Electric-Car Owners Hard Hit by California Power Shutdown | Hacker News Reader

Electric-Car Owners Hard Hit by California Power Shutdown

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34 pointselorant30 comments

This sounds like something a developing country would do. How about not clearing trees next to our power lines and just shut down instead, because it's easier?

I have never heard of a power company in any developed country handling the problem like this.

The trick to understanding America is to realise that it's the most wealthy technologically advanced country in the world and a declining "developing" colonized nation at the same time occupying the same space with tiny fractal boundaries between the two.

The problem is that some states like California have decided that if a fire is started as a result of the power lines interacting with anything, even as a result of an accident/severe weather, the power company is 100% responsible for the cost of cleanup. Which of course means that for a power company, the only 100% logical decision is to shut off power any time there is a strong wind - why the hell would any company ever risk a multi-million dollar bill for putting out fires if they can just simply switch off the power for a while? They can do their dilligence and clear out any branches near the powerlines, but accidents still happen and as long as the power company is held 100% responsible financially for those I don't see how they could not shut down power during severe weather.

The power company that got nailed with the $30 billion (or whatever it was) judgment for possibly causing a huge destructive fire is publicly traded. This matters because if shareholders had to eat that loss, it would destroy the valuation of the company and stock would plummet. Execs and board of directors get a lot of pay as stock and options, so cratering the stock isn't acceptable. So instead they passed the loss onto ratepayers i.e. innocent customers have a surcharge for decades to pay for a fire caused by utility negligence (and whether the utility did in fact cause the fire was never proven one way or the other, but it's easy to create a villain for juries to blame). We need to get a grip on our insignificance compared to natural forces. Wildfires are as inevitable as hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, etc. Humans can't stop them, but we can be prepared to flee and/or adapt to the resulting changes to the environment. Humans dominate Earth because we make plans and we adapt to whatever the planet throws at us.

The company, PG+E, went bankrupt. The shareholders did eat a big loss. They might still be incompetent but it’s not like they’re making huge profits off this shutdown.

The alternative option is to have competition. If customers could just switch to another power provider, PG&E would be far more interested in maintenance since it would affect long term profits. Many people would prefer a more expensive service if it was more reliable.

Personally, I think we should be looking into ways to increase the resiliency of our power grid, and that involves making it possible for companies to compete in production and/or delivery.

> I have never heard of a power company in any developed country handling the problem like this.

The power company has declared bankruptcy and at that point it's not free to make costly business decisions as it likes.

They had to declare bankruptcy because of how California decides to govern itself.

Maybe we don't put the sole responsibility on them to prevent fires.

Maybe we don't have our power grid powered by a monopoly.

Maybe we have a distributor and multiple providers for the grid, like Texas.

There are no power companies in the developed world with the same geography and climate conditions.

Power lines in California run through natural/old growth forests that are bigger than some countries. The Westin is extremely rough and rugged. There are seasonal Gale force winds that can blow sparks and ashes dozens of miles. It's simply not environmentally or economically feasible to clear cut a sufficiently large fire safety zones around all of the power lines or to bury them underground.

Due to transmission losses, it's also not yet feasible to go around the forests.

Although if you do have charge in your battery, electric cars can act as a backup power supply for your home to help mitigate power outages like these. The CCS and CHAdeMO standards have roadmaps for vehicle-to-home protocols:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x78XGElU2I0

https://www.chademo.com/technology/v2x/

https://insideevs.com/news/342354/charin-ccs-combo-standard-...

And do-it-yourselfers have been installing datacenter UPSs, when they can find one whose battery-bank voltage is similar to the car's traction-pack voltage:

http://www.priups.com/others/Doug/index.html

http://www.priups.com/others/charlie/index.html

I've never seen sparks on power lines except when trees touched them. Is that what causes all this? They're cutting power because they can't cut trees fast enough?

They cut trees back as standard maintenance. What I have read is that they reduced these maintenance programs as cost savings measure and this is the result.

Since the company is being held liable for huge amounts due to fires caused by their lack of maintenance the logical business decision for them is to just not provide power when the risk of sparking a fire is too high.

It is better for the shareholders to just not provide power than to pay the fines.

This really sounds like when you start just leveling criminal charges at the board because neither of these options are acceptable.

And declaring the Directors not "fit and proper persons" If not mandatory nationalisation.

