Iirc, PG & E doesn't own the energy production. That was the basis of the whole energy crisis a few years ago. Enron and others owned the production, and jacked up the price. Pge was not legally allowed to raise its prices, and was crying hard about going under. So Gray Davis used the state's surplus funds to pay the energy producers blackmail game, rather than letting pge pass all the costs to its customers, and we decided he was a villain for that.
All this started out in the 80's when "deregulation" was the answer for all our monopoly and big government woes. We split up things like pge and ma bell into smaller "competing" entities. And look how great that's been working!