California’s mass electricity shut-down has not gone well. Millions of state residents got little warning that their power would be switched off for up to a week while Pacific Gas & Electric checked its lines for any technical problems.

But as I wrote a couple days ago, it’s likely PG&E’s biggest concern was losing another pile of money if it was seen to be irresponsible: California Power Company Unplugs Customers to Protect Its Profits. The utility recently paid out $11 billion to resolve most of the insurance claims from two major wildfires in the state.

Naturally there was a great deal of anger about the shutdown, as Thursday’s Los Angeles Times described:

And there were millions of persons affected. Some of the reports use the term “customers” which means households, not individuals.

For some people, the outage was more than a huge inconvenience: A front page article in Friday’s New York Times titled “Frailest in Peril As Power Cuts Dim California” pointed out that many medical devices require electricity to run. (Reprinted in MSN.) So wildfires are not the only danger to public safety — PG&E endangered some Californians by its power shutoff.

I was lucky that the unplugged zone in my town was a few blocks away, but I still carried a flashlight around the house after dark just in case. It was unsettling that PG&E has sounded unmotivated to get the lights back on ASAP.

Here’s the LA Times article mentioned above: