‘This Did Not Go Well’: Inside PG&E’s Blackout Control Room
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
One the other hand this is also a political statement. They are clearly signaling to the politicians that they better shield them from further liability or expect more of this behavior. Shut the power down when the wind blows, after each earthquake until the lines can be checked, etc. My money is the politicians fold. The stock rose 3% Friday.
A number of their operations are being taken over by local public utilities in the current bankruptcy.
> Privatizing a utility was always a stupid move to begin with
PG&E isn't the result of privatizing a public utility, it's always been private.
> It's time we get to fixing all the damage Regan did to this country
If you mean Ronald Reagan, PG&E (or it's predecessors before various mergers and name changes) has been a private energy company since before he was born, so while there is lots you can blame him for, PG&E existing as a private energy firm isn't among them.
Generation however should be opened up to market mechanisms that find a price for power, reliability/dispatchability, and emissions.
No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater...
California is a high fire risk state regardless of whether the utility is publicly owned or investor (aka privately) owned. The risk is on a level that doesn't occur in many other states.
If the costs of fires are going to be socialized anyways (by immunizing utility from the liability, hence putting the burden on the ratepayers), the question of whether the utility should be publicly owned in order to reduce the obligation to shareholders is a valid one.
Either that or PGE will have to dramatically increase it's expenditures on maintenance to reduce the fire risk, which will have to come from shareholders' and ratepayers' pockets (the latter of which is not permitted under current PUC rules, IIUC).
Sounds a lot like California being California to me...
Companies have the option of shutting down operations and selling off their assets. PG&E presumably has a fleet of trucks and equipment, land rights etc., which were paid for with investors' money. If their profits fall below the level that could be achieved by selling off those assets and then investing the money at the market rate of return, it becomes profitable for raiders to come in and buy the company and do that with it, so the company has to stay more profitable than that in order to prevent that from happening.
Not selling shares. Having smaller dividends. That doesn't assume anyone is willing to loan them money.
> If their profits fall below the level that could be achieved by selling off those assets and then investing the money at the market rate of return, it becomes profitable for raiders to come in and buy the company and do that with it, so the company has to stay more profitable than that in order to prevent that from happening.
Ugh. I'm not sure via what mechanism, exactly, but it should not be possible for a monopoly power company to just dissolve and sell off the trucks for a tiny quick profit.
They already sold the shares and used the money to buy trucks and stuff. The dividends are effectively the interest on that money.
Suppose (made up numbers) that they have ten billion dollars in assets, but a twelve billion dollar market cap because of the expectation that those assets will be used to make future profits. Now you say "just make smaller profits" which means their market cap falls to eight billion dollars because of the expectation of smaller dividends.
Someone on Wall St then notices that they can make two billion dollars by buying them for eight billion and selling their assets for ten.
> I'm not sure via what mechanism, exactly, but it should not be possible for a monopoly power company to just dissolve and sell off the trucks for a tiny quick profit.
The government always has the option to be the buyer itself, or find one that wants to continue operating as a power company. But then it either has to raise its own capital or bring about a regulatory environment that allows a private company to meet the market rate of return and thereby raise a sufficient amount of private capital.
Whether that's just by writing it down, or having 30 billion in penalties if they stop delivering power, or by making dividends vest over 20 years...
Do they? The feds already had to step in when private companies deemed large swaths of the United States unprofitable (see also: rural electrification and the TVA).
Yes, they do. ERCOT, as one example, is doing just fine, many of the southwest power companies are private and aren't having issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrimack_Valley_gas_explosion...
We’ve done the privatize it all experiment even given evidence that services like Medicare can be run pretty cheaply, and, well, Kansas and Oklahoma.
I’d be curious to see if California could save rate payers money. My guess is the conventional finance wisdom about big government spending is more like fear mongering to protect special interests.
The closest equivalent with municipal power is the gobs of money PG&E has spent trying to kill local and statewide public power legislation.
CAHSR is surprisingly alive and active for something that died.
As to Trump—CAHSR had already failed by the time Trump took office. He simply demanded the federal government’s money back.
How do you get incompetence from being sued at every turn by people trying to micromanage the CAHSR project? The trump approach of ruling by fiat doesn't work in the real world.
Whether or not you agree with his actions Trump absolutely tried to kill CAHSR.
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-high-speed-rail-20...
'Ronald Batory, (the Obama Administration's) chief of the Federal Railroad Administration, the transportation agency that made the grants in 2009 and 2010, laid out a lengthy legal argument Tuesday for why the state was out of compliance with the grant agreement. Batory said in a three-page letter to California High-Speed Rail Authority Chief Executive Brian Kelly that the state “has materially failed to comply with the terms of the agreement and has failed to make reasonable progress on the project.”
