We had almost 4K worth of food spoil due to the outage. We don’t have a generator and PG&E never told us they were shutting off power to our house (we were supposed to get flyer in the mail but it never came). I’ll be sending the bill to PG&E and will pursue litigation if not refunded.

It looks like this will happen again and again because PG&E has neglected the maintenance of the lines in order to give the executives huge bonuses and wine and dine them at expensive Napa wineries. So I have a better idea. Start with eliminating the connection fee to PG&E when you have solar. This is $10 a month that is only there to punish people with solar and give more money to PG&E. Next offer a big rebate on residential and business solar with batteries (without batteries means you lose power during an outage the same as anyone without solar). Also offer a big rebate on batteries added to existing solar. Finally with with cities to eliminate permit fees for Solar and battery installation. All these will have the affect of getting residents away from their dependency on PG&E electricity. It won't help PG&E but since they don't really help customers or care about Californians should we care about them?

I’m in Woodside and lost power last week. The winds gusted at 4 MPH!

I’m not interested in a $100 rebate. What I am interested is having PG&E invest in making a ROBUST grid so that this sort of crap doesn’t happen again.

Also, ignore the environmental lobbyists and do what’s necessary to clear out the tinder near your power lines.

> Also, ignore the environmental lobbyists and do what’s necessary to clear out the tinder

It's some mythical environmental lobbyist's fault that PG&E didn't perform agreed upon and common sense maintenance?

Whoah boy. The koolaid is strong with this one.

Please correct me if misunderstand this situation. P.G.& E. is a private corporation with stockholder/investors.
Which is to say that PG&E is in the business of making profits. Providing service is secondary.

Since they are a monopoly, they control everything; the quality and the quantity of service, or the lack thereof,and what they spend and can charge their customers. In other words, they don't function as a public utility that is government regulated and controlled. They appear to have no oversight or accountability about their financials and so, to make more money, they don't spend it on maintenance or upgrades.

What, I believe, the State government must do is to terminate the current administrative/management structure (that is, fire the entire management team) and replace it with a genuinely public and government supervised organization that is held accountable to both taxpayers and customers, not stockholders.

@Martin Engel: Yeah---kind of like the DMV. Great idea! Maybe first go after the PUC and put some people there who have some brains, aren't the lap dogs of the Governor and PG&E, and can actually make decisions for the constituents/customers of PG&E and the citizens of CA. But, please, don't turn PG&E over to the government to run. If you think CA electricity is expensive and unreliable now, just wait!

> If you think CA electricity is expensive and unreliable now, just wait!

Yes - give it to an Enron style for-profit company!

Well the problem is the government in California helped make PG&E a monopoly. They made it illegal for anyone but PG&E to sale electricity. They are also regulated a lot. The big problem is there is no competition and we need other companies to arise but california hates energy companies. They over regulate everything to make it impossoble for another company to come in to replace PG&E.
Now the state government is using this as an opportinity to gain more power and control over our lives.