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Is California's PG&E The First Climate Change Bankruptcy? (marketscreener.com)
"California's largest power company intends to file for bankruptcy as it faces tens of billions of dollars in potential liability following massive wildfires that devastated parts of the state over the last two years," reports the Washington Post.
Calling it "a climate change casualty," one Forbes contributor notes that PG&E's stock has now lost 90% of its mid-October value after a giant November wildfire, adding that "Future investors will look back on these three months as a turning point, and wonder why the effects of climate change on the economic underpinnings to our society were not more widely recognized at the time." Climate scientists may equivocate about the degree to which Global Warming is contributing to these fires until more detailed research is complete, but for an investor who is used to making decisions based on incomplete or ambiguous information, the warning signs are flashing red... there is no doubt in my mind that Global Warming's thumb rests on the scale of PG&E's decision to declare bankruptcy.
And the Wall Street Journal is already describing it as "the first climate-change bankruptcy, probably not the last," noting that it was a prolonged drought that "dried out much of the state and decimated forests, dramatically increasing the risk of fire." "This is a fairly new development," said Bruce Usher, a professor at Columbia University's business school who teaches a course on climate and finance. "If you are not already considering extreme weather and other climatic events as one of many risk factors affecting business today, you are not doing your job"...
In less than a decade, PG&E, which serves 16 million customers, saw the risk of catastrophic wildfires multiply greatly in its vast service area, which stretches from the Oregon border south to Bakersfield. Weather patterns that had been typical for Southern California -- such as the hot, dry Santa Ana winds that sweep across the region in autumn, stoking fires -- were now appearing hundreds of miles to the north. "The Santa Ana fire condition is now a Northern California fire reality, " said Ken Pimlott, who retired last month as director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire. "In a perfect world, we would like to see all [of PG&E's] equipment upgraded, all of the vegetation removed from their lines. But I don't know anybody overnight who is going to catch up." PG&E scrambled to reduce fire risks by shoring up power lines and trimming millions of trees. But the company's equipment kept setting fires -- about 1,550 between mid-2014 through 2017, or more than one a day, according to data it filed with the state.
The global business community is recognizing the risks it faces from climate change. This week, a World Economic Forum survey of global business and thought leaders found extreme weather and other climate-related issues as top risks both by likelihood and impact.
Other factors besides climate change may also have pushed PG&E towards bankruptcy, according to the article. They're required by California state regulations to provide electrical service to the thousands of people moving into the state's forested areas, yet "an unusual California state law, known as 'inverse condemnation,' made PG&E liable if its equipment started a fire, regardless of whether it was negligent."
In declaring bankruptcy, PG&E cited an estimated $30 billion in liabilities -- plus 750 lawsuits from wildfires potentially caused by its power lines.
Calling it "a climate change casualty," one Forbes contributor notes that PG&E's stock has now lost 90% of its mid-October value after a giant November wildfire, adding that "Future investors will look back on these three months as a turning point, and wonder why the effects of climate change on the economic underpinnings to our society were not more widely recognized at the time." Climate scientists may equivocate about the degree to which Global Warming is contributing to these fires until more detailed research is complete, but for an investor who is used to making decisions based on incomplete or ambiguous information, the warning signs are flashing red... there is no doubt in my mind that Global Warming's thumb rests on the scale of PG&E's decision to declare bankruptcy.
And the Wall Street Journal is already describing it as "the first climate-change bankruptcy, probably not the last," noting that it was a prolonged drought that "dried out much of the state and decimated forests, dramatically increasing the risk of fire." "This is a fairly new development," said Bruce Usher, a professor at Columbia University's business school who teaches a course on climate and finance. "If you are not already considering extreme weather and other climatic events as one of many risk factors affecting business today, you are not doing your job"...
