Investor-owned utilities warn that excessive liability could raise costs and harm reliability

Tyson Smith, appearing on behalf of California's three large investor-owned utilities, thanked the CEA for its study and urged action that avoids the worst outcome: inaction combined with utility financial distress. "If we do nothing, we face rising energy bills, declining grid reliability, and a shrinking safety net when disasters strike," Smith said.

Smith and other industry witnesses argued that wildfire mitigation is a "whole-of-society" problem: utilities can reduce ignitions but cannot solve development patterns, vegetation and climate change alone. They supported pathways that combine community mitigation, allocation of catastrophe burden across stakeholders and carefully designed state-led backstops to insulate utilities' balance sheets while preserving incentives to invest in safety. Industry witnesses also described audit and regulatory oversight processes they said validate many mitigation expenditures and disputed characterizations that mitigation funds were unspent.