California's Self-Inflicted Energy Wounds

Headline: California electricity prices now second-highest in U.S.: ‘Everyone is getting squeezed’ [bold added]

Propelled in large part by PG&E, which hiked residential electricity rates by 20% for about 16 million Californians in January, the state’s high electricity prices are second only to Hawaii, which is always an expensive outlier because of the costs of shipping oil to the far-flung archipelago...

East Coast residents are paying higher prices during cold winter months with Californians paying higher electricity prices for a brief period nearly every summer since 2014, likely when people must cool their homes during heat waves.

It is unusual for Californians to pay higher prices than the East Coast in the depth of winter.

It's a safe bet that the "unusual"-ness of California paying more than East Coasters during winter will become the usual story. As is there wont, pro-regulation activists blame lax Public Utilities Commission oversight--there may be some truth to that--but as we stated in 2019, it's impossible to place all these conflicting demands on an energy provider:

Deliver electricity and natural gas reliably to 16 million Californians;

Charge customers as low a rate as possible;

Earn a profit for investors, including a regular dividend;

Clear trees and brush to reduce the risk of wildfires;

Provide generous salary, medical and pension benefits in accordance with union contracts;

Repair and replace its aging infrastructure with less efficient and more costly carbon-minimizing energy sources (principally windmills and solar, but not nuclear);

Decommission Diablo Canyon, its last nuclear power plant, for an estimated $4.8 billion beginning in 2024;

Meet Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) standards;

Pay $billions in damages for its culpability in the 2017-2019 wildfires.

Transfer hundreds of thousands of acres to tribes and public agencies per agreements dating back to 2001.

After PG&E declared bankruptcy in 2019, Governor Newsom threatened to take over the troubled utility. It was in the end a hollow threat, because he knew that politicians would take the blame for the hard decisions that had to be made (for example, backing off from green energy goals to keep fossil-fuel plants operating). If PG&E had become "Government Gas & Electric", who knows how much larger California's projected $73-billion budget deficit might have become?