In less than a decade, PG&E, which serves 16 million customers, saw the risk of catastrophic wildfires multiply greatly in its vast service area, which stretches from the Oregon border south to Bakersfield. Weather patterns that had been typical for Southern California -- such as the hot, dry Santa Ana winds that sweep across the region in autumn, stoking fires -- were now appearing hundreds of miles to the north. "The Santa Ana fire condition is now a Northern California fire reality, " said Ken Pimlott, who retired last month as director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire. "In a perfect world, we would like to see all [of PG&E's] equipment upgraded, all of the vegetation removed from their lines. But I don't know anybody overnight who is going to catch up." PG&E scrambled to reduce fire risks by shoring up power lines and trimming millions of trees. But the company's equipment kept setting fires -- about 1,550 between mid-2014 through 2017, or more than one a day, according to data it filed with the state.
The global business community is recognizing the risks it faces from climate change. This week, a World Economic Forum survey of global business and thought leaders found extreme weather and other climate-related issues as top risks both by likelihood and impact.
Other factors besides climate change may also have pushed PG&E towards bankruptcy, according to the article. They're required by California state regulations to provide electrical service to the thousands of people moving into the state's forested areas, yet "an unusual California state law, known as 'inverse condemnation,' made PG&E liable if its equipment started a fire, regardless of whether it was negligent."
In declaring bankruptcy, PG&E cited an estimated $30 billion in liabilities -- plus 750 lawsuits from wildfires potentially caused by its power lines.
They neglected their infrastructure in a known fireprone area.. Now they are being fined/sued out of existance. Uh huh, yeah its climate change.
PG&E would not be liable for "Global Warming", the fact they are liable for damages is because they were the ones you irresponsibly cared for equipment and other things.
Nothing like using some mystical bogeyman to cast blame on and shift away from your own poor judgment and ability.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When PG&E got a rate hike to upgrade their natural gas pipe lines, the board pocketed the rate hike for shareholders. No one knew that happened until after the San Bruno pipeline blew up a neighborhood and PG&E asked for another rate hike to pay for upgrading natural gas pipe lines. Putting the shareholder first and burning down the state is why PG&E is unpopular. Has nothing to do with climate change.
It was caused by not routine controlled burns. Building homes in high risk areas. Blaming climate is ignoring these factors.
Of California's fucked-in-the-head regulatory environment.
This has NOTHING to do with climate change.
They're basically required to service areas that will never be profitable, below their costs of delivery, can't spin off unprofitable business segments, they're not allowed to charge more to cover their costs, etc.
Meanwhile, state and federal regulations basically conspire against them. Changes in land management dramatically increase the chances of fire in any given area. And they're made liable for any fires in the area of their equipment, whether it was actually their equipment or not...meanwhile industry regulation basically prevents them from charging true cost of the power they deliver and actually making it MORE profitable to sell the power out of state and then re-import it...
Meanwhile, California's idiot density is going up year over year as people with an actual functional brain flee the state. They've had wildfires in California for HOW LONG? Yet, every year we've got idiots starting fires and moving into areas that abut to the aforementioned badly managed forested land and building WOOD HOUSES, while ignoring sensible rules for building in fire-prone areas. Then, after they've burned down for the umpteenth time, they go back and rebuild in exactly the same fashion!
It's just the intellectually retarded leading the intellectually retarded out there.
It's like going into a boxing match and finding out the other guy is bringing a knife, guns, artillery, grenades and a group of friends to kick your ass.
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THANK GOD!!!
Exactly, PG&E has been proven mismanged for decades. San Bruno wasn't a one-off, they covered up their lies intentionally. This company is shit and needs to die.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/01/17/pge-uninsulated-power-conductors-were-factors-in-fatal-wildfires-federal-judge/
The premise that climate change was even a 50% factor is retarded. Climate change doesn't cause mismanagement of trees along power lines while the company pockets the money for their bottom line, as they provably did.
This. PG&E does bare minimum maintenance. Our power goes out about once a year for the better part of a day, entirely at random, along with an area that is a couple of miles on each side, containing several thousand homes. That's not in the mountains or in some hard-to-reach place. It's in the heart of the Silicon Valley.
PG&E is grossly incompetent. Even if you ignore their equipment malfunctions causing wildfires in 2017 AND 2018 and somehow blame that on global warming, there's also the San Bruno pipeline explosion that killed 8 people and destroyed 38 homes. There's certainly no global warming involved there. They simply don't maintain their equipment until something breaks. And this means things break. A lot.
