Newsom: PG&E should pay $100 to shutoff sufferers

California Gov. Gavin Newsom wants PG&E to give $100 to each of the hundreds of thousands of customers who experienced blackouts last week when the company shut off power to swaths of Northern California.

“Californians should not pay the price for decades of PG&E’s greed and neglect,” Newsom announced on Monday. “PG&E’s mismanagement of the power shutoffs experienced last week was unacceptable. We will continue to hold PG&E accountable to make radical changes — prioritizing the safety of Californians and modernizing its equipment.”

In a letter to the state’s Public Utilities Commission on Monday, Newsom confirmed that the state would launch an investigation into PG&E’s decision to shut off power and its implementation of the outages that left an estimated 2 million residents and 800,000 customers without electricity.

The commission’s president, Marybel Batjer, announced later in the day that the PUC will hear from PG&E executives in an “emergency meeting” in San Francisco on Friday about lessons learned from the shutoffs. The company must submit an internal review to her by Thursday.

PG&E cut power to customers last week as a precautionary measure meant to prevent wildfires. The company’s equipment caused deadly fires in 2017 and 2018, and PG&E faces billions of dollars in liabilities related to the damage.

Batjer sent PG&E a letter Monday afternoon outlining seven “corrective actions” following the blackouts. The utilities commission wants PG&E to restore power to customers within 12 hours, improve its website so it doesn’t crash at critical times when customers are looking for information and offer better communication structures for future interactions with local governments.

“Failures in execution, combined with the magnitude of this Public Safety Power Shutoff event, created an unacceptable situation that should never be repeated,” Batjer wrote.

PG&E must send the commission weekly updates until all the feedback is implemented, according to Batjer.

In a statement, PG&E CEO Bill Johnson did not discuss whether customers would get a rebate. He, instead, acknowledged the company’s shortcomings in dealing with an “unprecedented event”

“We know there are areas where we fell short of our commitment to serving our customers during this unprecedented event, both in our operations and in our customer communications, and we look forward to learning from these agencies how we can improve,” Johnson wrote.

Still, Johnson called the shutoffs “the right decision.”