PG&E's criminal probation to end amid ongoing safety worries

[Eugene]

Source: Associated Press

PG&’s criminal probation to end amid ongoing safety worries

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE
January 24, 2022

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Pacific Gas & Electric is poised to emerge from five years of criminal probation, despite worries that nation’s largest utility remains too dangerous to trust after years of devastation from wildfires ignited by its outdated equipment and neglectful management.

The probation, set to expire at midnight Tuesday, was supposed to rehabilitate PG&E after its 2016 conviction for six felony crimes from a 2010 explosion triggered by its natural gas lines that blew up a San Bruno neighborhood and killed eight people.

Instead, PG&E became an even more destructive force. Since 2017 the utility has been blamed for more than 30 wildfires that wiped out more than 23,000 homes and businesses and killed more than 100 people.

“In these five years, PG&E has gone on a crime spree and will emerge from probation as a continuing menace to California,” U.S. District Judge William Alsup wrote in a report reviewing his oversight of the utility.

-snip-

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/wildfires-business-fires-crime-california-367cb44acf704920a0c2a72d60890bc5

[NNadir]

1. I wonder...

I wonder...

Instead, PG&E became an even more destructive force. Since 2017 the utility has been blamed for more than 30 wildfires that wiped out more than 23,000 homes and businesses and killed more than 100 people.

“In these five years, PG&E has gone on a crime spree and will emerge from probation as a continuing menace to California,” U.S. District Judge William Alsup wrote in a report reviewing his oversight of the utility.

...if this statement is a little severe for a utility that has been forced by fashion to string extra wires all over the state to connect systems of low reliability and high land use that work only part of the time.

It's not like California has any practical proposal to eliminate it's contribution to climate change except to mutter more of the "by 2050" stuff to replace the all the previous "by 'such and such' a year" stuff that had no practical import.

They are shutting, for reasons of fashion, the only reliable low carbon source in the entire State. That will mean more wires, including those to the 5 "temporary" gas plants they have now agreed to build.