The utility operated in a state of nearly postmodern unawareness, lacking even a complete set of records about what it owned. Indeed, after its gas pipeline explosion, it literally hauled in thousands upon thousands of boxes of property and inspection records from its regional offices to San Francisco's Cow Palace to try to piece them together. The utility that serves America's greatest tech hubs had not digitized its files.

That type of tragic irony abounds in Blunt's book. The Caribou-Palermo line was, when it was constructed in the early 1900s, one of the first big transmission projects to connect clean energy to population centers. But the aged hydroelectric dams that the line facilitated are not the shiny objects of modern climate policy. As a consultant hired by the utility's regulator, the California Public Utilities Commission, noted about the agency's own operations: "Because safety is considered to be 'off the radar screen' of most Commissioners and legislators, it is considered to have little cachet for CPUC staff and managers." Wherever safety ranked as a priority, it was not "safety first." As Blunt tells it, "The CPUC's intense focus on climate policy came at the expense of one of its core responsibilities: holding the utilities accountable on safety."

It did not have to be this way. Policymakers in California two decades ago decided to demonopolize the generation and retailing of power, something that up to that point had been the more or less exclusive domain of PG&E in its service territory. That could have and should have paved the way for a PG&E that had one job: maintaining the poles, wires, and substations that together constitute the grid, which is the essential network for everything else that happens in the power sector. Rather than quarantining the residual monopoly to its proper role, however, politicians in California and other blue states could not help themselves from treating monopolies' balance sheets as attractive playthings for public policy that was not directly related to the grid and its upkeep. Always thirsty for growth, and always accepting the bargain to go along to get along, PG&E went along with it all.

California Burning lucidly explains the financial motivations that caused this distraction on the part of the utility's management. Specifically, its negligence with respect to its core business was the consequence of a perverse incentive that animates the business model of nearly every investor-owned energy monopoly in America today. For every dollar these utility-monopolies invest in capital expenditures ("cap‑ex"), they command a return on that capital set by the regulator. Meanwhile, for operational and maintenance expenditures ("op-ex"), like inspecting transmission lines and clearing underbrush from their rights-of-way, there is no return margin, only revenue from ratepayers designed to match the budgeted annual spending in these categories of op-ex. The only financial incentive that exists for op-ex is to try to reduce the spending after the dollars have been approved by a regulator in a rate case, because then the utility can pocket the savings. This topic is much written about by utility regulatory observers, but Blunt is one of the very few journalists to pay any attention at all to this set of incentives, even though it is sort of a skeleton key to understanding the electric-utility sector; literally, it explains almost everything, including PG&E's safety performance. In California, the incentives coalesced with fatal simplicity. The utility was endlessly fascinated by cap-ex--that is, the shiny new things that policymakers most often wanted--while it neglected op-ex, the spending necessary to keep its grid running safely.

Yet one does not need to be interested specifically in utilities or the energy industry at large to appreciate this book-length reportage. Blunt has a number of warnings applicable beyond the sector: the rise of financiers at the expense of engineers, the risk of doing many things poorly rather than a couple of things well, the glamorous focus on the ever‑changing "current thing" at the expense of an enduring and important mission, and the regulatory capture that is a vicious cycle between big-dreaming policymakers and the energy monopolies on whose fortunes those policies often depend.