In addition, there is the basic connection fee. We pay a minimum of $10 a month just to be connected to the grid even if we use no power. Those of us with solar, would not receive generation credits during the time the grid is disconnected. Those of us with Electric Vehicles may have to pay a substantially higher rate (2x or more) to charge at a public station instead of our overnight rate of about 11c/kWh The key fact here is that PG&E elected to turn off electricity over a broad swath of California even when the anticipated winds didn't materialize in many impacted counties. Additionally, they were initially talking about closing various major tunnels during the outage. The goal was to simplify their communication process, not to minimize impact to customers. Their website couldn't handle the traffic (I was never able to see the projected outages on pge.com, only current outages), and many of us had to rely on postings by news organizations that were often out of date to see if we would be impacted. Penalizing them in a small way for turning off customers they didn't have to forces them to optimize for desired behavior unless a community is extremely unprofitable to service. It encourages them to maintain their right of ways and create redundancy in the grid for communities like Half Moon Bay that weren't particularly flamable but were turned off because the main transmission lines crossed "higher risk" areas.

Also tell me why my taxes fund the collection of data on innocent people. This is a costly process, and rife with potential for abuse. Why would I want my government to record this information?