The insurance challenges are now making it more expensive and difficult for some utilities to attract the capital required to harden their grids

The grids they’ve been refusing to maintain or harden for decades, those grids? Given their past history, they wouldn’t be acting now unless there was pressure on them - they’d just be handing out another round of executive bonuses and stock dividends.

Is this that Free Market I’ve always heard about?

As it stands now, utilities have become the “insurer of last resort” when it comes to damage claims from wildfires tied to their equipment, said Emily Fisher, general counsel at the Edison Electric Institute, an investor-owned utility trade group. The industry has become difficult to insure because there isn’t a limit to their potential wildfire liabilities, Fisher added.

Power companies also need to spend billions of dollars to make their infrastructure less prone to start fires, funding fixes such as installing weather monitoring equipment, burying power lines and replacing old poles. “It’s not a sustainable regime,” Fisher said.

It is certainly sustainable, though it may not be as profitable. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t care less what the general counsel for an investor-owned utility trade group that only cares about the next quarter’s earnings has to say on the matter.

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have they tried not starting wildfires?

Considering the utilities refuse to take responsibility for the fires they cause and also refuse to prevent those fires by maintaining their equipment… fuck 'em.

It’s time for either regulation or state-owned utilities. Corporations have proven they aren’t able to safely provide utility services.