The trouble with PG&E is that it's trying to serve two incompatible goals.
The shareholders want it to provide electric service for a profit in the locales where doing so is economically sensible (= urban/suburban), slowly grow its value, and throw off a stable stream of dividends. This is the basic value proposition of all for-profit utilities: low growth, low volatility, stable income.
The state government -- and a not insubstantial proportion of the state population -- want PG&E to be a non-profit that provides electricity at cost to everyone in its coverage area, which is to include huge swaths of forest-covered hillsides and dry rural scrubland. Every time it gets mentioned on HN (not exactly a hotbed of communism!) there's a bunch of comments about how it should be illegal for an electric utility to have any profit at all.
PG&E can't have it both ways. It hasn't paid a non-trivial dividend since 2017 and its share price is ~half of what it was 20 years ago, which makes it an astonishingly poor investment -- compare to Southern Company (SO) or Duke Energy (DUK). But at the same time it is legally mandated to absorb the costs of operating high-voltage lines in brushfire territory, and half its customers think it shouldn't be allowed to exist.
The shareholders want it to provide electric service for a profit in the locales where doing so is economically sensible (= urban/suburban), slowly grow its value, and throw off a stable stream of dividends. This is the basic value proposition of all for-profit utilities: low growth, low volatility, stable income.
The state government -- and a not insubstantial proportion of the state population -- want PG&E to be a non-profit that provides electricity at cost to everyone in its coverage area, which is to include huge swaths of forest-covered hillsides and dry rural scrubland. Every time it gets mentioned on HN (not exactly a hotbed of communism!) there's a bunch of comments about how it should be illegal for an electric utility to have any profit at all.
PG&E can't have it both ways. It hasn't paid a non-trivial dividend since 2017 and its share price is ~half of what it was 20 years ago, which makes it an astonishingly poor investment -- compare to Southern Company (SO) or Duke Energy (DUK). But at the same time it is legally mandated to absorb the costs of operating high-voltage lines in brushfire territory, and half its customers think it shouldn't be allowed to exist.