PG&E, Climate Change and the Sustainable Path Forward

By Anders Ferguson

The failure of Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) to provide power safely to Northern California has been a human and economic nightmare, while highlighting the ineffective regulatory oversight of the investor-owned utility.

But as tragic as this has been, the fallout has created new momentum for a safer, greener era of power generation and distribution in the Golden State and potentially elsewhere.

The Path Forward

In our view, the path forward is predicated on two key ideas inspired by innovation and technology:

• Adopting new models of ownership and governance for regulated electric utilities that move away from monopolies like PG&E and embrace community-owned utilities;
• Rapid deployment of renewable energy and utility-scale storage technology to reduce reliance on the grid and promote the widespread adoption of solar energy.

The good news is that both ideas can be committed to today. They can be implemented step by step over the next 20 years – not sometime in the distant future. Thanks to progressive thinking and the billions of private and public dollars ready to be deployed, we can create our own future and not be condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past.

For impact investors, there will be new opportunities to put capital to work in solutions that will re-engineer the paradigm that has defined energy production and distribution for more than a century.