Yves here. These PG&E pix are scary! This is in San Francisco, where access to equipment ought to be easy. But Wolf seems to be skipping over a point. By buying this shoddy equipment, San Francisco is also presumably paying a premium to step in as the electrical provider. What is that worth? It may not justify this much of a premium over the asset value, but having an existing grid does have value, particularly given cost of trying to build de novo.
By Wolf Richter, publisher of Wolf Street. Originally published at Wolf Street
This – the offer made on Sunday – has been kicked around in San Francisco since the catastrophic wildfire in Butte County in Northern California last year that killed 85 people, the cause of which was determined to have been PG&E’s electrical transmission lines – how they’ve not been maintained, including not removing vegetation near them. PG&E is infamous for skimping on maintenance and investment to maximize “shareholder value.” PG&E filed for bankruptcy in January, and its shares have collapsed by about 84% over the past two years, a good example of the results of maximizing “shareholder value.”
On Sunday, the City announced a plan to bid for PG&E’s “assets” in San Francisco for $2.5 billion. These “assets” are poles, power lines, transformers, and other electrical equipment, some of it under ground, some of it above ground, infamously maintained in the manner of PG&E, including this power pole and transformer a few feet from our balcony:
This pole is just an example. Note how the pole is completely rotten, how old the transformer is, and the insulators, and the wires. The pole was placed over 100 years ago, the transformer decades ago. I’ll show some additional stunning details in a moment. These types of power poles are all over San Francisco.
As you can tell from the pole, there is no competition in the power transmission business. This is the only set of wires to the building. It’s the same all across the country. Whoever owns the wires has a total monopoly. In the transmission business, there is no free market – so forget relying on the “market” to fix this issue. All the market wants from PG&E is dividends and a high share price, which translate into cost cuts, shitty maintenance, and inadequate investment.
The city of San Francisco would buy the power from power generators, including PG&E, which is also buying power from other power generators. There is actual competition among power generators with something like a real market, including market manipulation.
The $2.5 billion purchase price would be funded by a revenue bond issue. Last November, voters approved Proposition A that authorized San Francisco’s public utilities commission to issue bonds for the purpose of acquiring PG&E’s power equipment in San Francisco. “Funding secured,” as Elon Musk would say.
PG&E is headquartered in San Francisco, but it no longer has a lot of friends here. Power outages, sometimes lasting for hours, are fairly common. I have never lived in a city where they were as common as those I have experienced in San Francisco. Some of the outages are planned and come with advance notice. Others are surprise outages because of equipment failure of some sort. I have bought extra equipment to deal with them because I can’t just shut my business down. So there is no love lost.
PG&E also provides gas in San Francisco, and this would continue.
PG&E’s 30-inch gas pipeline in San Bruno, a town near San Francisco International Airport, exploded in 2010, killing eight people and incinerating the neighborhood. A federal investigation found that the pipeline, installed in 1956, had many defective welds; but as demand grew, PG&E increased the gas pressure to force more gas through the pipeline, rather than putting a modern gas pipeline into the ground. And there were numerous other shortcomings and revelations. Shareholder value had priority.
In 2017, a federal judge convicted PG&E on six criminal charges related to the gas pipeline explosion and imposed the maximum fine of $3 million, a barely audible slap on the wrist. No one went to jail, obviously, not even the regulators that had been in bed with PG&E. But it turned PG&E into a convicted felon, for whatever that’s worth.
So, where I sit, in my WOLF STREET media mogul empire, headquartered in San Francisco, electricity service cannot get a lot worse, in terms of price and reliability, but it can get a lot better. Ultimately, the City is responsible to local voters. PG&E is responsible to its bondholders and shareholders. Those are very different priorities, from my point of view.
But is San Francisco Overpaying for Dilapidated Outdated Equipment?
Here are more photos of the utility pole out front of our global corporate headquarters. There are many of these poles around. What I want to show is just how old this thing is.
There are wooden protectors still on the pole. In modern times, protectors are made of other materials, such as plastics. But these are wooden half-pipes along the pole, put over cables to protect them. There are two types of these wooden protectors on the pole, a large one for a big cable and a small one for a small cable.
