Comment by tancop
2 days ago
if pg&e was state owned (with good management, thats the hard part) it would operate at ~zero profit and pass through all savings to customers. that means rates as low as they can possible be at the current state of the grid and generation system.
most infra projects get taxpayer money through subsidies or partnerships anyway. taking it public would only kick out the investors with misaligned goals and replace them with fixed cost debt funding. you dont need to create incentives that hurt consumers when the state can invest directly.
I don’t follow. Taking what public? Most utility companies operating in CA are already publicly traded.
Do you mean “nationalizing” (or whatever the state equivalent is)? There are already some municipally owned utilities like DWP in LA and Santa Clara Power, but those began as municipal services and weren’t converted from independent businesses. The tendency over the past century has been to spin off public entities, not to take them in.