Batory alleged that the state had failed to spend required matching funds, falling short by $100 million as of December. He argued that it will fail to complete the Central Valley construction by a 2022 deadline required by the grant. Batory also said the state has not submitted required financial information — such as reports on what has been delivered to date — that would allow federal regulators to oversee the grants. It also has failed to take corrective actions after regulators raised concerns in 2017 and 2018.'
So what you're saying is that trump is trying to kill CAHSR? Got it.
trump is trying to kill CAHSR?
All the Trump administration did is say, "you were promised funding conditional on it being spent on X, Y, and Z. Instead, CA spent that money on the infrastructure equivalent of hookers and blow[0]. Therefore, we are simply cancelling the funding per the agreement and the law because essentially none went to X, Y, or Z."
CAHSR is free to proceed (as far as the Administration is concerned) however they want with their own funds and the promised investor funds. In other words, pay for your own hookers and blow.
[0] 'In one especially egregious case, in 2017, the CHSRA hired an external consultant to check the work of Parsons Brinckerhoff (now WSP USA), which had been paid $666 million for engineering consulting. The external consultant found that the CHSRA had not received finished work for 145 of 184 tasks that Parsons Brinckerhoff had called “complete.”'
https://www.city-journal.org/californias-high-speed-rail-pro...
In one scenario, CA keeps legislating more and more liabilities to PG&E until it goes bankrupt, in which case the state could take it over, but would also be saddled with those same liabilities.
Alternatively, they step back the liabilities and try to negotiate a deal with PG&E to take over, which would essentially be a buyout. However, what would the incentive be to sell a profitable company with a natural monopoly in one of the nation's largest power markets? I'd imagine the investors would price it so high that the deal would quickly become unattractive to the state.
If they went the expropriation route, that would be a hell of a court case to watch.
This is the same as the "shielded from liability" option, just in a roundabout way.
I suspect the harm meant was more of the general form of "government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem".
http://factmyth.com/factoids/reagan-said-government-is-the-p...
However, I'm not clear whether PG&E was ever actually nationalised?
https://www.masterresource.org/insull-samuel/insull-rural-el...
FDR didn't like competition for attention, and hounded Insull in court for years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
Thomas Edison's first power plant, the Pearl Street Power Station (1882) powered just 82 customers initially, largely commercial and industrial users.
Large-scale electrification within the US was developed through public works including the Tenessee Valley Authority, Bonneville Power Administration, Hoover Dam, and numerous others. Four federal regional power administrations, the BPA, Southeastern, Southwestern, and Western Area Power Administrations, still exist.
Many rural regions are served by electric (and telephone) cooperatives:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_utility_cooperatives#U...
Insull was put out of business by New York bankers who wanted to take over his business.
http://blog.heartland.org/2013/07/samuel-insull-getting-the-...
FDR needed enemies to blame to get his New Deal, and he had Insull hounded in the courts. Insull was found not guilty of any wrongdoing, but died penniless.
If you want to know history, you have to find better sources than wikipedia. There are plenty of books about this great man and this interesting period of history.
If the appropriate legal framework doesn't currently exist I can't imagine a 'The lights stay on' bill would be all that unpopular politically.
Well, lots of reasons, but one absolute blocker is that they are already bankrupt because of their liability for wildfires in 2017 and 2018.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Com...
Is them shutting the power off different from a tree falling on the line cutting power off? What if power went out due to some equipment failing that they didn't perform proper maintenance on?
[0].https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_gubernatorial_recal...
Arnold Schwarzneggar stole the governership, and promptly made the state pay the $80Bn. Californians paid through the nose for going along with the recall.
If Gavin gets hit with a recall, it will be more of the same. Californians will be the poorer for it. There are a lot of billionaires here, but also widespread extreme poverty. No coincidence, that.
It is very cheap to run a recall campaign in California.
I'm really a fan of this bit:
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/12/keeping-some-of-the-...
We struggled to reach “six nines“ for a reason.
It's not exactly hard to fight back against that.
Make fires cost them enormous sums of money, and make outages also cost them enormous sums of money. Give them extremely clear monetary incentives to improve as many lines as possible and make shutdowns as small as possible.
It's not possible to get around "totally reliable, totally safe, inexpensive; pick two" by passing a law mandating all three.
> It's not possible to get around "totally reliable, totally safe, inexpensive; pick two" by passing a law mandating all three.
Oh I'm not asking for that at all. They used to be pretty reliable, pretty safe, kind of expensive. After neglecting lines they got to pretty reliable, not very safe, kind of expensive. With the shutdowns they shift to not very reliable, pretty safe, kind of expensive. They need to go back to where they started.
They would presumably take whichever option bankrupts them the slowest, but if all the roads lead to the same destination, eventually you end up there.
> They used to be pretty reliable, pretty safe, kind of expensive. After neglecting lines they got to pretty reliable, not very safe, kind of expensive. With the shutdowns they shift to not very reliable, pretty safe, kind of expensive. They need to go back to where they started.
