Liam Denning, Columnist

PG&E Bankruptcy Risk Gets Real — But What Comes After?

California must figure out how to pay for defending the grid against a changing climate.

January 7, 2019 at 4:37 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Climate change threatens California’s power grid in more ways than one.
Photographer: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

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Standoffs over who pays what for infrastructure are kind of where America’s at right now. Besides the shutdown in D.C. over the southern border barrier, California is grappling with how to finance a somewhat more useful bit of equipment: its power grid.

A series of wildfires over the past two years has left the state’s largest utility, PG&E Corp., exposed to potentially tens of billions of dollars of liabilities. The company is reportedly considering filing for bankruptcy within weeks. Its stock, having fallen by half over the past two months, plunged another 20 percent on Monday morning.