A fire above Reno, Nevada. Forty-two thousand people ordered out. And ten thousand customers switched off on purpose — which, with the fire that close, was probably right. The question is why the switch is the cheapest move a utility has.
A utility whose wires run through dry country has two ways to stop them burning a town down: rebuild the network over decades, or turn the power off tonight. Both are legal, both reduce risk — and the rules price them completely differently.
If the wires start a fire, the damage is a liability. California goes furthest: a utility there owes for property damage even if it broke no rule. Nevada does not do that; NV Energy would be judged the ordinary way, on carelessness — with one detail that matters, because a written shutoff policy that goes unused on the night of a fire becomes evidence against the company.
If instead the company cuts the power, the loss lands on the customer, and nothing requires the company to count it. That is not a court's ruling. It is the company's own published position.
A shutoff is not a flicker. Restoration requires one hundred percent of the system to be inspected by eye, so a planned event runs one to a few days. In that time the fridge, the well pump, the oxygen concentrator and the shop's card reader are simply gone.
California ran this at scale. In 2019 PG&E cut power to two million customers across the season; its largest single event took out around 800,000 at once. More than 30,000 registered medical-baseline customers were in the affected counties, and across three shutoffs the company failed to warn 1,100 of them.
The regulator did act — on the warnings, not the decision. About $20 million in credits and backup batteries, and $86 million more at the governor's demand: $100 a household, $250 a small business. Against an estimated $2.5 billion of economic loss from one October event.
In 2018 the Camp Fire destroyed Paradise, California and killed 85 people. PG&E, whose equipment started it, filed for bankruptcy that January against roughly $30 billion in wildfire claims.
Behind that number sits inverse condemnation: if a utility's equipment is a substantial cause of a fire, it owes for property damage regardless of fault. The reasoning is that the company serves the public and can spread the cost through everyone's bills — which is what makes the liability certain as well as enormous. Nevada does not apply it to private utilities; there, carelessness has to be shown.
NV Energy's own information sheet on emergency de-energization says the shutoff ensures safe delivery of electricity, and that the company is not liable for product loss as a result. That is the whole ledger entry.
Nothing here was hidden. Nevada requires a wildfire plan filed with the state, and the policy sits inside it. California gave its companies the same authority in 2012, to be used only as a last resort. Colorado is writing its own version now. Governments across the West authorised the switch deliberately — and none of them decided who pays for it.
Burying a line costs about $3 million a mile; PG&E has done 384 of the 2,300 miles it plans. Covered conductor is cheaper — one California utility puts it at $438,000 a mile — but PG&E's own assessment is that it removes less than 65% of ignition risk on its own.
This work is not unrewarded: money in the network enters the rate base and earns a regulated return for decades. But it earns slowly and protects slowly. The switch protects tonight and costs nothing tonight — and that is the choice the rules put in front of the person on shift when the wind picks up.
Keep hardening until the switch is no longer needed: bury what can be buried, wrap the rest, and treat it as a permanent programme rather than a project.
The price. At $3 million a mile, at the pace the largest programme in the country has managed, this is a twenty-year answer to a problem that arrives every August. Customers carry it through their bills either way. And through the whole transition the switch stays exactly where it is, because a half-hardened network still has a dangerous half.
California did this in 2019, and for a reason worth stating: PG&E had just gone bankrupt, and bankruptcy is the outcome in which burned-out families are paid last and least. So the law kept the liability and built a cushion around it — a $21 billion fund available once claims from a single fire pass $1 billion, a safety certificate that presumes a certified company acted reasonably, and a limit on how much shareholders must put back.
The price. Half the fund is paid by customers, at about half a cent per kilowatt-hour — the households already carrying the shutoffs also capitalise the cushion. The certificate weakens the exact incentive the liability existed to create. And a burned-out family now files against a fund of fixed size with a statutory end date in 2035, instead of a company with everything it owns behind the claim.
Change neither the wire nor the liability, but the empty side of the ledger: an automatic payment for every hour a customer is dark, backup power supplied rather than suggested to every medical-baseline customer, compensation for spoiled stock and shops that could not open. California has done every piece of this once — but as a one-off punishment for bad warnings, not as the standing price of the measure.
The price. A utility recovers what it is made to pay, through the rate base — so unless the law forbids it, the compensation returns through everybody's bill and the switch is free to the shareholder again. Forbid it, and the money comes from the people who are supposed to be burying the wire. And make the switch expensive enough, and a company may hesitate on the one night it should have thrown it.
By Sunday night the fire was still uncontained, six people were hurt, a hospital emergency room had been evacuated, and about 10,000 customers were dark by decision rather than by damage.
None of the three designs makes that go away. Hardening is a twenty-year bill paid by the people it protects. Moving the liability keeps the company alive and hands the burned-out family a fund of fixed size. Pricing the switch raises everyone's bill and risks a moment's hesitation on the worst night of the year. Each moves the cost somewhere else — and each puts a different group in the room when the decision gets made.
When somebody offers you a safety measure that costs nothing — in a rule, in a plan, in a law being written this year — what would you need to know to find out who is actually paying for it?