As I understand it, PG&E is a weird situation, as they're a for-profit but heavily regulated monopoly with no competitors. So, in terms of wildfires their options are:

1. Spend their savings on network maintenance. Not possible as they've got zero money having been liable for a bunch of costly wildfires.

2. Stop serving loss-making wilderness customers who need costly-to-maintain cables run through forests. Not possible due to legal service obligation.

3. Raise prices for loss-making customers who need long runs of costly-to-maintain cables. Not possible due to legal regulation of prices.

4. Raise prices for all customers, to pay for better network maintenance. Not possible due to legal regulation of prices.

5. Transfer loss-making customers in fire-prone areas to competitors who can serve them more efficiently. Not possible, as they have no competitors (except much more expensive options like diesel generators)

6. Go out of business. Also seemingly somehow impossible, despite having their finances wiped out by all the wildfires they've caused.

7. Pay for network upgrades/bankruptcy by cutting executive bonuses. Legally possible, and maybe politically popular, but it's nowhere near enough money, and what sort of chump would take a job where their pay depended on solving financial problems with their origins 20 years ago, in political issues outside of their control?

8. Make the problems worse, in the hopes massive outages will motivate politicians to give them cash, let them raise prices, or let them drop customers. Or maybe just nationalise them to put them out of their misery <--- YOU ARE HERE

It’s very difficult to match the capability of “carrying a jerrycan of petrol” with current electrical technology.

I think it's much easier to make your own electricity than to make your own petrol if it comes to that.

Pyrolysis (at a reasonably large scale) can make acceptable diesel out of plastic, biowaste, or cooking oil.

I’m no chemical engineer, but just the fact that I’ve never heard that word tells me I’m not doing that in my garage after an emergency. I’m going with self-generated electricity. That I know several ways of doing, from common household materials.

Bio-diesel was a big thing 10+yr ago when restaurants used to have waste oil they had to pay to get rid of. Now they all the restaurants have some recycler that comes around and picks it up (who presumably sells it in bulk to someone who processes it into something). A diesel engine will burn basically any oily substance if you can find a way to get it into the engine without clogging up the plumbing bits. Nobody does it anymore because it's not cheap anymore and environmentalist circles have shifted to electric or anti-car whereas 10+yr ago biofuel was seen as a way to not drill in the arctic or spill oil in the gulf.

> I’m no chemical engineer

I am a chemist. :)

Its standard petro-chemistry as long as you NEVER put PVC plastic into the digester - then you get dioxins. Which are nasty.

In principle, you can distil the diesel and capture the methane gaseous fraction to heat the next batch.

The real challenge is the variable inputs has a huge impact on the diesel recovery - which is why you need some scale to smooth out the variances. On a small scale its often not economical.

But farmers do this all the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolysis

Out of interest, how would you do this, and how much power do you expect to generate?

If it came down to it, I could make one of the world's most inefficient electrical generators with some wire and some magnets. More specifically, we have potential electrical generators all around us. Anything with an electrical motor can potential be reversed to generate.

So I don't have anything specific in mind, nor any numbers to work with, but I'm confident I'd figure something out. I'm a likely to have more success with that than I am making diesel in my garage.

You'd need a few machine shop tools to make your own generator, as well as access to magnets and other specific materials (iron laminations, etc), as well as a good understanding of magnetics. I think you underestimate what 'world's least effecient generator' means - if energy suddenly became scarce, I wouldn't spend my time to make something that would probably make a few watts at best.

Your best bet, if you really want electrical power in this scenario, is to reuse a motor or car alternator. Now the biggest issue is a source of power - unless you have access to a flowing river, you're pretty much stuck with wind. And here, you'll be limited by your ability to make efficient blades. In fact, your best power source might be you, using a bike-mounted generator. I've though about makig one for fun, but it's a lot of effort to go through, to make a device that would probably make 150W.

Realistically, IMHO in this scenario I would abandon electronic devices and stick to hand tools.

It's much harder and more expensive stock up on electricity thank liquid fuel if you know your source is going to be unreliable.

It's not green but owners in fire-prone areas should be keeping a generator plus fuel on hand to charge up if they need to evacuate.

You could even put the fuel and generator in the back of your Tesla pickup and charge while you drive! Except I'm sure it won't drive while plugged in.

Given the fires at the oil storage tanks in the Bay Area, I wonder if CA will shut down petroleum infrastructure during high fire risk.

This is why "plug in hybrid" is such an attractive setup. You can get a decent EV only range, and then hybrid like MPG once that's exhausted.

As long as you can get gas or electricity you can keep moving.

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