PG&E Says It Could Impose Blackouts in California for a Decade
wsj.com
wsj.com
My question is if it's cheaper to fire-proof everyone's house, or to have everyone go and buy solar for their properties, or to just accept some people and properties are going to burn in a fiery inferno from time to time.
A quick Google shows that there were $7B in insurance claims for the Camp Fire. At $15K per install of solar, that's ~500k homes. Apparently fire-proofing a house has similar costs. There are something like 7M homes in California. Many of those are in urban areas, so let's say there are 2M in fire-prone areas.
It actually seems worthwhile to just pay for the upgrades.
I really hope PG&E can cut down the time needed for these outages.
We’re under no political obligation to keep enabling the private control of our collectively built and maintained communities.
When do the hand outs to these screw ups stop?
“Nothing more” is quite a serious stretch that you won’t be able to prove, and that destroys the rest of your argument
PG&E is trying to hold the state hostage. Want us to pay for fires? Fine, we'll cut power to danger zones that weren't economically viable anyway.
https://www.readyforwildfire.org/prepare-for-wildfire/get-re...
Also in a community, not everyone (or maybe, very few) has a 100 feet room to clear and maintain.
Edit: Even if you do have 100 feet to maintain, go on a two week vacation and see how many leaves gather.
You don't need a 100-foot break to protect your house from burning leaves. The 100-foot break is to protect your house from the incinerating radiation of torching trees.
You can technically even have trees within the 100-foot break. The goal is to prevent a situation where individually burning trees accelerate combustion in a feedback loop. If they're burning more slowly they're radiating less energy and thus you don't need as much space to the house.
>>Sometimes, that channel of upward-flowing air can collapse in one small spot. Then the hot air in the atmosphere plummets through the weak point. “You get a very fast wind moving down toward the ground, and when it hits the ground, it spreads like jelly slopping across the floor,” Williams said. “It can also send white-hot air out in front of the flame, incinerating the landscape before the actual flame has arrived. It can cause forests to spontaneously combust without coming into contact with a flame.”
When this upward-moving air pattern stays strong, it creates other kinds of problems. It can loft burning wood high into the atmosphere, carrying it many miles away from the center of the fire. When this debris finally lands, it can start new fires. In 2011, Williams lived dozens of miles from the edge of the blaze, yet he remembers semi-burned sticks falling like drizzle in his backyard. “These were twigs that you hold in your hand and say, ‘Wow, this actually weighs something. This made it 35 miles in the air,’” he said." https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/californ...
Even maintenance divisions that routinely trim trees and foliage growing up on high voltage lines must cover lots of ground because everything is so scattered (they sometimes even use helicopters wielding huge saws). Preventative measures like this consume labor and profit margins, and apparently aren't always sufficient (Camp Fire).
A neighborhood in a dry area equipped with its own energy storage and generation assets would likely never be completely vacant - at least one resident would always be present to sound the alarm in the event of a Powerwall or solar short prompted fire. Even so, smoke detectors are probably connected on the web or allocated emergency frequencies? Fire hydrants are legally required to be near homes. Fire stations shouldn't be far.
A decentralized grid fire outbreak wouldn't be up a dirt road in the mountains - paved road access to a neighborhood would diminish response time relative to what it would require to scramble expensive firefighting aircraft.
A residential transformer is bringing it down from nearly 14 kV...
While PG&E has been somewhat deficient in maintaining their network they have 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.
Yes, otherwise they'd just keep burning down the state because of their preference for extracting profits over safety maintenance like they did the last two years, instead of blackouts to prevent fires. But, bad as the blackouts are, the food are worse, so insofar as the blackouts result from PG&E coming to grips with the liability impacts of causing fires, they are a good thing.
A better thing would have been PG&E not underfunding maintenance for several years, but that would have meant less dividends for shareholders.
There are standards for how close tree limbs can be to a power line. PG&E asked for money to meet those standards. PG&E accepted that money. Then PG&E didn't meet those standards.
Sure acts of god, environmental changes, and other unusual issues start fires. However California has been hot and dry periodically and the existing standards provide good protection... it's just that PG&E is not meeting them.
Well run power systems start few fires, but its not zero fires.
Fair comparisons would be to San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison. Both have had selective power shutoffs in the recent wind. Also, note that SCE did not power down some lines and it appears their equipment caused a wildfire:
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-18/saddleri...
SDG&E has been using public safety power shutoffs for some time, and has a pretty good system of sectionalizers to make the outage areas more granular than PG&E's. That said, they don't have anywhere near the T&D infrastructure of PG&E.
What are options for Californians to communicate concerns to state and local legislators?
What you'd get is a bunch of small companies competing. And, human nature being what it is, at least some of them would scrimp on maintenance and tree trimming, and hope that they'd continue to be lucky. And some of those wouldn't be lucky, and you'd still get fires.
The difference would be that when Billy Bob's Power Company set off a multi-billion-dollar fire, it would just fold. Sally Sue's Power Company would buy up their assets (but not their liabilities) for pennies on the dollar, and you'd be left hoping that Sally Sue did better at maintenance than Billy Bob.
Additionally, and I think this is non-debatable in the USA (though I'm up for debate, and to be wrong), C-levels have their primary and sole obligation to shareholders. When push comes to shove, and tough decisions need to be made, in the USA it is always in the interest of shareholders unless mandated by the government. Sometimes better businesses push for that mandate, so they can remain competitive and not be flaming piles of shit unable to compete... [2].
PG&E executives, right now, can use this (shareholder returns) as disguise for moral ineptitude in their social circles allowing them to escape ridicule as monsters.
No amount of competition will fix these problems and incentivize the correct behaviour for a _utility_ as long as they're obligated to return dividends before moral decency.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_multiplier#United_State...
