Rural China has per capita income of less than $3000 per person (16000 RMB). California has per capita GDP of over $70,000. Californians are over 20 times wealthier than people in rural china. However, California cannot maintain a more reliable power grid.

From 2016 to 2019, China's total investment in transforming and upgrading rural power grids reached RMB830 billion (US$150 billion), and the average power outage time in rural areas was reduced to about 15 hours (900 Minutes) per year.

California PGE has a report on outages in 2019 when high winds caused many "safety" shutdowns. They did not include planned shutdowns and like to report a statistic where they exclude "major events".

The System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) is commonly used as a reliability indicator by electric power utilities. PGE had over 1300 minutes of outage per customer. customers in NAPA had an average of over 6000 minutes of outage and the North Bay had over 4000 minutes of outage.

In 2020, for multiple days millions of customers had rotating blackout lasting hours.

In 2004, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) estimated that the annual costs of U.S. power outages are at least $22 billion and maybe as high as $135 billion. This was before California's problems with a poorly maintained grid and poorly maintained forests and over reliance on wind and solar made things much worse.