OT (PGE) Hi GV,
I think a certain amount of essential, minimal regulation is fine, however, not regulation on pricing. The current regulation blocks price increases from PG&E, and this in turn blocks a free-market solution from occurring. Here's how:
If you look at the emergency surcharge that was issued to every California household (~$2), this figure is absolutely, in no way, even close to the amount of money that some businesses are probably losing in loss productivity during an outage, (not our company, since we just work later if there's an outage). But what if a business has scheduled hourly employees like some other industry sectors have?
When you calculate the loss in labor costs that the average company could experience during just ONE rolling outage in Silicon Valley (keeping in mind, that SJMN reported a couple of days ago, the average Silicon Valley salary is now $65k per employee), this amount (total payroll for the duration of an outage) could pay for the power of many neighborhoods for a long time.
So, a rolling outage is simply money down the drain for businesses. And that's not an effective free-market solution.
Companies spend money towards productivity. Would a company prefer to throw money purely down the drain - or - towards higher electricity costs for resolution? I think the answer would be obvious.
However, the current regulation appears to block this type of free-market solution from happening.
Regards,
Amy J PS As an INTC shareholder, I'm curious... I don't know if such an insurance policy exists, but does Intel have "outage insurance" to cover any business loss, if a full outage should occur? I understand the larger companies currently are not experiencing full outages because they are voluntarily decreasing their electric usage.
Btw, startups aren't given this option - PGE just cuts us off, without any planned schedule. I checked PGE's website (and ISO's website, who are the folks that control this decision), but there isn't a list of scheduled "Blocks" planned for a rolling outage, as one would expect there to be. |
