Hopefully have delivered some chunky UPSes and decent support SLAs to those with medical equipment.
Could see this backfiring if eg people start using lots of generators instead...
For more detail see articles like: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/California-s-st...
It isn't clear that PG+E did anything wrong in maintaining power lines. That just isn't how liability works here. There is always some chance that power lines cause a small fire, and recently the costs of a small fire have grown massively, as it has become more common that a small fire expands into a large fire. PG+E is facing rising costs, and they don't really have many ways to lower fire risk that they haven't already taken. They are not legally allowed to stop serving this area. So they are forced into measures like these.
(They also just went bankrupt, so it's not like PG+E investors are making a killing while underserving their customers.)
The best practice is to install substation equipment that prevents enormous current from flowing through a phase-to-ground fault. Petersen coils and similar devices do this, and they appear to be reasonably widespread in Europe.
Heck, suppose PG&E turns off power during high wind events. Do they even have the required equipment to avoid starting a fire if a line fell and is still on the ground after the wind stops when they turn power back on? This type of equipment exists.
The Laguna fire in 1970 crossed over I8. [1] (Be sure to watch the video at the bottom of the article, it's really interesting.) I know you acknowledge that it probably happened, but the reason is didn't happen more was due to the location of those fires, not characteristics of those fires. Most wildfires don't happen near freeways, so the data will show that fires jump freeways more frequently now. That may be true, but there are also a lot more freeways now. Interstate highways didn't even exist before 1956 and freeways were also rare at that time, so comparing freeway-jumping between then and now isn't really saying much about fire intensity.
Almost all of California's largest fires have had human causes.[3] There is a tendency to blame climate for wildfires increasing, but the real reason is that there are just a lot more people in the state. More structures, more people, more irresponsibility at scale. There is also a lot more misguided policy. For example, bans on cutting trees, reduction of logging activity and various other policies designed to "protect" the environment but fail to acknowledge unintended consequences. (To be clear, I'm not advocating mass logging, but bad policy is definitely contributing to fires.) [4]
> The problem with these recent fires is when you have like sustained 50 mph gusts and 5% humidity
Like the Santa Ana winds? That isn't a new thing.
[1] https://wildfiretoday.com/2015/09/26/the-laguna-fire-45-year... [2] https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/a-brief-history-of-the-sa... [3] https://www.fire.ca.gov/communications/downloads/fact_sheets... [4] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/08/23/california-fires-gove...
A 90% solution would be an excellent start here.
The places that don't burn now are just saving up more fuel for bigger fires in the future. The idyllic mountain cabin surrounded by large pine trees and ladder fuels is lost. Roads with brush up to the lines are death traps. Housing developments in box end canyons are the definition of insanity. Climate change is making large fires more frequent. Sparks from fallen lines have killed hundreds, just wait till we get a deranged but gifted arsonist that understands meteorology.
The first place for an excellent start begins at your home. It's going to take the power company years or decades to retrofit. Push the brush and trees as far back as possible. Start a neighborhood preventative fire group. Demand your city and country cut brush back from roads.
The 99% Invisible podcast did an episode on this [1]. There is strong evidence that even very intense forest-fires won't cause buildings to burn if they take well-known preventative measures.
I don't know how much of the financial damages from the utility companies are owed to homeowners, but it certainly seems like homeowners aren't absolved of responsibility if their house burns when they've ignored preventative measures.
How many days a year can they do this before “measures like these” become stopping serving this area?
PG&E knew that the towers in this area weren't sufficient for the weather conditions and did nothing about it.
I don't think there's a law on the books requiring that everyone have access to electrical service (like there is for, say, USPS service).
Maybe beefy solar setups with battery banks and ability to run off-grid will start becoming the norm there. It is California, after all; it's a great place for solar. Heck, it might easily be cheaper for PG&E to subsidize the installation of these systems vs committing to maintaining all those lines properly in perpetuity.
This is almost definitely the case. Consider that PG+E just went bankrupt from fire costs. If you split PG+E into two parts, the "safe utility" that served urban areas, and the "risky utility" that served rural areas, the fire costs would almost all go to the "risky utility". If they were allowed to, PG+E would be better off simply dropping every customer more than 60 miles away from San Francisco.
But it just doesn't work that way. PG+E is technically a public company, but the customers they are required to serve and the prices they are allowed to charge are so heavily regulated, it often seems more like it's a complicated extension of the California government.
As far as I'm aware, that's the main point of having a regulated power utility. They have to deliver universal service.
So, more like an organized group of users in the middle of nowhere, but do have rights as a recognized municipality of the state.
With how liability works in California, I'd be really curious to see.