These photos show further how PG&E has handled its maintenance (“what maintenance?”) and how it has invested in its equipment. This is the same pole, seen from the bottom up. Follow the red arrows to the large wooden protector half-pipes:
The photo below shows the same wooden half-pipes a little further down the pole:
In the photo below, follow the red arrows to the small wooden half-pipe:
The photo blow shows the whole rickety top. Note the large wooden half-pipe along the right side of the pole:
The question here: Is San Francisco paying too much for “assets” that will then turn out to be “liabilities” instead, namely accidents waiting to happen due to PG&E’s run-down equipment and negligent maintenance? Who is going to be toast when the ancient transformer blows up that is eight feet from our balcony? And how much would the City have to pay for this toast?
Separating out San Francisco’s electric infrastructure, for a population of about 880,000, is not going to be another fatal blow for PG&E, given that it serves about 16 million customers in much of California. But it would be a blow.
There are discussions under way at the state level to split up PG&E into smaller electric utilities and selling them to the various cities. And there are discussions underway to split the gas and electric utilities.
PG&E, has long had regulators in its pocket, as numerous investigations and scandals have shown, including the investigation into the San Bruno pipeline explosion.
California also forced ratepayers to bail out PG&E after its 2001 bankruptcy via forced above-market rates, which continue to this day, while its bond holders and stockholders were made whole at the time.
Now Californians have lost patience. And dismembering PG&E is a real option. Earlier this year, San Francisco’s public utility commission, in studying the feasibility of purchasing PG&E’s electrical equipment in San Francisco, found that a municipally owned utility could provide lower electricity rates due to lower funding costs in the bond market, and because the municipal utility would be a non-profit and would not have to make Wall Street happy. It might actually focus on its customers, who are voters.
Given the mess we’ve been in with PG&E, just about anything is better than the status quo of a monopoly whose bondholders and shareholders continue to get bailed out by rate payers, and whose rate payers in turn continue to get shafted and even killed by inadequate maintenance and investment. But that $2.5 billion looks like a lot of money for this crappy infrastructure.
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My goodness. It’s almost like asset stripping.
A classic Republican trope on display: Dick Nixon’s “Benign Neglect.”
Given that San Francisco has an international reputation for “progressive” politics, this reversion to good, old fashioned “honest graft” would further degrade the “brand” of supposed American Left Politics.
As someone else, somewhere else typed: “It’s a trap!”
I wonder at the framing of this series of interconnected events. I have yet to see anyone call for another long hallowed option to be deployed: Nationalization.
Have the Pelosis and the Feinsteins invested heavily in California PG&E? That would help explain the move to sell San Francisco all that crappy power infrastructure, those things look like an electrocution waiting to happen. Who wouldn’t prefer to try a different sort of infrastructure – this is a good opportunity. Something decentralized?
nationalization, under what nation? Oh bwhaha. I mean maybe the state of CA could take it, the thing is I suspect they want nothing to do with it, it’s such a losing proposition, rather keep their hands clean.
If the ‘authorities’ can seize money and goods from even suspected drugs vendors, then the same can be done to PG&E under the RICO statute.
Let the investors in PG&E lose their shirts. Classical “free market” capitalism does not guarantee a return on investment for anyone.
Enough of the reign of “Socialism for the rich.” Now it is the turn of the poor.
“Progressive” my foot. The City has almost always been “creative” with facts, laws, and money. There are reasons why the very expensive brand new city hall collapsed in 1906, or the thousands of dead vanished into hundreds. The same same things have been happening since the Americans took over in 1849.
Well, it has has been an ongoing effort for San Francisco for over a fricking century to buy out PG@E and its predecessors, which has been successfully fended off. So after overcharging San Franciscans (and everyone else) since the end of the first Gilded Age and under maintaining the system, it sells at a vastly inflated price during the second Gilded Age!
Again, progressive my fanny. I just wonder who is getting the
bribesdonations and bonuses for this atrocity. The port, the manufacturing, warehouses, the schools, all the small communities intertwined into the city, and the same for the rest of the Bay Area, have gone away,?often under puzzling circumstances; the whole place is now a Banana Republic built over a theme park.I know I sound like I’m on rant. Actually, I am ranting. However, living mostly in the same place for decades makes the changes throughout our country more noticeable. And while I saw sometimes feel like the old man yelling at the kids to get off the lawn, I am not that old. I’m a child of Baby Boomers.
“Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown”
Good morning and greetings from a wet Provence. Whenever I watch Fox, I always hear that “we could end up like socialist France”. As I drove from England last week and saw the investment in infrastructure, including wind and solar power and, just outside Calais, the complex to handle customs and phyto-sanitary inspections, I wonder what what is so bad about “socialist France”. I feel like going to the local mairie and claiming political asylum, especially after the latest Brexit blog. NB the Calais complex is ready. I saw the earth works begin in March.
“I saw the earthworks begin in March.”
I had to laugh. The history of England and France centering on Calais is filled with earthworks construction projects. Then siege engines appear. In a very real sense, exactly that event is happening again.
As for seeking asylum in France; it is, I believe, a tradition for dissident gentlemen to do so. You are a gentleman, and you do see through the ‘surface’ of ‘things’, so, dissidence is almost to be guaranteed.
Be of good cheer.
Thank you, Ambrit.
Off to the Arc trials at Longchamp on Sunday, on the way to Brexitannia.
Wife just recently returned from France post Rallye du Midi, asked to be the Australian ambassador for the event, lovely e-mail received yesterday from a nice Boston lady she attended in her paramedic capacity after a rather big laceration to leg during the comp, and a side trip to Italy.
Even as an Australian she was quite enamored with the experience, rented a car and got off the beaten track, spend a few days in the rugged part of Annecy as a guest of another female rower she met at the comp. Her couple fellow Australian travelers seemed to like the freshly picked mountain mushrooms for the first nights main … chortle … washed down with local slip wine.
Not to mention the frequency of Americans and some other English speakers asking her for directions, thinking she was an English speaking french woman. Not that her Maiden surname is Scottish or anything … chortle … guess I know what I’ve got on my plate for some years to come.
Amends … she who must be obeyed demands I correct the record, its Lac de Sainte Croix at the Gorges du Verdon, albeit did visit the aforementioned.
Speaking of France, why on earth aren’t we going forward with a cold fusion plasma plant? Hello, San Francisco. The construction in France (I think) was estimated to cost 10BnEuro. So 2.5bn dollars could go a long way toward a similar project. Screw PG&E.
Cold fusion?
Are you joking? Or did you just mis-speak and really mean nuclear fusion? The ITER tokamak?
ITER will only produce power for a few minutes as an experiment – there are no commercial fusion reactors and probably never will be unless some new physics is discovered (rather unlikely).
The idea of commercial fusion has always been a giant boondoggle for mega-corporations – going back to before I was a physics grad student in the 80s. The radioactive waste will be just as bad or worse than fission reactors – giant, expensive centralized power which will have to be taken down every other year to replace the reactor walls which will break down from radioactivity. Reactors would have to be the size of a football stadiums to be functional — make fission reactors look cheap. This is a dead end technology – a giveaway to corporations to try to maintain centralized control and profits.
There is only one good, clean fusion technology — we call it the sun – will last for billions of more years — and it is very easy to collect its photons and heat to make electricity.
Oh, sorry. My bad. Ever hopeful here. I thought 10bn sounded so reasonable! Yes, I agree, solar is the best.
So what is France trying to achieve?
GDP reach around – ???? – after bonuses ….
Solar is really bad at handling base loads. And batteries aren’t a great solution. Aside from the use of nasty materials, there is energy loss putting energy into the battery and taking it out.
Nuclear is the best of bad solutions.
And I suspect you mean thorium. One big reason the West preferred uranium nuclear plants is the waste has military uses (not just deplete uranium…). In lay terms, thorium burns all its fuel, so there’s no issue with disposing of radioactive tailings.
The failure to pursue thorium as a replacement for current nuclear is yet another example of collective irresponsibility. Even on a crash basis, it would easily take 20 years to be ready for large scale deployment.
There was an attempt to build alternative kinds of reactors in the 1940s-50s, but the Pentagon was all that lovely leftovers to make bombs. IIRC, some of the safer reactors were built as pilots, but since the military was paying for the research…
It does seem like a high price. But I am curious about how much revenue it generates? Buying a monopoly can often be costly and a monopoly is what is being bought. Is the existing management part of the deal? The existing management is something that in my opinion would reduce the price significantly….
