for maintenance directly to executive compensation.

The regulators should have thrown the hammer down on PG&E then, but after the disaster happens the money has to come from somewhere. Even if PG&E declares bankruptcy, the grid must run, and people must be able to rebuild their destroyed homes.

A public utility would be better than this sort of parasitic investor owned utility. Or, lots more regulation, and lots more jail time.

	▲	Ajedi32 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I see. So Nevada and the 46 other states with electricity cheaper than California[1] all have stricter regulation than California then? That's why their electricity is so much cheaper? [1]: https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/

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epistasis 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Unless by "taxes" you mean "delivery charges" this is simply untrue.

The generation is cheap. The delivery, the grid cost, is 3x-5x the cost of the generation.

It's all PG&E and the regulators's fault, for not containing costs more.

	▲	ahmeneeroe-v2 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		You're going to have to be more specific about cost control.