I don't think that's even really what happened. It's not as if the occasional power line never caught fire thirty years ago.
The reason the Camp Fire was so destructive has more to do with climate change than PG&E maintenance. It could as easily have been a cigarette or a lightning strike and it would have been the same result.
But that's likely to continue to be the case. Fires in California are going to be more severe than they used to be.
Which may justify them being more conservative or spending more on maintenance than they ever did historically. But that isn't going to be free.
It looks like their vegetation management budget was less than 2% of revenue from 2013-2017.
Doubling or tripling that, well, it wouldn't be free but it wouldn't be a huge hardship either.
There are plenty of utility companies who manage to make a profit, deliver reliable service, and not start wildfires. If PGE can't, others would be happy to step up.
For industry, they will likely install their own generators, either diesel or natural gas. Which raises environmental concerns - it's no good having clean hydro or wind power, if you can't get it to where it's needed.
After crashing 30%+ the day before. They are essentially bankrupt.
No, they are actually bankrupt.
“The prudent thing to do when you’re uncertain is to turn the power off,” he said. “When the public complains that everything in the refrigerator is bad and the ice cream melted, then you could blame the judge. I’m willing to take the heat.”
[1] - https://www.kqed.org/news/11737336/judge-pge-paid-out-stock-...
The above quote benefits from a little more context. Alsup's point is that PG&E paid dividends while slashing the maintenance budget — and as a judge, he's willing to step in and say "that's not right".
But his point here is that if we’re willing to assign liability to PG&E for damages from a brushfire sparked tomorrow... if in your mind PG&E is truly responsible for any resulting death or destruction if a tree falls on their transmission lines during a time of critical fire risk and sparks a blaze.... then it is not only prudent, but it would be morally and economically imperative to shut down the lines during those critical risk periods.
There are several competing theories of liability and responsibility. Under strict liability, a fire happens, the root cause was an electrical spark, the utility is liable. You can’t operate a grid across all of California during 55mph winds at the end of the hot dry summer under those terms, and not go bankrupt.
From PG&E;
“California is one of the only states in the country in which courts have applied inverse condemnation to events caused by utility equipment. This means that if a utility’s equipment is found to have been a substantial cause of the damage in an event such as a wildfire – even if the utility has followed established inspection and safety rules – the utility may still be liable for property damages and attorneys’ fees associated with that event.”
There are a lot of variables in how damaging a wildfire may be. What sparked the fire is only one small variable in the chain of events. Forest management, building zones encroaching on forested areas, presence of fire brakes, disaster preparedness and response, emergency alerts all play a significant role, and those are just the factors CA can directly control. The weather, the climate is another matter.
“But for the spark” is a reductionist way to lay the blame for a multi-billion dollar fire. CA wildfires will burn every single year. The sparks are inevitable. The amount of preventative maintenance that theoretically can be done amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars.
It doesn’t serve CA’s common interest for electricity to cost $1/kWh. Risk mitigation is a statistical analysis, not an absolute. At some point you’ve invested enough that the risk is “mitigated” even if it isn’t “eliminated” and we accept this type of risk mitigation everywhere in modern life, the electrical grid should be no different.
How many people die driving on CA’s highways every year? How many could be saved with $100 billion of safety improvements? Do you shut them down until you can be certain no one else will die due to a deficient design or, perhaps, due to a gore point impact attenuator that hasn’t been reset?
A cursory look at PG&E financials shows that on ~$17b in revenue they spend ~$5b on supply and ~$7b on maintenance. They had been running $1-$1.5b surpluses the last few years. I wonder looking at other utilities how those ratios would stack up.
Would $1b more maintenance have prevented the Camp Fire? Entirely impossible to say. We do know that the full maintenance list runs into the $10s if not $100s of billions.
PG&E has no control over the weather, winds, firefighting budgets, or forest policy, yet it alone is now to be held in total responsibility for all fires that originate with its equipment? thats absurd.
(Fwiw this is just a gut feeling, I don't have actual numbers to back anything up)
Remember state-wide we’re talking about ~$5b of energy (generation cost) per year. How much do you want to pay to transmit that $5b of energy?
There are two reasons why you're wrong.
First, PG&E can't control the weather but did have control over its operations, e.g., how it maintained its equipment, how much it prepared for problems, how it managed risk. It may be tricky to determine if it's truly at fault, but it's equally tricky to determine that it's in the clear.
Second, a large utility is not like a private company. We cannot let a large utility fail, and therefore they are more like a government organization than a private company. When they mess up and hurt people, everyone needs to pitch in and help, not just those that are affected, as everyone shares the benefits and responsibilities of keeping them afloat.
A literalist interpretation of this quote is 'when there is a fire, hold the utility responsible unless it can be proven otherwise'.
