The dark side of this is, what if it's not economical at all to service these outlying customers? What if the cost of retrofitting those lines is greater than the total future amortized profit from servicing those customers during wildfire conditions?
I don't think there's a law on the books requiring that everyone have access to electrical service (like there is for, say, USPS service).
Maybe beefy solar setups with battery banks and ability to run off-grid will start becoming the norm there. It is California, after all; it's a great place for solar. Heck, it might easily be cheaper for PG&E to subsidize the installation of these systems vs committing to maintaining all those lines properly in perpetuity.
What if it's not economical at all to service these outlying customers?
This is almost definitely the case. Consider that PG+E just went bankrupt from fire costs. If you split PG+E into two parts, the "safe utility" that served urban areas, and the "risky utility" that served rural areas, the fire costs would almost all go to the "risky utility". If they were allowed to, PG+E would be better off simply dropping every customer more than 60 miles away from San Francisco.
But it just doesn't work that way. PG+E is technically a public company, but the customers they are required to serve and the prices they are allowed to charge are so heavily regulated, it often seems more like it's a complicated extension of the California government.
Pretty much all of California urban areas have fire danger so no area is really "safe". The Santa Rosa and Oakland fires come to mind, along with all of the LA hill blazes that threaten the city most years.
Do they though? If I build a new house in the middle of nowhere, is the utility required to spend tens of millions of dollars to build out new infrastructure to serve just me? My understanding is they aren't.
Without looking up the specific California laws, a typical way such obligations were implemented was to require regulatory approval for discontinuing existing lines. So it’s not symmetric for new versus existing lines.
If you want electricity, you may be required to pay them to extend the infrastructure to your house in the middle of nowhere (at your cost) and then they are required to provide you power and maintain the infrastructure (and assume the liability). If other people begin using the infrastructure within a set period of time, you will receive partial refund for the upfront expense.
> it might easily be cheaper for PG&E to subsidize the installation of these systems vs committing to maintaining all those lines properly in perpetuity.
With how liability works in California, I'd be really curious to see.
Maybe this is just another sign that people should stop building in the wildland urban interface. Not that they will. We as a country feel quite entitled to build in unsafe places.
> The dark side of this is, what if it's not economical at all to service these outlying customers?
PG&E is a regulated regional monopoly with a universal service mandate within it's service area that has huge piles of money to throw at political fights to stop having public power retailers take over some of it's service areas, so it can just suck up the cost of dealing with uneconomical rural customers as the cost of the privilege of being allowed to own profitable urban and suburban customers it is willing to fight for.
I don't think there's a law on the books requiring that everyone have access to electrical service (like there is for, say, USPS service).
Maybe beefy solar setups with battery banks and ability to run off-grid will start becoming the norm there. It is California, after all; it's a great place for solar. Heck, it might easily be cheaper for PG&E to subsidize the installation of these systems vs committing to maintaining all those lines properly in perpetuity.