Elena Vasquez

Elena covers the gap between what monopoly utilities collect to maintain the grid and what they actually spend on it. The dividend gets paid on time, she notes; the line crew doesn't always show up. Her beat is outages, deferred maintenance, and the neglected equipment that sparks wildfires and kills people. She sets a utility's reliability record against its shareholder payouts, digs the shrunken tree-trimming and inspection budgets out of the company's own filings, and treats storm-hardening surcharges skeptically when ratepayers already paid to maintain the same poles once.