If that is to be the standard then a utility can't afford to run when there is a fire risk. Realistically that law is unenforceable due to being too expensive, but proving that in practice will involve a lot of pain for either shareholders or ratepayers.
Innocent unless proven otherwise is the usual standard for a good reason - it is a mistake to punish without substantial evidence that has been closely reviewed by a number of legal and technical experts.
> Second, a large utility is not like a private company. We cannot let a large utility fail
Figure out a way to let it fail. Maybe the lines are state owned but companies can partake in an auction for a 12-month exclusive right to maintain the line and charge people for using it. Too-big-to-fail is a problem that can be fixed.
I'm not advocating strict liability here. I'm arguing that when a large company has a history of negligence that gave rise to similar incidents, the burden should shift to them to prove they were not the cause of the accident.
I see no way utilities provided by a for-profit company make sense. They are monopolies for services across entire swaths of the population. I can’t select which company I receive power from. In this model paying dividends to shareholders simply means that there was either some service/maintenance cut, or they set their rates too high for their customers.
At best, utilities should be government ran. Their “shareholders” should be those that foot the bill at the end of the day. At worst, at least make them nonprofit entities so that they’ll focus their efforts on bettering the product rather than doing what they can to improve shareholder dividends.
You can choose your supplier but not who runs your distribution.
The accepted spelling is break btw. I was prompted to check though as this spelling if anything fits the usage at least as well as the 'proper' spelling.
"A firebreak is a gap in vegetation or other combustible material that acts as a barrier to slow or stop the progress of a bushfire"
At the same time, while it’s statisticslly likely that fires would happen with our without PG&E, we can’t escape the fact that they’ve been responsible for quite a few of them.
Paradise, California, was built very close to the wildlife-urban interface. And our federal forest management practices should be questioned. But, PG&E knew about the specific faulty equipment that ended up sparking the Camp fire.
Why didn’t they prioritize fixing equipment in a dry forest adjacent to a populated area? Why did they pay dividends if so much infrastructure was failing?
They’d have a much easier case to make if they could at least show an attempt to prioritize maintenance, especially in high risk areas. Then we could all say, “accidents happen.” But there’s a pattern with PG&E.
When people die on a highway because of human error, or an “act of god”, it’s one thing. Just as we should except that a massive utility will never have a 0% failure rate. But when a bridge collapses, and people knew the bridge was at risk of collapse, and dividends were paid instead of spending every available dollar on upgrades...
They spend billions of dollars on maintenance each year, so obviously they prioritized fixing whatever all the equipment that they did actually fix that year.
PG&E knows about tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure which is past its useful life. Towers built in 1910s and 1920s which are so old it’s hard to even get up on them to patch them. Towers they don’t even know what year they were even built.
Rates are set in a political environment and those rates pay for supply, maintenance, clean energy enhancements, and dividends.
Why weren’t rates set higher? What percent of rate revenue was spent on shifts to renewables? Why not go after that spending as well as dividends? Dividends were 1/15th of the revenue, to put it in perspective.
As to your bridge analogy;
> The U.S. has been underfunding its highway system for years, resulting in a $836 billion backlog of highway and bridge capital needs. The bulk of the backlog ($420 billion) is in repairing existing highways, while $123 billion is needed for bridge repair, $167 billion for system expansion, and $126 for system enhancement (which includes safety enhancements, operational improvements, and environmental projects).
https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/roads/funding-futur...
The fact that there were generous warnings only compounds the self-neglect. Oxygen-dependent COPD is no joke. PG&E is not your healthcare provider.
It appears he did have a backup, but was not able to get to it in time.
People get hit criminally and civilly for things far lamer than this. Are some of those wrong? Yes. But interrupting what is supposed to be a continuous service is not acceptable, especially as the lack of maintenance was self-inflicted.
No, you don't.
Not everybody can do everything they need to be safe against collapse of society. Many thousands die every year for lack of the dollars safety would cost. Medical costs regularly bankrupt families. A backup generator, vs. food on the table? Clearly, the generator has to wait.
It is clear that power was cut over hundreds of square miles that were under no fire threat. People died just to give PGE leverage to force the state to indemnify them against their own negligence.
PGE provided a tent at the El Dorado County fairground, with outlets. For 100 people, for the entire county. All were taken by people's medical equipment, and many, many more turned away.
We have no way of knowing what would have happened without the power outages. PG&E's actions may have prevented a fire in this otherwise difficult situation, as they cannot magically fix the infrastructure with the snap of a finger. Sounds like I should thank the judge though!
If they don't want to be in the utility business, California should confiscate it from them and sell it to somebody else who does.
I’m not saying there are easy fixes but I don’t think flippantly disregarding concern has the right approach either.
