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California’s Governor Gavin Newsom is starting to sound disturbingly more and more like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. (More on that in a moment.) As we recently discussed, Pacific Gas & Electric has continued to impose rounds of blackouts across “red flag” areas of the state under warnings of high winds and possible wildfires. This has many residents feeling rather angry and demanding that something is done. To the rescue rides Governor Newsom. He doesn’t want the aging power lines to cause any more fires but he also doesn’t want his voters upset over having their power cut off.What...

Shares of PG&E Corp. plummeted on heavy volume to a record low Friday, after Citigroup warned that the latest California wildfire, which the utility may have helped start, could render them worthless. PG&E PCG-28.5% said Friday that it filed an incident report with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) regarding the “Kincade” fire, which broke out near Geyserville in Sonoma County.

Calls to transition the troubled Pacific Gas and Electric Co. into a public utility intensified Sunday, as nearly 1 million customers lost power throughout California and the Kincade Fire blazed through Sonoma County. A day earlier, Gov. Gavin Newsom told Bloomberg he would encourage Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway to make a bid for PG&E. “We would love to see that interest materialize, in a more proactive, public effort,” he said Saturday. Berkshire Hathaway’s energy subsidiary is heavily invested in the utility business, in California and elsewhere. It owns multiple solar farms, including a 550-megawatt facility in San Luis Obispo County...

Tweet from Governor Newsom’s office:You didn’t expect him to call them blackouts did you? Or brownouts?Response was immediate. Even from normally like-minded allies. Tweet from Seth Mandel of the Washington Examiner: Power to the People! Except of course in states that spend all of your money on electric trains to nowhere, subsidies for wind, solar and electric car (that run on, duh, electricity) companies instead of proper oversight of your Public Service Commission that is supposed to be providing oversight of the state’s public utility companies. In case I’m unclear: oversight would include verifying that the monopolistic companies are providing...

After again shutting power to hundreds of thousands this week, California’s utility PG&E disclosed Thursday that it had discovered a broken jumper cable by the ignition site of a wildfire blazing across Sonoma County. The company has warned of more blackouts this weekend and perhaps for the next decade as it refurbishes its aging grid. Gov. Gavin Newsom is trying to deflect political blame. “It’s about dog-eat-dog capitalism meeting climate change. It’s about corporate greed meeting climate change. It’s about decades of mismanagement,” Mr. Newsom declared. But Democrats for years have treated PG&E as their de facto political subsidiary. The...

This weekend’s planned power outages could be the largest yet in California, as utilities such as Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison order wide blackouts to prevent more blazes — and more wildfire liability — amid heavy, hot winds. PG&E, which has 5.4 million electric customers and provides power to 16 million Californians, was projecting Thursday that it could shut off power across nearly all of its territory in Northern California on Sunday and Monday because of ferocious gusts. “This system will likely be the strongest event of the year from a wind perspective,” the utility said on...

Another PG&E worker was targeted in an attempted attack as the utility company continued its forced power outage in northern California on Wednesday, officials said. The worker’s front passenger seat window was reportedly shot at by a projectile. The employee was not injured in the incident and the projectile was believed to be fired by a pellet gun. Another worker was also reportedly shot at during the Oct. 9 outages while traveling in a utility truck. A vehicle pulled up next to the PG&E truck and shattered the employee’s passenger side window with a bullet, SFGate reports. The driver was...

SAN FRANCISCO—Californians are facing a potential second round of pre-emptive power outages, with the state’s largest utility working to prevent its equipment from sparking wildfires as hot, gusty winds are forecast later this week. PG&E Corp. said Monday it might cut electricity to parts of 16 counties in the Sierra Foothills and north of San Francisco. About 200,000 households and businesses were notified that they might lose power starting late Wednesday, the bankrupt utility said. At a press conference, PG&E Chief Executive Bill Johnson said shutting off power to hundreds of thousands of customers again might be necessary, given how...

