| > So we've paid the cost of the gas line upgrade but the cost of the electric upgrade to mitigate the fire risk is still incoming. I don't believe we've paid anywhere near the full cost of upgrading/maintaining the gas infrastructure yet. It continues to age and will require ongoing and increasing maintenance - and expensive maintenance since lines are buried. Furthermore as more customers switch away from natural gas, the remaining customers rates will rise to pay for the infrastructure maintenance as this paper from the Haas School of Business describes [1]: "As Figure 4 shows, this percentage rise in bills is small when only a few customers exit
the natural gas sector, but bills rise substantially if many customers exit. To understand why
this relationship is non-linear, imagine that all customers but one exit, and that remaining
customer must cover all of the utility’s legacy costs." You're right that we will likely pay higher costs for electric infrastructure upgrades also - or alternatively experience more fire-avoidance PSPS events, or a bit of both. But electricity as a medium for delivering energy offers more technological opportunities for addressing these issues and the very pressing issue of decarbonization than natural gas does going forward. Batteries and municipal microgrids are some of technologies that can help with this going forward. 1. https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP317.pdf |