In an interview with HuffPost, the Silicon Valley progressive accused the power company of prioritizing high executive salaries and payouts to investors over infrastructure upgrades needed to operate safely in a hotter, drier climate.

“The for-profit motive does not work,” Khanna said by phone Wednesday. “The public utility is a much better option because you’re not having to worry about maximizing shareholder returns and you will make the safety investments that are necessary.”

Khanna is among the highest-profile elected officials to back a resurgent movement pushing for public ownership of power stations and transmission lines. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), whom Khanna has backed for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, proposed creating a public option for electricity as part of his Green New Deal and this week said it was “time to begin thinking about public ownership of major utilities.”

Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) enacted a law in July directing state regulators to draft a plan to create a public utility to replace investor-owned power companies. Nascent campaigns to municipalize utilities in Chicago and New York City are gaining steam.

But the apocalyptic images of suburban homes and cars engulfed in flames and nightmarish stories of residents struggling to survive amid rolling blackouts in the country’s most populous state captured national attention this month and added new momentum to the populist campaigns.

PG&E, as it’s known, declared bankruptcy in January in the face of roughly $30 billion in claims stemming from its role in the last two years of wildfires. That includes the Camp fire, the worst fire in California’s history, which last year killed 86 people and destroyed at least 14,000 homes. Officials found the company’s equipment responsible for sparking the blaze. As this year’s fire season approached, PG&E took the dramatic step of cutting off power to millions of homes in California in hopes of preventing sparks from power lines downed by strong winds from igniting dry brush.

The company warned that customers should expect rolling blackouts to continue for at least 10 years as it upgrades its infrastructure. Despite the shutoffs, PG&E said this week its power lines may have sparked two wildfires in the San Francisco Bay Area.

PG&E generated 21% of its electricity from solar and wind in 2016, compared to 17% from natural gas and none from coal, according to the company’s figures, making it a notch greener than California’s power mix overall.

But Khanna said a publicly controlled utility freed of the requirement to pay investors dividends could transition much faster to zero-emission sources. He cited Silicon Valley Power, the municipal utility in Santa Clara, which this year generated nearly half its residential electricity from solar and wind.

The utility, Khanna said, “is a shining example” of what California lawmakers could transform PG&E into: a locally controlled nonprofit rapidly reducing its emissions and preventing power outages.

“When you have the public that’s running the utilities, they’re going to care about the consequences of climate changes,” Khanna said. “They’re going to support renewable energy. They’re not going to be motivated by profit.”

PG&E’s profiteering has particularly rankled Californians watching their homes burn, businesses suffer and medical clinics close as modern necessities like phones, refrigerators and electric cars become useless. Just before blackouts began earlier this month, PG&E wined and dined about a dozen employees of the company’s gas division at a ritzy Napa Valley winery. PG&E CEO Bill Johnson apologized for what he called an “insensitive” and “tone deaf” event after the San Francisco Chronicle reported on the gathering.

“While the event was planned for about a year, we sincerely apologize for the insensitivity of the timing and location of the event,” Jeff Smith, a spokesman for PG&E, said in an email Thursday. “Moving forward, we will no longer hold these types of events.”

But Johnson’s own pay has drawn criticism. The executive, who earns a base salary of $2.5 million a year, could net $110 million if share prices return to a 2017 peak as part of a bankruptcy deal, according to the Sacramento Bee.