My colleague Ivan Penn, who covers energy from Los Angeles, is in San Francisco today, as Pacific Gas & Electric executives meet with regulators. He wrote about what he’ll be watching for at their meeting:

It is almost a regular event these days: PG&E faces another round of explaining. This time it’s over safety strategy the utility admits it botched last week when its efforts to prevent wildfires left two million people in the dark.

Bill Johnson, PG&E’s chief executive, who will be joined by the utility’s chairman and a half-dozen other top executives, is set to appear before the California Public Utilities Commission this afternoon.

[Read more about the blackout from inside the control room: “This did not go well.”]

He can arm himself with at least one key defense of the company’s methods: PG&E avoided an episode like Southern California’s Saddleridge Fire, which killed one person and destroyed 17 homes and other buildings during the course of the same week. A transmission tower owned by Southern California Edison, officials with that utility said, could have caused the blaze.

Mr. Johnson still must contend with the displeasure of a commission that already has demanded corrective action.

Marybel Batjer, president of the commission, outlined the context of today’s hearing in an eight-page letter she sent to Mr. Johnson on Monday. PG&E’s handling of the power shut-off , Ms. Batjer said, “created an unacceptable situation that should never be repeated.”

It is just the latest example from years of poor management decisions, fatal safety errors in its electric and gas pipeline business, criminal misdeeds that led to felony convictions and a bankruptcy case filed in January because of tens of billions in wildfire liability tied to two dozen fires caused by its equipment. The bankruptcy court has set an Oct. 21 deadline for victims of those fires to file claims.

[Here’s why tens of thousands of wildfire victims could get nothing.]

Those wildfires include the scores of people killed in last year’s Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise. A 100-year-old PG&E transmission tower that was a quarter-century past its “useful life” by the utility’s own standards is suspected of causing the fire.