The Pacific Gas & Electric Company, California’s largest utility, is setting aside $13.5 billion in a fund for victims of wildfires sparked by its electric lines and equipment.
The San Francisco-based utility is creating the fund as part of a massive restructuring plan as it navigates bankruptcy proceedings, according to Bloomberg. The power company is in the middle of the largest bankruptcy by a public utility in United States history.
State investigators have found PG&E responsible for numerous fires in the past three years, including the 2018 Camp fire that killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise.
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom has threatened a government takeover of the company if it fails to put forward a workable reorganization plan. Newsom has alleged that it failed to conduct routine maintenance and upgrades on its power lines out of “corporate greed.”
“As it relates to PG&E, it’s about dog-eats-dog capitalism meeting climate change,” Newsom said at an October press conference. “It’s about corporate greed meeting climate change. It’s about decades of mismanagement. It’s about focusing on shareholders and dividends over you and members of the public.”
Newsom has accepted roughly $700,000 in donations from PG&E, its foundation, and its employees on behalf of his political campaigns and initiatives, according to the Washington Post.
In an effort to minimize further wildfire risk, PG&E has begun cutting off power to hundreds of thousands of Californians at risk of a wildfire. The blackouts and plague of destructive wildfires have pushed some in California to question whether it has pursued climate change mitigation policies too far, too fast.