Frustrated by PG&E Corp. PCG 3.61% ’s California blackouts and its existing options for exiting bankruptcy, the mayor of the state’s third-biggest city is proposing something radically different: turn the company into the nation’s largest customer-owned utility. San Jose hopes to persuade other California cities and counties in coming weeks to line up behind the plan, which would strip PG&E of its status as an investor-owned company and turn it into a nonprofit electric-and-gas cooperative, Mayor Sam Liccardo said in an interview. SNIP

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Pacific Gas & Electric Company is considering potential power shutoffs this week for portions of 17 counties, citing strong winds as the reason, the company said Sunday evening. Extreme weather conditions and dry fuels projected to last about 18 to 24 hours on Oct. 23 and 24 may cause a Public Safety Power Shutoff to counties across Northern and Central California, according to PG&E.

The blackouts imposed by Pacific Gas & Electric Co. in mid-October affected hundreds of thousands of residents throughout California, causing agricultural operations to come to a virtual standstill in some areas while costing the state’s overall economy as much as $2.6 billion, according to some estimates. It also fueled a valuable conversation about the condition of our forests and the apparent lack of preparedness among our government agencies and utilities.

PG&E Corp.’s chief executive said Friday that it could take as long as 10 years for the company to improve its electric system enough to significantly diminish the need to pull the plug on customers to reduce the risk of sparking fires. Bill Johnson, who joined the company in May, made the disclosure at a California Public Utilities Commission hearing where the panel’s president, Marybel Batjer, sharply criticized the company’s “inadequate execution” of a shut-off in which it turned off power to large portions of Northern California for more than two days last week. The commission convened an emergency meeting...

Going solar isn’t necessarily any protection from California’s new “planned” power outages, and local residents and businesses are enduring a lot more than just a few inconveniences. Bloomberg’s Chris Martin has a story on California’s troubles with one of my favorite headlines ever: “Californians Learning That Solar Panels Don't Work in Blackouts.” Apparently, many of California’s would-be Earth-savers had no idea that just putting solar panels on their roofs doesn’t mean they’ll have power when PG&E switches it off. As Martin explains:

Earlier this month, nearly 2 million Californians were hurt by a “planned” power shutoff by Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), a private utility company. The shutoff was part of a botched wildfire management strategy to prevent transmission lines neglected by the company for years from catching fire. Customers received only 24 hours’ notice for a shutoff that lasted up to four days, during which grocery stores sat empty, cleared of basic supplies, and schools were closed. The residents of Paradise, California, displaced just one year ago by massive fires that destroyed their town and killed dozens, found themselves without electricity...

One valuable lesson has been learned from the California blackouts concerning the greens' vaunted solar power. People with solar panels fitted to their homes have long acted under the impression that these granted them some immunity to blackouts. They now know better. Those who went to the heavy expense of purchasing and installing solar panels are in the same situation as their neighbors: no light, no heat, no power. How does this make sense? If you've got a system that generates power all by itself, with no outside aid or assistance necessary, then it's a sure thing that it'll continue...

... California residents have come face-to-face with an uncomfortable new reality: Large swaths of the state—by itself the fifth-largest economy in the world, and home to the globe’s most technologically advanced companies—may be subject to the sort of abrupt blackouts normally associated with underdeveloped countries. The state’s three big investor-owned utilities now have regulatory permission to cut off power to parts of their service territories during strong winds to reduce the risk of their electric lines causing wildfires, after at least 21 blazes linked to utility equipment killed more than 100 people and burned tens of thousands of homes in...

Hours after electricity was restored Saturday to all Bay Area PG&E customers, officials with the utility said their crews had located at least 50 instances of weather-related damage to power equipment within outage zones, including 13 in the North Bay — about half of them in Sonoma County. Another 100 or so cases around the greater Bay Area and the Sierra Nevada foothills were still being evaluated Saturday but are suspected of resulting from the same gusting winds that prompted the utility to shut off power to about 800,000 customers Wednesday in a controversial effort to prevent catastrophic wildfires. Power...

AN FRANCISCO — It was a problem that California had come to dread. Weather models were signaling extreme winds and dry conditions from one end of the state to the other. The risk of wildfires was high. Pacific Gas & Electric, the giant utility whose power lines and transformers have been blamed for a series of disastrous wildfires in recent years, was determined to prevent another one. Just before last weekend, the company informed state officials that it might shut off power to a large area of Northern California, potentially leaving millions of people in the dark — something no...

Pacific Gas & Electric Company shareholders are facing the possibility of a worst-case scenario -- the value of their holdings getting completely wiped out -- after a federal bankruptcy judge’s ruling.