Basically, PG&E is what happens when governments try to allow a regulated monopoly to provide critical utilities instead of a municipal electric company or a regional nonprofit. Every dollar that went to PG&E's sharedholders is a dollar that should have been used for routine maintenance and upgrades. If that money had been used that way, close to a hundred people would likely still be alive today, just from those two incidents alone. The problem is, the primary goal of any for-profit corporation, no matter how highly regulated, is and always will be profit, and their concern for public safety will always be limited to doing the bare minimum necessary to avoid getting sued out of existence.
This is their second bankruptcy this century. The first, though largely caused by the California energy crisis, was certainly not helped by a $2 million judgement against them in 1997 for failing to trim trees near power lines, resulting in a devastating wildfire in Nevada back in 1994. For them to have pretty much the same situation in 2017 is almost unconscionable. Yet judging from the frequent power outages in mountainous parts of the Bay Area, IMO, there's no reason to believe that they have learned their lesson and are maintaining trees adequately even to this day. The 2018 Camp Fire was just the additional straw thrown down on top of the camel posthumously.
Clearly, this company has failed. We should let it fail. Deny them Chapter 11. Cancel the stock. Make them file Chapter 7 and sell off the pieces. That's the only way things get better. Or at a bare minimum, order a complete replacement of all the company's leadership as part of the bankruptcy proceedings. If we keep letting the same people make the same bad decisions, how can we possibly expect different results?
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I know it's fashionable for conservatives to pick at the Leftist policies of the United States' most prosperous state but you're just making things up here. PG&E was doing great prior to the two big waves of fires that came through California https://www.macrotrends.net/st... and they would have zero liabilities in the case of these fires if they had maintained things the way they knew they were obligated to.
"Meanwhile, state and federal regulations basically conspire against them."
So we're convoluting state and federal policy now as a means of damning California? Most of our big open territory in this state is Federal.
"And they're made liable for any fires in the area of their equipment, whether it was actually their equipment or not..."
Citation needed.
"Meanwhile, California's idiot density is going up year over year as people with an actual functional brain flee the state."
Right, Californian's are idiots. What state are you from? Wait, it doesn't matter because it's not as prosperous as California.
"It's just the intellectually retarded leading the intellectually retarded out there."
Shit, I'll take our imperfect system over a Red state's any day of the week. At least we're able to generate meaningful wealth without the maximum exploitation of all of our public land as Texas does. We could certainly learn a thing or two from other blue states but I'm guessing that's not where you're at.
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From wikipedia...
....."...supply-demand imbalance, flawed market design and inconsistent rules made possible significant market manipulation as delineated in final investigation report. Without underlying market dysfunction, attempts to manipulate the market would not be successful."
By keeping the consumer price of electricity artificially low, the California government discouraged citizens from practicing conservation. In February 2001, California governor Gray Davis stated, "Believe me, if I wanted to raise rates I could have solved this problem in 20 minutes.
Energy price regulation incentivized suppliers to ration their electricity supply rather than expand production. The resulting scarcity created opportunities for market manipulation by energy speculators.
State lawmakers expected the price of electricity to decrease due to the resulting competition; hence they capped the price of electricity at the pre-deregulation level. Since they also saw it as imperative that the supply of electricity remain uninterrupted, utility companies were required by law to buy electricity from spot markets at uncapped prices when faced with imminent power shortages.
When the electricity demand in California rose, utilities had no financial incentive to expand production, as long term prices were capped. Instead, wholesalers such as Enron manipulated the market to force utility companies into daily spot markets for short term gain. For example, in a market technique known as megawatt laundering, wholesalers bought up electricity in California at below cap price to sell out of state, creating shortages. In some instances, wholesalers scheduled power transmission to create congestion and drive up prices.
After extensive investigation, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) substantially agreed in 2003
One of the biggest contributors to political campaigns during the period of law making that created the mess was Enron. So guess what fucker, your politicians made it happen, for their own personal gain. They sold you idiots out, and you are still blaming someone other than them.
"His name was James Damore."
