The Smoldering State
Every so often, Dustin Mulvaney, a solar-energy expert and a professor at San José State University, will appear before the California Public Utilities Commission, the agency charged with regulating power companies and other monopolies in the Golden State. He will research and testify about what a certain solar policy would do in the state.
Sometimes, before he speaks, he thinks about the Paris Agreement, and the thousands of people who traveled around the world to participate in a small way in its creation.
And then he delivers his testimony to an all but empty room.
The electricity system in California seems to be facing a total breakdown. For the past several weeks, millions of people across the state’s north , which Pacific Gas and Electric, the local utility better known as PG&E, said were necessary to avoid wildfires. Yet last week, a massive in the hills near Santa Rosa anyway, forcing hundreds of thousands to evacuate. That fire appears to have ignited a PG&E-owned high-tension wire suffered a malfunction. Now, a week after it began, has incinerated more than 120 square miles and is less than a third contained.