They appear to have done the classic: We’ll save money on maintenance and when the costly repairs comes then it will be someone elses problem as we’ve moved on and the cost will hit another cost-center/department anyway. Similar to how some companies save money by paying low wages and then when recurring costly recruitment is necessary then it will be someone elses problem.
Sadly this kind of natural monopolies seem to attract incompetent managers and it does not seem to matter if it is owned by the public or in private ownership, the safest way of not attracting incompetence is probably to offer less than market wages for management :p
San Francisco should make sure that for 2.5 billion they get PG&E to include retirement of their distribution contract for power from the the City-owned Hetch Hetchy Dam. The people of the City will get cheaper power, and the public utility will get a guaranteed revenue stream.
Electricity rates are determined not by PG&E but by CPUC.
It’s a very complex arrangement with a lot of players.
The unanswered question in so many articles like this is a simple one: could an electric power generation & transmission utility service California without billions of dollars invested by stock & bonds? If so, who pays & how much.
Let’s hear step 2 beyond the “have had enough of PG&E “.
Well, there’s Sacramento Metro Utility District (revenues over a $Billion per year) and the LA Dept. of Water and Power (services about 25% of California rate payers). Both are publicly owned utility providers. So the question has been answered.
As for the CPUC and “complexity”, that is a feature not a bug. Corruption loves a complex, dark, room. (Don’t be fooled by the “public” meetings.)
The ratepayers at SMUD know exactly who pays and how much; it’s less than PG&E ratepayers.
(Full Disclosure: I’m a former PG&E rate payer.)
Step 2 is to have the State of California seize the assets of PG&E. Next, dissolve PG&E claiming that they violate RICO rules. Finally, let the State, through an expanded Public Service Commission run the electric generation and distribution system. The State can float bonds backed by the revenue stream, exactly as do the private utilities now.
The basic difference between the public and private sectors here is that the private sector has scant regard for the rate payers. Their investors get first consideration in all decision making. The public sphere, while possibly no less corrupt, at least has the rate payers, in their capacity as voters, to placate. Just keep any representatives of the major bond investors off of the Public Utilities board and the system might just work. As it is now, with the example of Enron’s manipulation of the energy system out West of recent memory, the public is ready for a change.
Something very like the Trust busting crusades of a century ago is in the offing. Similar conditions to back then are in play today.
Greed is never vanquished for long. To paraphrase an as for now unknown ancient speaker: “The price of affordable utilities is eternal vigilance.”
San Francisco will only be purchasing the right of way they gave to PG&E. That plant is junk and will require complete replacement. You can’t fix junk. They should condemn it (blight?) and seize it.
My power company can’t seem to keep the lights on either, after a storm a few weeks ago 50% of their customers were without power, me included. Most people around here have generators which the damn power company should be paying for since they aren’t doing the job they are supposed to do.
PG&E makes my power company look good however. That is some really ugly plant and equipment!
This whole thing is especially comical when the fossil fools drag out the “but the sun doesn’t always shine !” argument.
Yeah well the conservative/neolib monkey-wrenching of our society had made us live with intermittancy anyway so how the (family blog) is that even an argument at this point?
Looks like the pole at the house I rent. The only repair has been driving a steel sleeve down along side of it to keep it from falling over. Then when they came to install new service to the house the top was so rotten the employee had to move the wires down lower.
In cases like that the pole isn’t holding the wires up, it’s the opposite.
Why not just seize PG&E’s entire apparatus under civil forfeiture law, state commercial law or federal RICO?
(Stockholders lose all value, and executives lose everything to clawbacks and seizure of all property funded with PG&E salaries and bonuses.)
What’s the difference between a drug cartel and PG&E? Other than the legality of the product? Both supply a wanted commodity, both have conspiratorial management breaking the law and killing people. If corporations have all the rights of people, then they should suffer the federal death penalty after a certain number of crimes.
p.s. Why have no PG&E executives been prosecuted and imprisoned? We know about Kamala’s incompetence as Attorney General,
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/09/while-pge-played-cat-and-mouse-game-with-california-regulators-where-was-kamala.html
but what about local or federal authorities?
Complete agreement with your points.
(Can a State government be said to have the right of nationalization?)
When he was a San Francisco Supervisor, Governor Newsom was in the Bay Guardian’s “Hall of Shame” as a PG&E-controlled politician for his dealings with them, but maybe the money has dried up now that they are on hard times.
