PG&E recently issued a laudatory press release praising as a benefit something that should trouble PG&E customers:

One of California’s biggest strengths may be a surprise: PG&E’s grid has open capacity today. The grid was built to handle the times when demand is highest. Most of the time, it uses about 40% to 45% of its capacity. As a result, some parts of PG&E’s service area can add 50 to 100 megawatts of demand by using equipment already in place.

In other words, PG&E’s ratepayers have been paying for unused distribution grid equipment for YEARS–equipment that had no real purpose until data centers came along unexpectedly.

I wrote earlier about how PG&E had used excessive demand forecasts from 2009 to 2018 to justify overbuilding its distribution system by as much as 100%. We’re now seeing PG&E as trying to sell us on the idea that somehow all of overspending that we are paying for will somehow create an underappreciated reward.

What should happen is that new data centers using that capacity should be required to pay an entry fee equal to the accumulated net present value of the original cost of that distribution capacity, and that fee is used to offset the revenue requirements of all of the other customers. PG&E should receive none of the profits associated with that excess capacity.