People with life essential medical equipment which runs on electrical power absolutely must ensure they have a backup power supply, be ready to activate it, and have a plan should an outage continue beyond their backup capacity.
Power goes out, whether it’s a blackout, brownout, planned maintenance, or otherwise. Everyone should have plans for managing during an outage.
People who aren’t capable of planning this out for themselves should have a social worker doing it for them, and obviously people need to be capable of operating their life essential equipment at home, or they need someone on hand to operate it for them.
I mean - how can “you die if the power goes out” be an acceptable risk to send someone home to? I assume that would be medical malpractice.
In reality, and in this case, a backup was on hand. Something else happened/failed in the intervening moments which contributed to this person’s death.
IMO the story is being weaponized irresponsibly against PG&E because they make a good target which sells a lot of clicks.
Trees did not just start growing near power lines last year. PGE have decades of data, and know in excruciating detail what consequences to expect from sending out billion-dollar dividends instead of performing maintenance.
Extortionate behavior should be addressed by law enforcement. There should be a murder investigation for everybody killed by this action, and the executives responsible charged personally.
Medicaid has no control over power distribution system maintenance but can absolutely foresee occasional unscheduled electrical outages occurring.
Just like many essential buildings, like hospitals, provision their own electrical backup systems, so too must individuals who medically rely on power.
Here’s a site talking about emergency preparedness for households with children which require medical monitoring including equipment which requires AC power;
https://complexchild.org/articles/2011-articles/december/pow...
Keeping someone alive is sometimes tough work. There is a high level of individual responsibility here for someone who is not in an assisted living facility.
Being granted a monopoly in exchange for operating a public utility creates a serious -- some would say sacred -- obligation.
How essential services are provisioned is a social choice. Formulaire notions like "Medicaid should do it" are not useful. Medicaid is staffed by people who understand medical services. Power distribution networks are staffed by people who understand power. It is far from clear that the former are the right people to be making choices about the latter.
It happens that my mother is in a semi-assisted facility. They had no power for three days, no backup power, and residents are not allowed generators. The phones there didn't work without power.
not discounting the responsibility on the utility in any way, but a faulty kettle would have been as deadly.
The penalty & probation supervision for their felony convictions over the San Bruno fire, not the bankruptcy—both are PG&E cases in San Francisco.
The entire energy sector are allowed to operate in these terrible ways because they have local governments supporting their terrible business models.
Price of energy hasn't gone down because there is no actual competition. Without these large government subsidies, there'd be little to no action to "be green" Even though Nuclear is the greenest (taken every factor in and equalizing the playing field). But I digress.
PG&E isn't the only problem. Atlanta had a blackout recently. NY had one. This issue isn't isolated. It's central planning at it's worst.
In my opinion, electricity needs to now become a government function. The more people install solar panels and batteries, the less profitable electricity is going to be.
It's a death spiral eventually completely dominated by the fixed costs of keeping the network connected and enough electricity production in reserve rather than the variable costs of baseline consumption.
There’s nothing deregulated about forbidding futures contracts.
There are really two alternatives here. One is that solar+storage never manages to provide cheaper electricity than existing nighttime baseload generation methods. Then the big change is that time of day metering becomes cheaper during the day (when solar generates) and more expensive at night (when baseload generators justify their existence). But that isn't going to destroy the power grid, it's not a fundamental change, it just changes the pricing.
The other alternative is that solar+storage does become cheaper than baseload generation methods even at night. In that case the power grid is destroyed because most people simply stop needing it. It becomes cheaper to over-spec the solar panels on your roof and the batteries (or whatever) in your basement to handle unusual conditions, or suffer not being able to run your air conditioner one or two days out of the year, than to pay the full cost of operating the power grid just to handle those one or two days a year. But in that case there is nothing to privatize/nationalize/whatever because the residential power grid simply ceases to exist.
Despite massive wealth, the California government's slide into 3rd-world standards has been pretty fast.
Having someone to blame is fun politics, but it's not going to get California out of the mess. It's not even a fire management problem. California covers a region of the world that has been having decades or centuries-long drought phases for millennia. The last few decades were built up during the good times. It's getting dryer now, and there will be more fires throughout this dry phase, however many years or decades it lasts.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/10/11/photos-saddleridge-fi...
I would say they accomplished a whole damn lot. People are going to be a million times more prepared for the next one.
Nursing homes being without a power backup is an unnaceptable state of affairs.
The amount of people that seemed utterly lost about what to do without power is disturbing. People should be more prepared. Especially given last year's events.
It's rediculous people are blaming PG&E for this. I think they're an awful company but they made the right call here and seem to be acting amicably.
A short notice and smooth event was basically impossible given that even government agencies don't know the right numbers to call.
It was 40-50 percent near Palo Alto, including in areas where power was cut. That’s actually relatively high by California standards.
Outside of the wet season, much of California is a desiccated tinderbox.