To be more specific, Newsom was placed in the “Hall of Shame” in 1998 for pushing PG&E’s position on proposition 9 — a statewide measure to repeal portions of California’s energy deregulation law — in the timeline I linked to below.
Like ambrit, also in complete agreement, except for “Kamala’s incompetence.” I think she would have been competent to do her job; she just didn’t want to.
Well decaying infrastructure like this is largely WHY they want to purchase this. If PG&E had been maintaining SF wouldn’t be as interested in purchasing it. Now I have NO way of judging whether the price being suggested is reasonable, or even within an order of magnitude of reasonable. There is a LOT of infrastructure here and I don’t have any idea of whether the photos are typical, or worst cases. And of course cash strapped local governments are also prone to deferring maintenance.
You do wonder if by taking a slice of those old poles, that by using dendrochronology that it might be able to be determined when the tree that was used for this pole was felled and thus how old those poles really are. I bet some go back a century or more.
Until PG&E executives start going to jail for their crimes, nothing will really change. And by jail I do not mean country club jail but the jails that have inmates that weigh 250 pounds and spend their entire day working out with weights and have names like Casper. That sort of jail.
I suppose the plan for PG&E is to let California take over the whole electrical grid, spend tens of billions bringing it up to spec and upgrading the whole network, and then getting California’s politicians to once more privatize the whole grid for knock-down prices to PG&E 2.0
Why bother? I’m not just being flip here, that’s a serious question. Using “years in service” as a proxy for “fitness for purpose” is obviously flawed.
I’m totally cool with annual inspections, including tech inspections that might indicate failures the naked eye won’t catch. But it’s bizarre to claim that just because it’s old it’s necessarily broken.
The entire area burned in the 1906 earthquake caused fire, so it’s newer than that.
It’s also near the water, so there’s a lot of salt to cause the rust.
Nevertheless, that pole is really old and shamefully dilapidated.
Wonder how they are maintaining their nuclear reactors at Diablo Canyon, which are scheduled for shutdown in six years?
“Maintaining?” What’s that? :-)
Seriously, I am pretty sure that any shortcuts that can be done without having an instant meltdown have been thought on and quite possibly done. If they had been serious about safety, they would not have built in near an earthquake fault. Although honestly, the entire state is riddled with them, some of which we still haven’t found yet.
While not a big fan of PG&E is the infrastructure maintained by LADWP(the municipal utility that serves Los Angeles) significantly better? Generally I have noticed not living in California that their is a lot of above ground poor maintained power lines even in major cities relative to let’s say Boston or New York. It seems perhaps the real precedent was set by San Diego has whose residents are paying an extra surcharge to a different “private” California utility SDG&E or also called Sempra(of which one of their top executives is related to former CA Gov Jerry Brown) to underground the entire cities overground electrical infrastructure over the next few decades. It seems as if this is what PG&E “really” wants to properly maintain their infrastructure.
Another California investor-owned utility, SCE, nearly burned my old house down twice.
The first time was when a powerline blew against a tree during a windstorm, touching off the big Round Valley fire. After we got the valuables out to houses of friends, we went home to wait for evacuation with the cats, but at midnight it began to rain, and we were saved.
A couple years later, my roommate heard the transformer down the street explode. Since she is an ex-wildland firefighter, she took off down the street with her shovel in hand, and put it out. The house of our neighbor down the street had a power surge that filled his house with black smoke as a result of the same incident. If not for my roommate, all 50 houses in our arid rural area would have been on fire before the firefighters could have stopped it.
I suspect that for a common regulatory approach to investor-owned utilities by the CPUC, we are getting the same result from all of them.
I live a few miles from San Bruno and a transformer on our block blew last year. I don’t know how much more utility mayhem my nerves can take.
So sorry for what you went through and so impressed with your kick-ass roommate!!
Those multi-colored (blue, green, clear) glass insulators aren’t even rated for power distribution, they are for telegraph lines. This dates those poles back to the 40’s at least.
Glass insulators can appear “blue” or “green” depending on the span of time exposed to the weather and the chemical makeup of the glass. Often, telegraph wire insulators were not color coded. The wires in the photo may be telephone wires (invented by A.G. Bell in the 1870’s). In any case, utility poles carry all manner of wire, including cable TV. The technicians know what goes where (at least regionally).
