By Nathanael Johnson
For the last 150 years, Pacific Gas & Electric has been playing political hardball to maintain its monopoly over California’s electricity.
PG&E, now infamous for its connection to wildfires and power outages, started life in 1852, when three brothers — the Scots-Irish Donohues — began laying gas pipe through the muddy streets of Gold Rush-era San Francisco. Over the following decades, the company swallowed rivals, growing into an investor-owned giant with a monopoly on the power and gas lines to the cities of Northern California. PG&E’s growth mirrored that of California’s in the early decades of the 20th century, as the former colonial outpost once pillaged for treasure morphed into a self-sustaining powerhouse. It was the era of massive public projects — the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hetch-Hetchy Dam in Yosemite — bound together with a web of rails and blacktop to form the foundation of what would become the fifth-largest economy in the world.
To power this growth, the state needed electrons in a hurry, a task delegated to PG&E. California allowed the utility to have a monopoly on electricity…
