The real problem is that utility executives are lemmings that all want to run off the same cliff at the same time. SCE happens to think they are the leader in providing to the electric car industry, and they have been keeping their heads down in the California battles lately. PG&E has had several messes on their hands between that proposition in June and San Ramon, and since CA is likely to lead in adoption, it is a CA utility that the rest of the industry will look to and so SCE gets it by default.
SCE has been wringing their hands for years and posturing themselves to the electric car and plug in hybrid as an excuse to demand distribution rate increases that they haven't been able to get for years. That is what the other utility executives see. They see hand-wringing that can posture for distribution rate increases that they haven't been able to get through their utility commissions for years due to opposition to increasing rates. Utility rates are worse than even the usual political sausage factory. Maybe the consumer groups and enviros will go for the rate increases if packaged with the plug in car. That is the whole reason for all the utility company angst. It is manufactured for the theater of public, and public utility commission, opinion.
The manufactured angst is their current cliff, just like downsizing was in the 90's.
In their defense, maybe they are right. Maybe they really haven't had the money in the distribution accounts to pay for upgrades. I know more than 99.995% of the people out there about power rates in general, but that still leaves at least the 1000 or so people spread throughout the IOUs that actually understand their own individual rates and how they affect their accounts down to the GL. You would go insane if you actually tried to understand that from the outside rather than just understand how it affects your house or facility.
To a couple of other points.
1) The power distribution, and transmission, equipment installed thirty to sixty years ago was so preposterously overengineered at the time that it is still cranking along nicely. In the words of my primary high voltage expert "a cool transformer is a happy transformer". By and large they can sit there well past the apex of the failure curve and keep going indefinitely. The stuff that is in the air and on the ground is by and large fine until it fails, and easy to replace when it does. All of the handwringing about the smart grid is also largely a bunch of BS. The grid is a lot smarter than you would know from the outside. The problem is and was broken regulation. The way utilities used to make money was they built new generation to serve new load. Transmission only existed to get the hostage generation to the hostage load. The transmission system was not previously regulated in such a way that would lead to what America has needed for years, which is the super-highway concept of high voltage lines that would allow markets to properly function. It really isn't even regulated properly now.
2) Continuing the theme, deregulation was not the problem in California. A deregulated electricity market looks nothing like a deregulated market for most other commodities. A deregulated market for electricity exists in multiple and overlapping frameworks of regulation. The problem in CA was the regulated model they selected for their deregulated market. They took the mostly functional British model and applied it to California. What they did not understand was that in Britain there was a) a massive oversupply and b) a utility industry that was so broken that the utilities had a built in ability for utilities to do things like "install meters" and make money. Since California is in a net import situation, and had meters, the market conditions had nothing to do with their model. The proximate cause of the so called "energy crisis" also was actually physical. It was the explosion on the El Paso pipeline in 2000 that jacked up prices and limited supply in CA even ahead of the general massive NG spike. Those two factors (lack of available supply and the general NG market) drove conditions in the CA market to cause a credit crisis for the unregulated and regulated players both. But, the credit crisis was caused by the bad market design. Without all three of those things (supply, price and credit), the CA market would have survived intact. However, make no mistake, the crisis was bankruptcy of PG&E and near bankruptcy of SCE (SDG&E was in better shape) and therefore the real problem that leads to bankruptcy is credit. It was improper regulation, not deregulation, that caused the "crisis".