Thanks for the link! It says exactly what I was saying, PG&E is responsible for the fires... like this sentence from your link:
A PG&E transmission tower in a burned-out forest in Butte County. PG&Eâ(TM)s lack of properly insulated power conductors â" and the threat of trees or limbs falling on distribution lines â" played a role in causing some of the disastrous and lethal wildfires of 2017 and 2018,
I'll save that one to point out to others, thanks man!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They think that they can blame this on global warming? I call bullshit. Global warming and it's effects on humanity has been something people in the USA have been beaten over the head with for at least 30 years now. They knew that global warming would mean greater demand for electricity for air conditioning, that this meant greater threats of storms and wild fires, this is not news. What have they been doing for the last 30 years to stop this from happening?
I will say that PG&E might not have all the blame here, they are in a business that is highly regulated by government. The government of California is likely the most to blame here, and some of this might land on the shoulders of the federal government too.
Even before global warming was in the common vocabulary we had threats of acid rain and other environmental disaster. What did California do about this? They declared the state a "nuclear free zone" meaning that they denied themselves access to the safest and cleanest source of energy available. This was true then and now. Nuclear power is far cheaper and far more reliable than wind or solar power. If they were paying attention to the science on global warming then they should also have been paying attention to the best science could tell them on how to combat it.
This is why I believe that so many politicians are anti-science, they've legislated themselves into a global warming corner. If you want to convince me that the "science is settled" on global warming then why are you ignoring the science on the safest and lowest CO2 energy source we have? Which is the greater threat to California, America, and the world? Is it global warming or nuclear power? If you say global warming then you are fools for shutting down the nuclear power plants you had and not building more. If you say global warming then you are fools for not planning on the effects and costs they will entail decades ago.
Nope, you can't blame this on global warming you fools. This is just bad management from the top to the bottom. I hope you enjoy freezing in the dark.
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FTFY. What is missing is accountability. In this case, IMO, the right way to hold them accountable is to throw about half the management chain in jail for the next three decades, fire the rest, liquidate the assets, and dissolve the company.
PG&E should have been dissolved after Anderson back in 1993 (a.k.a. the Erin Brockovich lawsuit). It should have been dissolved after the 1997 fires. It should have been dissolved again in its 2001 bankruptcy. And again after the 2010 San Bruno pipeline disaster. For a company that starts so many fires and kills so many people through gross criminal negligence, the only plausible answer is to metaphorically kill it with fire.
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That's a great point for this particular fire and some others. But the idea is that climate change is increasing the intensity of most fires in the state regardless of who starts them. Major (often record breaking) fires seem to happen every year. And climate change has led to those fires being much larger and damaging/expensive than before.
Standard issue with electrical reticulation is that the general public are so uninformed as to be living in a land of comic book physics.
The industry is full of really responsible people invested in their business going well and delivering a service. The OP beautifully points out how a couple of inflexible limits: a requirement to provide power into dangerous places - uneconomically, liability through perverse legislation and the impact of climate change has come around to ... severely bite the legislators in the ass, and the voting public and consumers.
While it may be fun to win over in some legal match its a zero sum game and hugely wasteful.
Even if it were climate change it would not be the first "bankruptcy" due to climate change. That would belong to the hunters of Doggerland about 10,000 year ago which is where the North Sea is today due to climate change. Now admittedly the concept of bankruptcy was a little different back then, there being no banks, but they certainly traded and were definitely put out of business by climate change.
PG&E is exactly what an economist would tell you will happen when government sets a price ceiling and supply isn't allowed to be reduced to compensate. Instead of quantity supplied being reduced (because that's illegal), quality is reduced as much as possible (Same exact economic issue with rent control price ceilings creating slumlords). The whole thing is the State of California's fault, a predictable result of their laws and regulatory mismanagement.
But sure, blame the power company which isn't allowed to make any significant decisions (who to sell power to, for how much and how top roduce and sell it) that California effectively runs via regulation.
San Diego Gas and Electric has the exact same issue as PG&E, just to a lesser extent because they're smaller.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
The Pacific Gas and Electric Company is an American investor-owned utility with publicly traded stock that is headquartered in the Pacific Gas & Electric Building in San Francisco.
The UK is the size of a postage stamp compared to the USA. Literally the only part of the UK with population density as low as the US is the Pitcairn islands. California is a large state (e.g. England is 57% as large as California alone) and the regions that have just burned are hilly to mountainous. In fact, the round of fires before this last one occured mostly within the Mendocino national Forest. And all of them have been in severe earthquake country, which is pretty much all of California except the Klamath knot. That means frequent service, which means burial of cables becomes a bigger problem.
We bury lines where it is convenient. This problem was caused by pge skipping routine maintenance (cutting back trees which encroach on power lines) because doing so would encroach upon executive compensation. These people aren't doing their jobs, they don't deserve pay let alone bonuses. And since not doing their jobs has killed people and destroyed towns, they should really be prosecuted for manslaughter, destruction of property, and willful negligence all at once.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, and we pay for it. The Californians have a cap on how much they can charge for electricity, which puts a cap on how much can be spent on resources for implementing new connections, maintaining old equipment, staff hires etc.
You'd be amazed at how quickly a profit (that adds to war chest to be able to put a capital spend into upgrading legacy equipment) turns into a loss when you start putting top of the range things into cost fixed product, when by regulation, the standard is sufficient. And even when you put in the top notch stuff, things _still_ go wrong, as that's the nature of entropy and statistics. And when there's a loss, you lose staff. Which means you likely can't maintain, so things go wrong. Or you can't actually afford to patch things up you know are going wrong. So the customer complains and you get fined. But you can't put your prices up to cover costs because state laws say that's not allowed.
There's that age old addage: Quality, speed and cost. Pick any two.
There's a requirement that things are implemented now. New connection to a forest miles from anywyere? Needs to be done NOW. And at that fixed low cost (vastly below cost for the supplier). Guess what happens.
What would be interesting would be a tabula rasa analysis of what it _should_ cost to provide the service, with the staffing, to the area based on statistical trends available from company records. Have this priced up by independents. Sure, it's costly, but it'll provide a baseline that'll inform policy as to whether caps placed on cost are actually viable or not. It's easy to set a price and say "It's your problem to sort that bit out, we're blameless for any issues that may arise". Sometimes, it's not possible to meet arbitrary targets. That really needs to be understood.
What this article seems to be is an attempt to turn a complex, and multivariate issue into a univariate soundbite. Which leads to flawed conclusions, as nobody wants to try and understand the nuance. Far easier to bring out the torches and pitchforks.
you can't get away with a lot of the crap you used to. 50 years ago the fires wouldn't have been so bad and they would have gotten away with it. The next company that replaces them (probably the same folks just reincorporated, hooray) will have to actually maintain that infrastructure, which is an added expense.
The thing about climate change is it's changing how we live and work in lot of way. Mostly though it's just adding expense and making life more difficult. Plus the global economy's already pretty crap for the working class, so it's not like it'd take much to push it over the edge into permanent recession.
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It's time to consider to bury the power lines. Something they do here in Sweden more and more.
You don't seem to grasp the size of North America and why this isn't a cost effective solution. To put simply, the difference in size between California and Sweden is about 20k sqkm. In North America, you can restring an entire street(say 300m long) including poles, transformers and so on for around $30k-40k, if you trench it you're looking upwards of $500k-1.5m depending on whether or not you also have to deal with other utilities. Relaying lines like that sometimes happens when a street is having new water lines, sewage and so on put in at the same time. Higher priorities are placed for areas that have high disaster issues like freezing rain - central-east US, eastern US along the I75 corridor, and up into Canada and, Ontario through the 401 into Quebec and along the St. Lawrence Seaway. In California's case, you can bet your ass that there's been a long humming and hawwing over "is above ground electrical better in an earthquake zone" then below ground.
Sometimes it's not even worth the effort in high flood zones from hurricanes because companies have discovered no matter how *good* of a conduit is being used, how well water proofed it is, how resistant to salt it is. Somehow you get water or salt or end up with a vapor filled tube of salt water which when it fails, is nothing short of spectacular.
