[kevinburke]

PG&E already went bankrupt recently, and taking over the whole state wouldn't really help very much. The problem is largely liability rules that make it very expensive to provide power to wildfire zones and rural areas. PG&E and the state have decided to pay for that by charging people who live in cities very high rates for electricity.

It's perverse that people who live in safe, urban areas are subsidizing people who live in wildfire zones. The savings come largely from not doing that anymore.

[amluto]

This whole model is nonsensical, though. Averaging costs among customers doesn’t give anyone the right incentives:

- Urban customers should have an incentive to use electricity over gas, which they would if rates were reasonable.

- Urban customers should not pay per kWh even if one thinks they should subsidize rural customers. It should be some kind of tax with reasonable allocation.

- Undercharging rural customers for provision of service and overcharging per kWh messes up incentives, too. If suburban or rural communities faced the actual cost of transmission to their area and distribution within it, they could make real decisions, for example:

# Technologies exist to reduce the risk that a power line fault starts a fire. Search for “ground fault neutralizer” or “REFCL.” Similarly common reclosers take a very YOLO approach to deal with a faulted line, and other approaches exist. PG&E, of course, doesn’t want to use these because the ridiculous CPUC rules let them make more profit by spending more money trimming trees.

# Communities could maintain their own lines and have actual locally enforced codes about vegetation.

# Communities could install batteries at their end of transmission lines to help ride through public safety power shutdowns and to level out their own loads. And they could even build small wind turbines optimized for operation in high winds (which are rather strongly correlated with those shutdowns) to generate a few MW and keep those batteries charged. Heck, this could be automated: de-energize the line when the wind is high automatically, and there won’t even be a substantial inrush when re-energizing when the wind stops because the batteries can reduce load to zero.

# A community could decide the cost isn’t worth it and build its own mini grid. This might spur interesting investment into things like small modular reactors :)

- The ownership and regulatory structure right now sucks, amplifying all the problems above and the lack of real solutions.

[CobaltFire]

I bang this drum all the time, but you are the first other person I've seen state it online.

If we stop subsidizing the foothills by creating urban utility districts it would solve the PG&E problem.

We would have a new problem of causing a ton of people to be unable to continue living in those areas without some kind of off-grid program.

Long term I think this is the only sane way forward though.

[abeppu]

> We would have a new problem of causing a ton of people to be unable to continue living in those areas without some kind of off-grid program.

But people in those areas are likely to be able to benefit from solar, so maybe being "off the grid" in the sense of not having long runs of power lines surrounded by trees to your house in the country is reasonable, and perhaps also cheaper for those rural residents anyway?

[marssaxman]

> a ton of people to be unable to continue living in those areas

That sounds like more of a solution than a problem: those places are going to burn, so it's better that people stop living there.

[UncleEntity]

Ironically, if they just let them naturally burn in the first place there wouldn't be even a fraction of damage caused by these modern wildfires.

[Qwertious]

IIRC it's a funding problem - controlled burns require a ton of manpower to control, and the longer since the last burn, the harder it is to control.

[thatguy0900]

Long term I don't see how it's possible to continue to let people live in areas so fire prone that insurance cannot be done, it seems to me. Unless you want to live in a concrete castle or something

[mindslight]

Construction itself isn't that expensive. It's certainly possible to self insure and accept that living in an area prone to fires means your house might burn down. It goes against the prevailing culture of the ever-growing housing bubble, but financialization has to hit its limits some time.

[mauvehaus]

Self-insuring is probably not going to fly with your mortgage lender. If nobody can get a mortgage, and everyone has to self-insure, it's going to 1) drive down housing prices (fewer cash buyers) and 2) guarantee that only people of pretty substantial means can afford to live there (even with lower prices, most people can't come up with a cash payment for a house).

[mindslight]

I did acknowledge it would go against housing bubble culture. It certainly wouldn't be a financially prudent way of obtaining primary shelter, but rather for vacation homes or whatnot. We're mostly talking about rural properties in the woods, right?

[coryrc]

If prices were sane, anybody who bought a house ten years ago currently has enough equity to pay cash.

[trinsic2]

You mean like a brick building? like how structures were originally built? Seems like a good idea to me for house to be made of stone in high fire related areas. Obviously the cost would be astronomical.

[arrosenberg]

Brick buildings don't do well with earthquakes. California also happens to sit on a major, active fault line. While it is technically possible to make a brick or stone building earthquake-proof, I would imagine it's cost prohibitive for large scale single-family housing projects. Apartment towers are already built with a multistory steel-reinforced concrete base that is built to withstand earthquakes, but it would increase costs significantly to build to the top like that.

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

I am 90% in agreement with you. I do think that you should consider how rural/suburban areas have all of the generation and transmission which the cities rely on for their power.

It's not exactly fair to treat those rural residents as burdens to the urban areas when they provide the means for the urban areas to exist.

[avidiax]

> It's not exactly fair to treat those rural residents as burdens to the urban areas when they provide the means for the urban areas to exist.

There's a difference between people that are in farming/ranching and industry vs. people that are rural to afford a more lavish home in the woods or on the hills.

Even still, a system that doesn't appropriately price and apportion risk will always be under pressure.

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

>a system that doesn't appropriately price and apportion risk will always be under pressure

Very well stated, I am stealing this. Also in agreement with rural resource types vs rich rural.

Again I think it is more complex than just apportioning power costs. CA effectively has a state policy of not maintaining its forest/rural land (ditto feds and their land). My parents live adjacent to national forest and have fire evacuations nearly every year.

There is nothing that the rural residents in their area can do to mitigate risk, even at their own cost. So we're asking them to bear the cost of the state/fed policy decisions. This is exactly the problem you describe of inappropriate price/risk apportionment.

[coryrc]

The forests are supposed to burn.

They mitigate by building fireproof homes and leaving when the fire comes. Or just not living there.

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

Yes, small frequent burns which are allowed to consume the dry biomass. This does not describe the current fire management process in the western US

[janalsncm]

> they provide the means for the urban areas to exist

Unless you’re referring to farmers I don’t understand this point. As of right now it is the other way around.

[ahmeneeroe-v2]

No. Build the generation for urban areas within those same urban areas.

[rangestransform]

How about:

- we get rid of nimby enabling laws

- don’t subsidize rural customers

- automate farming