Catching the California Utility Serial Killer

It’s time to call a spade a spade. Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) has been a serial killer, hiding behind corporate jargon and legal loopholes while its negligence ignites California like a matchbook doused in gasoline.

PG&E has caused catastrophic wildfires, decimated entire towns, and taken many innocent lives. The death toll continues to rise, and the excuses are wearing thin. The public deserves accountability and a plan of action that doesn’t rely on the failed strategies of the past.

The Root Cause: Negligence and greed

The fires aren’t a matter of bad luck or unfortunate weather patterns. They are the predictable result of a company that prioritizes shareholder profits over public safety. PG&E’s infrastructure is a relic of a bygone era, held together with duct tape and good intentions.

Transmission lines that should have been replaced years ago remain in service, frayed and brittle, poised to spark at the slightest provocation. It's an engineering time bomb that has already gone off, multiple times.

How does a company with such a tragic record continue to operate? well, PG&E has mastered the art of avoiding real consequences. They file for bankruptcy, they settle lawsuits, and they fund PR campaigns. But they don’t fix the underlying issues because doing so would mean cutting into their profit margins.

How to fix it

Step 1: Decentralize Power Generation

Relying on a single utility to manage power for millions of Californians is an outdated and dangerous model. The future is decentralized energy. The solution lies in community microgrids, rooftop solar, and battery storage.

These systems can operate independently from the main grid, reducing the risk of massive fires caused by high-voltage transmission lines. When power is generated closer to the point of use, there’s less need for miles of aging cables slicing through the wilderness.

Take the town of Paradise, destroyed by the Camp Fire sparked by PG&E. Now, residents are installing solar panels and batteries, taking power generation into their own hands. People no longer trust PG&E to keep them safe, so they are building their own infrastructure and we should too.

Step 2: Mandate Hardening of Critical Infrastructure

PG&E’s infrastructure needs a complete overhaul. The company needs to bury transmission lines in high-risk areas, replace ancient wooden poles with fire-resistant ones, and implement intelligent, real-time monitoring systems to detect faults before they ignite fires. This is standard practice in countries with modern utilities but PG&E claims it’s too expensive.

Too expensive? Tell that to the families who lost loved ones. Tell that to the towns reduced to ash. The cost of doing nothing is infinitely higher than the cost of modernizing the grid. State and federal regulators must force PG&E to adopt these changes, and if they refuse, it’s time to revoke their license to operate. Enough is enough.

Step 3: Establish True Accountability

PG&E executives have escaped justice for too long. They treat felony charges like a temporary inconvenience, a PR hiccup to be smoothed over with a few billion dollars in settlements. But settlements don’t bring back lives. Settlements don’t restore the natural landscape. And settlements don't save the lives of customers they will inevitably fail again. It’s time for real accountability, criminal accountability. Executives who knowingly prioritize profits over safety should face prison time, not golden parachutes.

There’s precedent for this. In the 1980s, the heads of Union Carbide faced charges after the Bhopal disaster in India. When negligence leads to death, it’s called manslaughter, and it’s time we started applying the same standard to corporate decision-makers.

Step 4: Empower Local Communities

The state’s centralized approach has failed. Local communities must be empowered to take control of their own energy needs and fire prevention strategies. This means loosening regulations around microgrids and local energy cooperatives. It means incentivizing home hardening, brush clearing, and creating defensible space around properties. It means giving people the tools to protect themselves when PG&E fails to do so.

Communities have proven that they can be more agile, more innovative, and more committed to safety than a bloated monopoly. Look at Marin County, where local agencies have implemented aggressive wildfire prevention measures independently of PG&E. They’ve cut fire risk without waiting for the utility’s blessing.

The Bottom Line

PG&E has demonstrated, time and again, that it cannot be trusted to prioritize public safety. If we want to stop them from killing more people, we need to overhaul the system from the ground up. It’s time to decentralize power generation, harden our infrastructure, hold executives criminally accountable, and empower local communities.

We know what needs to be done. The question is whether we have the will to do it. We cannot afford to wait for another fire season, another destroyed town, another list of victims whose deaths could have been prevented. The time for action is now.