My impression was that the California utilities were being operated in revenue extraction mode for decades and prioritized paying shareholders over infrastructure maintenance leading to the crisis situation we are in today. The enormous costs today are due to the need to keep paying owners as well as catching up on the deferred maintenance, and in classic fashion the owners are still gobbling up most of the money and starving the operations budgets.

PG&E is guaranteed a rate of return, meaning its profit margin is basically state-guaranteed. A large share of blame falls on CPUC and the structuring of the utilities. CPUC must decide whether they approve of rate before pge implements them, and I think it almost always does.

I'm by no means excusing pge, they were pretty clearly negligent and failed to meet their obligations. But it's a state-backed operation, which pretty much always means less punishment for failure to operate effectively.

The dividends were probably ok until they went bankrupt, which resulted in not so great a deal for shareholders after all.

Where did the money go? Paying for wildfire damage.

Spending more money on infrastructure means profits will increase.

There's not really any way around that. Capital expenditures are profit.

Well, no, capital expenditures can create future profit. Emphasis on _can_ and _future_.

No. Capital expenditures are profit (or really, count towards earnings).

They're long-term investments in fixed assets, not expenses that get subtracted out when calculating net income. You're just swapping cash with assets of equivalent value, so profits don't change.

I'm not sure how PG&E would possibly not increase their profits if they got a rate increase meant to cover infrastructure investments. If they spend 100% of that increased revenue on infrastructure, then 100% of that counts towards profit - not in the future - immediately.