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.
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.
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 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.