Shocking! (not really)
Shutting power as winds approach hurricane force is very sensible. Here (bay area) this week, the forecast was for winds in the 30mph range with gusts into the 40s. Windy yes, but hardly a storm.
The kicker is the winds never arrived. PG&E shutdown was scheduled for noon Wednesday but there no wind at all. So they postponed it to 8pm. At 8pm, no wind either. No further news from PG&E. At 11pm they cut power. Still no wind (maybe gusting to 2mph). Overnight - no wind. Next morning - no wind.
Nature really called them out here to highlight it was purely a political move. PG&E postponed the shutdown a few times waiting for the wind but when it never arrived they shut power down anyway.
Winds over 60mph on the ridges. https://www.wunderground.com/dashboard/pws/KCALOSGA177/graph...
We had 40+mph winds at our home all night. Based on previous experience the power would have gone out anyhow.
In the spring we had a tree take down the power line in front of the house and continue arcing. Thank goodness it was a day after rain and calm wind. On a night like this recent night, the mountain would have been ash.
For those that live in rural, fire-prone areas power outages are often fairly normal and the big danger is burning. If someone hears 4th of July fireworks being set off where I live there's a real risk of a vigilante mob. The tradeoff of power cuts seems reasonable.
There has been reporting that preventive power cuts are generally a good idea, but highly unpopular unless they are really targeted. This is what San Diego Gas & Electric learned: put in equipment to enable more targeted cuts and monitoring. I expect this is where PG&E will need to invest next.
Winds were 30-40 mph in the hills in the north and east bay late Wednesday and early Thursday. Mt Diablo had 70+ mph gusts.
The wind forecasts were never for the low elevations.
My understanding is that burying power lines is cheaper in the long run and less prone to failures (trees falling, cars smashing the utility poles, ...). Therefore, why can't this be done in the US and especially California? Or is it already done for new developments? If no, is it because of regulations?
From what I remember, PG&E is notorious for "procrastinating" on maintenance of its wires, as well. Wires need to be regularly checked and have nearby foliage trimmed to a safe distance. Keeping up on this maintenance would reduce the risk of fires, but California is big and the utility has decided it doesn't want to do that. So the poles are more dangerous than they should be.
Since PG&E has no competitors, and new competitors cannot form, PG&E has no reason to invest further in its infrastructure.
So by default, I would assume that electricity distribution should be a government function, but electric generation could probably work fine as a set of non-monopolies competing to feed energy into the publicly-run grid at the lowest prices.
Just a line item...
I don’t know about PG&E specifically, but in my region deregulation led to an attritted workforce and suspension of capital improvements. Shockingly, the infrastructure is a dumpster fire 20 years later.
Paradise (Camp fire) was sufficiently west that I think its own power lines did not travel through Natl Forest however if I'm not mistaken it was hit by fire from the east (pushed by a wind out of the east), further up into the Sierra, and almost certainly there power lines were in the wilderness.
This is course a bummer given the past effort to provide power to those areas, but maybe it's okay to acknowledge mistakes.
We're in California and are in a community that was affected by PG&E's power shut off.
I think one problem in California is that since I first arrived in the 1980s, the population has grown from 22 to close to 40 mln. And given, again, US cultural proclivities, there's a significant number of people who'd love to move out into at least near-wilderness - but they still expect to be provided with their utilities. Some may be fine living off-grid - but not others. And there's no way, in the US, you can tell them that they can't have their cake and eat it too. Especially if they're rich and some portion of those people moving out into their dream home in or near wilderness are rich and figure that entitles them to having it all.
Why shouldn't PG&E pay for it? They blew their safety budget on executive bonuses. Hell, look at how many hundreds of millions PG&E spends annually on stock buybacks to appease the shareholders.
I don't support other utility customers paying for that. I doubt you do either. That's who pays if PG&E foots the bill.
Define wilderness, there are plenty of people not in dense urban cities in California.
I doubt you do either.
When you assume you make an ass out of "u" and "me". I think rural electrification is important. More important than stock buybacks, executive compensation, and astronomically expensive lobbyists like Willie Brown. Rural service and higher rates don't necessarily go hand in hand.
That said I'd be more okay with paying increased rates for more comprehensive service than I am with paying increased rates to fund PG&E negligence.
Isn't that exactly what just happened and exactly what everyone's complaining about?
This isn't a can't be done safely problem, it's a private firm gambling to squeeze out more short-term profits and hoping it doesn't blow up in their face problem.
The particular problem though is wildfires and they're more slowly caught, and can become larger and more destructive, the further away they are from population.
For example, Santa Clara runs their own public utility[2]. The average resident pays about 10.4 cents per KWh. That's about 30 percent less than rates PG&E charges.
Also, their energy is greener and their infrastructure is better maintained.
The problem with for profit utilities is that they are incentivized to keep things as lean as possible. They neglect maintenance of their infrastructure and use that money for bonuses and dividends. You can see that played out here [1].
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/PG-E-diverted-safety-...
They aren't incentivised to be excessively lean. The incentive structure for someone who has spent a fortune on expensive capital investment is to maintain it.
There is no point incentive to build a vast system of poles and wires then letting it degrade over time.
Anyway, it won't be capitalist incentives at work; it will be something in the details of the regulations. In Australia, due to poor market regulations, we have the opposite problem where our utilities spend far too much on grid maintenance.
Sure there is: short-term profit.
Making a long-term investment to squeeze it for unsustainable short term profits is genuinely stupid. There is no incentive to do that. They would make more money milking the grid for long-term profits.
If you've got a better name for it I'm all ears. But PG&E has been neglecting their infrastructure at least since the early 90s when their lackadaisical approach to clearing brush led to the Sierra Fire in '94.
Keep in mind that PG&E's record keeping was so lax that they blew up a neighborhood in San Bruno after increasing the pressure on a gas pipeline without knowing if the line could support such pressure. Apparently PG&E also got sued a couple years ago by shareholders alleging gross mismanagement and demanding safety reforms. I'd say there's plenty of stupid and greed at PG&E to go around.
'Incompetence' would be the normal choice. And standard run-of-the mill incompetence has nothing to do with profit motives or incentives.
You can get incompetence with any governance structure; it isn't related to profit motives. If they are being sued by their own shareholders that is quite solid evidence that it isn't capitalist incentives that are the problem.
Generally the costs are lower and service levels higher than privately-held corporations.
Granted, most munis don't have to deal with long-distance distribution, though there are four federal power administrations which do, the Bonneville, Southeastern, Southwestern, and Western Area Power Administrations. Also the Tennessee Valley Authority.
That really seems to be the only thing that matters here, given that the issue is about the liabilities fires due to lack of line maintenance in forested areas.
[0] https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/blog/private-insurance-vs-m...
The interesting question is when you got something that you can't compete with directly like a train line but can compete using other methods like buses or airlines. In that case there might be more incentive to a train line operator to give a good service because of the competition.
Other people are saying it's a heavily regulated utility. The state of California is saying how much it can make and what it can do with the money it makes. They point to how much it's invested in solar power. They'd also claim the state didn't mandate work on power infrastructure maintenance - indeed it made it harder to cut back trees. It made it harder for residence to clear trees but still allowed them to build amidst a large amount of fuel. That the state basically used PG&E as a cut out for it's own ends - i.e. we're not raising taxes we're just allowing PG&E to raise rates and then mandating what PG&E has to build out.
One of those two stories has to be wrong, correct?
Why? Because PG&E has fought long and hard to keep their monopoly. They've gone so far as to keep the Ayatollah of the Assembly on their payroll. Marin got a very neutered version of Marin Clean Energy as a result of PG&E and San Francisco still hasn't been able to sneak public power legislation past PG&E.
With this in mind does it really make sense to pause society and hope one never happens again? Doesn't it make more sense to mitigate the risk directly, more controlled burns, more brush clearing. Surely the cost of these things is less than the cost of e.g. turning off power for days and would carry less risk overall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x78XGElU2I0
https://www.chademo.com/technology/v2x/
https://insideevs.com/news/342354/charin-ccs-combo-standard-...
In previous blackouts I have connected a kilowatt inverter to the car and used it to power stuff. It worked great and it was very useful.
California pays a much higher $ per kwh of electricity compared to many other states in the US, and I'm guessing 'you get what you pay for' doesn't apply when in this case.
If you tell someone what they have to do, what they can charge and how much they can make then what's the distinction but that entity and part of the government?
It is not like you have had a market choice to decide to payout dividends to shareholders or to maintain transmission lines.
Elevators and public transit instead of exurban sprawl out into the redwoods solves the issue completely.
The real problem is incentivizing people to make it happen.
Their business model has been mostly static for many years. In that time, the whole business can ossify, and only now -- when the environment has changed -- do they need to adapt. And they aren't prepared to do it.
Or, yes, buying a generator. Looks like Home Depot has a good selection.
If you want a generator that will run for weeks on its own you need to look for "off grid".
That newspaper no longer exists. During my three years as a reporter there, I carefully avoided ever having to write PG&E stories, which were a near-fetish for the publisher, Bruce Brugmann.
But maybe he was right about giving public ownership a real shot in the Bay Area, even if he was annoying as shit about it at times. (It should also be noted that he was from a heartland state where public power is common.)
1. A single government-mandated monopoly provider everywhere with no competition.
2. Government provider.
Conspiracy theory (which is shared by everyone I've talked to): PG&E turned off the power to make a political statement that they shouldn't be liable for wildfires.
Edit: by "not be liable", I mean passing legislation to achieve this.