[2] This is also a vector for abuse by monopolies and oligopolies; where, they lobby for regulation which creates a barrier to entry (in the market) insurmountable to new organizations and institutions.
No. Shareholders have a residual claim. Corporations have to obey the law, pay their debts, and pay their other obligations first. Shareholders may only claim from what remains.
The fact is that many Californians are served by an under-maintained aging grid, nominally maintained by a public-private utility with regulated pricing. PG&E is thrashing because they can't raise rates and they can't cut off customers and they don't have a maintenance time machine, so they are made a whipping boy for not solving the impossible.
At least this is focusing our attention on our electrical grid issues. There's major fire risk, but solar demands modernization as well. Let's hope this crisis does not go to waste.
2014 1.45B
2015 888M
2016 1.41B
2017 1.66B
Maybe they could use some of that to a) not burn down california and b) provide their customers with reliable power.
The weasel words like 'fact', and 'aging grid' and 'whipping boy' stand no water here.
PG&E needs to be dissolved.
Removing all the profit puts a couple 2-3 year band-aid over the fact that PG&E's infrastructure recovery requests make up the bulk of their cases.
CPUC sees all their projections, plans, requests, and expenses, compensation when they come to them for rate cases. They also make decisions on executive compensation and incentive plans. Whether or not you make the assumption that CPUC is in cahoots with IOUs, what changes when you liquidate PG&E, when the new boss is just the old boss' boss?
You're probably better off trying to rebuild some generation system avoiding transmission lines in risky areas.
> Maybe they could use some of that to a) not burn down california and b) provide their customers with reliable power.
Unfortunately they cannot because they are literally bankrupt.
> PG&E needs to be dissolved
Dissolving PG&E does not magically cut back vegetation or modernize the grid. That's the whipping boy: it's like blaming Exxon for climate change. It directs the energy of our anger to impotent punishment for past misdeeds, without solving today's problems.
CA's electrical grid has maintenance debt and underinsured fire risk. I think you're saying that my utility bill is more than enough to cover that - if so, that's great news! I'd love to be convinced that Calfornia can have reliable safe power for no more than I'm paying now.
But from what I've read, PG&E has a backlog of work and liability risk, plus limited ability to raise rates. So either our bills or taxes go up. And when then do, hopefully it also provides for the grid modernization necessary for climate change. (And wringing out the PG&E rent seekers would be fine by me too.)
There is this false dichotomy woven in your arguments equating rate increases with safety measures.
Did I say that there is magic in a PG&E dissolution? If the organizational structure of PG&E can't use the resources it has (people, money, influence) to operate the grid safely, someone else needs to take over. When someone is systematically lousy at their job, they get fired.
Your rhetoric is riddled with logical fallacies, you aren't making analogies that explain your reasoning. You are making straw men and putting words in my mouth.
So, multiple competing electric distribution systems with the total fire danger being worse than that of the worst maintained? That would be...very, very bad, strictly worse than the status quo.
If you mean basically competing retail providers using PG&E’s distribution infrastructure, then that doesn't change anything relevant from the status quo.
Make it a public service run by the California Resources Agency, answering to the same cabinet secretary as CalFire does, then you've got both the Agency Secretary and the Governor who have a pretty strong incentive to ensure that: (1) deferred maintenance doesn't cause massive fires, and (2) deferred maintenance doesn't require blackouts to prevent causing massive fires.
At least elected officials can be replaced.
The National Park Service.
> The federal government runs a deficit every year.
There are many reasons for that, but it doesn't matter in deciding who should control California's power system.
> State schools are always screaming for more funding and yet US children lag behind the world in math.
Change "and yet" to "because" and I'm right there with you.
> The same incentives that exist while private will exist if public: avoid punishment and avoid losing your job at all costs because it’s just a simple infrastructure company with a monopoly to be a utility.
A publicly traded company is legal bound to motives ulterior to what is best for the people of California.
Fake energy shortages was why Enron was able to charge exorbitant prices for electricity. You'd think that Americans would have that seared into their brains.
They are basically being penalized for being the straw that broke the camel's back.
Probably better maintenance would have helped some, but it's not like they bear all the blame for the destruction caused by the fire.
While anyone can start a wildfire, they are a large actor, which causes them. They make profit and could invest money to reduce their part in it, but as long that is an external cost, there is no economic motivation. That's not penalisation, it's economics.
Instead, the counterposition here seems to be that they should bear none of the blame, that any liability on their part is an injustice, and that refusing preventative maintenance and literally unplugging regions at risk is somehow an acceptable outcome. And that seems insane.
If they can't provide the service they're contracted to provide, they need to be regulated to be sure they do. The market has failed (and this isn't the first time PG&E got caught playing ridiculous games with regulators at the expense of customers, I was in California during the electricity crisis of 2000).
I can accept that perhaps some other parties should share some of the liability, but it seems completely unsupportable to claim that PG&E has no control over these risks and should be absolved of all responsibility.
And why not? If they get hit with a lawsuit, they can just jack up the rates or if citizens get too noisy, just shut them off for a week or two and show them who's the boss here. It's not like the customers can go elsewhere, and they are guaranteed 10% return on the money by the state by ROE rate arrangements, whatever happens. How many other "private" companies do you know that are guaranteed to make money no matter what?
We shouldn't have to choose between having blackouts or having wildfires. I can't think of any other first-world country where that happens.
I'm unsure but I think a lot of the issue is that feeder lines are often run through unfortunate areas. Fire prone, subject to high winds, and difficult to reach quickly. One suspects that under grounding is likely impossible. Instead they would need to reroute the lines. Then there are all the diffuse rural suburbs.
Brief article, has link to a PDF with 12 actual pictures in various counties.
They don't.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-e-knew-for-years-its-lines-c...