PG&E is a regulated regional monopoly with a universal service mandate within it's service area that has huge piles of money to throw at political fights to stop having public power retailers take over some of it's service areas, so it can just suck up the cost of dealing with uneconomical rural customers as the cost of the privilege of being allowed to own profitable urban and suburban customers it is willing to fight for.
Do you have evidence for this? I assumed going bankrupt is a pretty large piece of evidence against this argument.
By my read, after two consecutive years' of fire lawsuits being judged against PG&E and going bankrupt, someone decided to listen to the engineers and technicians on the ground.
However, even a small state like Rhode Island has plenty of overhead wires, despite being a tenth the size of Denmark.
But surely a rich state like California could dig down wires in areas where it would significant benefits. The benefits are everywhere, obviously, but some areas would gain more benefits than others.
Can a state/country really be considered rich, if it cannot afford to dig down electric wires?
Every time people are forced to make an inefficient decision, the cost is multiplied a thousand fold over time throughout the economy. Money spent burying cables isn’t available to invest elsewhere; a factory goes unbuilt; it doesn’t produce material wealth; it doesn’t hire a young worker into an entry level job; that worker never has a chance to grow and apply their mind to solve new problems; he doesn’t build a new, better factory or tech company one day.
TL;DR Labor rates are above market rates due to the legislative requirements.
See https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/08/31/union-wa... for one point of view on this issue.
It isn't clear to me if these legislative mandates apply to power-line construction though.
http://www.pgecurrents.com/2017/10/31/facts-about-undergroun...
This is part of the trillion dollar sprawl problem we have. We have built a massive amount of infrastructure as cheap as possible, and now we cant afford to built it correctly. People would have never built houses in many places if they had to pay the actual costs.
Something I was reading recently claimed that total operational costs on underground lines also higher in the long run - dielectrics break down, faults are much more expensive etc. Found it counterintuitive, but hard to counter.
The article further talks about people outraged by the amount spent on digging down these cables, as they are generally high voltage cables, and not those that actually reach houses. So I'd imagine regular wires cost less than the above calculation (which includes the 5.7 billion for purchasing the original wires).
[0] In Danish: https://ing.dk/artikel/nyt-opror-stop-milliard-fras-pa-grave...
Edit: A commenter further down noted:
> PG&E has 81,000 miles of distribution lines
So that's 130,357 kilometers. So at the same cost per km as Denmark, 5,312,500 DKK /km, that's 692,521,562,500 DKK or $105,117,847,971.88 USD, ($105.12 billion) USD.
Not considering how many miles of that is actually through mountain ranges and the extra cost of doing highly remote work.
That being said, I do get an impression that more money is lost in bureaucracy/company "fees" in the US than in Denmark.
https://www.elp.com/articles/powergrid_international/print/v...
As the saying goes: this suboptimal outcome is a feature, not a bug.
Building infrastructure well means telling people no. We have a problem with that in the US.
No. You cannot build in the floodplain.
No. You cannot build in the wildland urban interface.
No. You cannot build on a mudslide prone slope.
No. You cannot build in the surge zone.
We just don't do that. Instead we have a system where elect people to give us what we want without paying for the long term consequences. Simply put, we can't fix California, we don't have the money to. People in at risk areas need to be charged for the expense they add to the system, no new customers need added to the system.
If you wonder why the US doesn't build densely, it's because we don't pay for the true cost of our sprawl.
The upshot of this is that every utility in the country would love nothing more than to underground every overhead line in their service area. The reason this doesn’t happen is because public service commissions, who approve capital plans, aren’t willing to saddle customers with the astronomical costs of undergrounding lines (which runs $2-$3M per mile on distribution, depending on rock content of soil).
So, $4.5 million per customer.
At this point, why be attached to the grid at all?
A renewable setup with storage makes sense at that point.
That might fly in some rich suburb of NYC but try that in Buffalo and the tar and feathers would come out.
Well, PG+E just went bankrupt, so there aren't any dimes left for shareholders anyway. It's not like they're making a huge margin of profit.
Because if we catered to every "we're a rich country, why don't we" request across every subject we'd have a government financial situation akin to that of the USSR circa 1988.
Not to mention the fact that burying power lines across rural areas would be exorbitantly expensive. It's one thing to bury power lines in New Jersey. It's another to bury all the power lines in Wisconsin. For what it's worth, the power lines are generally buried in the more dense and rich (must be both, not just one) cites.
Underground lines have their own set of issues, primarily that they have dramatically increased capacitive current. This is manageable, I believe.
Unregulated growth wherever people want to build isn't going to be an affordable problem, no matter how much money people think California has.