This does not apply to glass insulators that ARE colored white, brown, or black intentionally.
When was the last time they were produced? They are telegraph/telephone line insulators. Given that there doesn’t appear to be any ‘new’ secondary wires from the transformer, they seem to be used for the secondary.
Where are telegraph insulators allowed to be used for electrical distribution?
The comms are clearly visible as newer fiber optic lines, WAY below what appears to be the electrical rats nest level
Eh. This specific bit of distribution line near a residence isn’t surprising. Most distribution (the stuff in our backyards, neighborhoods) is that same vintage as the time it was developed. Utilities will sometimes have a preverse incentive to keep old infrastructure in place until it is broken or destroyed (act of God does a lot of work for them) in order to maximize the return on assets and delay the capital expense of replacing poles/transformers. Although unsightly, the photos above are not unusual as the electric system in San Francisco is quite commensurate with its early development and redevelopment after natural disasters.
So, arguably PG&E have engaged in asset stripping for many years, and as a result have driven themselves into bankruptcy. Their negligence appears to be legion.
Why not take their infrastructure by eminent domain? Yes, eminent domain the most potent weapon in the public arsenal. Ignored, suppressed and forgotten in the virulent smog of neoliberal lawfare. If their infrastructure is CALPERS, then demonstrate it in court and pay them the $1 that all this crap is worth.
There have been repeated efforts to have public power in San Francisco.
The last time, in 2002, the ballot measure lost by 353 votes. Ballot box lids began washing up on the shore shortly afterward.
It happened while Willie Brown, the great California political fixer, was mayor. The NC article earlier this week on Kamala Harris — a Brown protege — missing the boat on PG&E oversight was exactly right.
Sorry, it was the 2001 election.
PG&E has a long history of owning politicians in San Francisco. It has to, to gain access to electricity generated by Hetch Hetchy Dam, which is owned by the city. The utility gets to sell and distribute the power through janky sales agreements with the City — a high maintenance piece of work for city politicians and PG&E execs.
The old Bay Guardian did great work on the issue, and has a great timeline archived here.
Very odd omission here, especially given Richter’s line of work: what is an electric utility serving nearly a million people, in a very prosperous market, worth? There must be comparables all over the country. Then you find an estimate for what it will cost to bring the maintenance up to date, and deduct that. Then you have a good idea what it’s worth. Personally, I have no clue. $2.5 billion sounds like a lot, but it might be heavily discounted. After all, it’s a fire sale. Literally.
Did the city of San Francisco run that kind of valuation? I assume they’d be subject to lawsuits for misfeasance if they didn’t. What is the basis for the sum they’re offering? As Yves says, just having a network in place and operating is worth a great deal; replacing poles is standard, ongoing maintenance for electric utilities. That makes the failure to do so more damning; but it also means the new owner(s) can easily figure about what it’s going to cost. Doing so will be a shot in the arm for the area’s workers, though they may have to be bussed in from the back of beyond.
Would it have been $4 billion with decent maintenance? There goes your shareholder value – a point Richter fails to make. Oh, and come to think: are the shareholders suing the past and present management for endangering the assets? They should.
A privately-owned water utility in Hingham, Massachusetts that serves 12,700 will be acquired by the Town for $114 million, in a process that has taken seven years since it was authorized by Town Meeting.
https://www.patriotledger.com/news/20190423/after-landslide-vote-hingham-begins-water-company-takeover
just guessing, but factor in the cost/value for a metropolitan right-of-way and see how it rates
1) wow. Just wow.
2) they really ought to be ashamed of themselves. Instead, they’re filthy stinking rich.
RE:
Here Are Photos of Some of the Dilapidated Equipment San Francisco Wants to Buy from Bankrupt PG&E for $2.5 Billion.
I really never realized how lucky I was to grow up in BOSTON; I have seen
some junky stuff there but never like the yahoo mountain dew in the
junk sanfrancisco pearl of the west!!
And they’ll tell you the property around it is worth trillions.
If San Francisco is considered to be offering to buy back its own Electricity Sovereignty from PG&E; perhaps the price to be paid could be considered a ransom paid to the “kidnapper” PG&E as the price for getting S F’s “kidnapped” Electricity Sovereignty back?