The big problem California has is the lack of proper forestry management. 40 years ago, burns were common. If you were buying a house and there was 1" of pine needles on the ground it would be automatically condemned until it was cleaned up. Now you have people who protest burns, protest cleaning up areas with highly flammable ground clutter. Give you a tip though, the entire eastern pine stands ranging from the northern US to Southern Western Canada are ripe to go up. They're effectively dead, tens of thousands of sqkm of dead trees from pine beetles and no burn policies.
Om, nomnomnom...
PG&E was prevented from trimming trees. It's a common thing to protest and sue PG&E for doing what they're supposed to do. To the point that councilwomen and citizens watch each and every cut to condemn PG&E for being too aggressive in their clearance trims. And while the protest/lawsuit is on-going, there cannot be any trimming allowed. So we get wildfires.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Next time you might like to read to the end.
You must be new here.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How about PUC do its damn job and watch over the utilities that it regulates, rather than take millions in campaign donations and illegal activities? Oh - it's because even Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown was involved in the scandals... Yeah, let the State regulate everything about the utility, let the utilities buy-off the regulators and Governor - and then when the SHTF, blame the CEO - and not the elected officials. Here's a hint: don't reward the bastards in Sacramento in the first place, by re-electing them (or electing their chosen heir) to their positions.
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Not just let them fail (which we should), but then fire every single sitting CPUC member, and bar them for life from ever running for public office or working for the State Government. CPUC is supposed to oversee these kinds of things - and they sit around earning $142,000 per year. Of course, it's a great way to get paybacks from the Governor (who appoints them), and when you have millions and millions getting funneled from the utilities into the Governor's mansion, well - you tend to put people into the CPUC who will do the bidding of the utility. Toss them all out - even the hand-picked "heir" to the Governor's mansion.
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PG&E is exactly what an economist would tell you will happen when government sets a price ceiling and supply isn't allowed to be reduced to compensate.
That, sir, is a load of hot cockery.
So just to be clear, even after paying millions of dollars to executives who weren't doing their jobs, PGE was able to turn a profit of $1.65 billion up 18% from the prior year even though their revenues had fallen! How do you think they managed that? As long as they are failing to maintain infrastructure as they are legally obligated to do, every single dollar of that profit represents an effective theft from The People, let alone their customers.
In exchange for their various right-of-way monopolies, maintenance vehicle access and the like, they are obligated to maintain the infrastructure in safe condition, and do business in a fair manner. They are doing neither. PGE is a criminal conspiracy to defraud the people who reside or even simply have financial interests in the area which they "serve". And beyond that: it has killed in the past, it has killed recently, and it will kill again. And those responsible will almost certainly not only face no punishment, but get to retain the majority of their ill-gotten gains.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's not that simple. Being an environmentalist doesn't necessarily mean you are against using clearing fires. Often residents got angry when "controlled burns" or preventable fires got out of control and leveled their neighborhood. Any fire has some risk of spreading outside of its predicted or "controlled" area.
Such residents formed lobbying groups, and they asked for evidence that the techniques being used actually worked. Turns out record-keeping was poor such that nobody could present clear evidence. (The "ecology nuts" some refer to are actually lobbyists.)
Plus, clear-cutting (thinning) was an alternative to controlled burns or "allowed" burns, or at least a supplement to reduce their needs and risk. If you thin the forest occasionally, then the need for controlled/allowed burns would go down, at least in theory.
But both State and Federal funds dried up during the Great Recession, and both clear-cutting and the original techniques fell behind schedule. As is typical during big economic slumps, long-term projects get reduced. And climate-change may have made the problem worse.
Table-ized A.I.
Most of the time the line doesn't break - but a tree branch falls across the line, catches on fire, then continues down to the ground. In these cases, the circuit breaker won't help - the circuit is never really broken or even disturbed, but the branches in the trees short the line to ground for a few milliseconds (before they burst into flame) and start the fire.
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The corporation certainly wouldn't have diverted safety funds into bonuses and stock dividends, because there would be no stockholders.
I mean yes, ostensibly a nonprofit could still divert safety funds into bonuses, but it would likely cost them their nonprofit status.
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