Decades of pretending that liability didn't exist just caught up with them.
They wound-up liable because they gutted their tree-trimming operations and paid the difference in dividends. That is something that definitely makes you liable regardless of whether the original thing is an acceptable risk.
Now, it's hard to if this is indeed a "bail us out or we'll shut down at every strong breeze" statement or whether they are legitimately worried the lines they neglected actually now ignite at every strong breeze.
Either way, I think the average Californian justifiably hates this company. But it seems unlikely things will change.
California is a strict liability state when it comes to utility line fires: even if the utility isn't negligent, the utility must pay damages.
> They wound-up liable because they gutted their tree-trimming operations and paid the difference in dividends.
This is open to debate; it might be good evidence of negligence. But evidence of negligence doesn't matter.
Edit: Note, the Camp Fire has bankrupted them. They are bankrupt, in bankruptcy proceedings. They are also on criminal (not civil) probation. None of this stopped their stock from rising after the recent events - where a more naive me might expect their stock holders' money would be forfeit once they reached the level of bankruptcy (unsecured debtors and all).
Someone else pointed out that your statements about deaths are false. So I'll point out that California's electricity isn't 22¢/kWh. The California average is 16.06¢.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/
States that have it worse:
Hawaii: 26.05¢
Alaska: 19.10¢
Connecticut: 17.55¢
Massachusetts: 17.12¢
Rhode Island: 16.42¢
New Hampshire: 16.17¢Not sure how they come up with such a number, but California is large and has many electricity providers.
But for PG&E in the Bay Area, let me quote from my PG&E electric bill here in hand:
Daytime: $0.53476 (delivery) + $0.25069 (generation) = $0.785/kWh
Part-peak: $0.28917 (delivery) + $0.10643 (generation) = $0.396/kWh
Night: $0.13578 (delivery) + $0.03968 (generation) = $0.175/kWh
The cheapest rate is 17.5 cents per kWh, that is late at night (currently after 11pm, soon to be changed to be after midnight).
Daytime rate is 78.5 cents per kWh! This is PG&E in the Bay Area.
PG&E doesn't serve all of California. While we're being pedantic, PG&E's (non-low-income) rates are generally closer to $0.20-$0.30 per kWh. Their rates are a bit too complex to easily summarize but during peak hours you are pretty much guaranteed to be paying more than $0.20/kWh (and in many cases above $0.25/kWh). Off-peak rates are all above $0.12/kWh, generally more than $0.16/kWh.
47, not "thousands", assuming all the 2017 wildfire deaths were attributable to PG&E.
In 2015, PG&E only killed two people (Butte Fire).
PG&E also poisoned a few hundred in Hinkley (the town Erin Brockovich made famous). PG&E killed another 8 in San Bruno (and injured 58.
Oh gosh, let's not forget the Sierra Fire of 1994.
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/PG-E-Guilty-In-1994-Sier...
Edit: Oh gosh, downvotes. Do you guys really need links to all the blood on PG&E's hands?
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/10160680-181/the-camp-fir...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tubbs_Fire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butte_Fire
You're right, and if you take a look at what I wrote I did not mention the Tubbs Fire. Plenty of folks have died at the hands of PG&E, and I mistakenly added a link to it however.
I mean, just off the top of my head, I'd put Venezuela's power company as worse than PG&E. More people have died from their power problems than from PG&E's. Just in March of 2019, the entire country was without power for 10 days.
What should PG&E do now? California is a leader on climate change and needs strong statewise utilities as partners.
Schwarzenegger won in the replacement election, in a three way race with 48% of the vote.
2003 California gubernatorial recall election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_gubernatorial_recal...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-13/texas-pow...
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/pge-underground-power...
Long story short, PG&E would rather spend the money on executive compensation.
https://sites.utexas.edu/energyinstitute/files/2016/11/UTAus...
PG&E has 106,000 miles of total distribution:
https://www.pge.com/en_US/about-pge/company-information/prof...
Which works out to less than $2 billion, so the $30 billion would account for at least an alternate (if not necessarily safer) system.
(My initial thought on posting was that $30 billion would not be enough, though the first read of actual per-mile costs, neglecting per MW-mile, seemed to suggest otherwise.)
https://psc.wi.gov/Documents/Brochures/Under%20Ground%20Tran...
That doesn't seem so unusually dense to me. And the pictures I saw online of the burned houses all have the foundations reasonably far away from each other. These were houses with yards around them, not row homes put right up next to each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise,_California#/media/Fi...
The fire front isn't leaping house to house. It's being blown, often miles, by fierce, fire-driven and -generated, winds.
This is a demonstration of ember-driven ignition:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_Vh4cQdH26g
And the phenomenon in the Paradise / Camp Fire:
That's reporter bias. I'm not saying it's right or wrong but to throw that in there is clear bias.