California Can Expect Blackouts for a Decade, Says PG&E CEO

PG&E has been paying out dividends and executive bonuses instead of reinvesting in their infrastructure for years. And bought off a number of state politicians.

Now that climate change is creating conditions for the already wildfire-prone landscape of California to suffer more frequent and severe events, the power companies are washing their hands of it. Short of some major state or federal investment in upgrading energy infrastructure (like the green new deal), I wouldn’t expect that to change.

Ultimately it's a consequence of privatization. Power in California (and particularly PG&E) has been poorly managed for decades and focused on profit at the expense of safety measures, maintenance, etc. Even if these blackouts were a necessary safety measure, the way they were performed is a great example of this - they failed to properly notify customers, their website was broken, their services available for people with medical needs were inadequate, etc. The only way to explain how poorly it was handled is cost-cutting - they had plenty of time in advance to prepare for this.

I'm not really sure whether strong regulatory oversight of PG&E would fix things or if the state just needs to take over. I'm sure privatized power works in other places but I've lived in this state for decades and PG&E has always been a disaster company with a high death count that pays out to investors and execs aggressively.

Also South African here, I don't think it would be the same set of problems.

Seems like less of an incompetence/malice thing and more like a long history of bad strategies with grid infrastructure and power generation.

California has been constantly lowering its power stability throughout the day by shutting down reliable power plants for more intermittent solar and wind farms, without building the storage needed to avoid a blackout.

On the infrastructure side, it seems like there hasn't been much recent investment, and as power sources get further and further from the consumer the likelihood of a problem on some section of the lines increases.

Problems with power lines is an unfortunate reality of states where population centers are spread fairly far apart (we deal with this in Canada too). They're very expensive, especially long distance ones, so it can be hard to make incentives for infrastructure upgrades.

That's definitely a dimension of what's happening, none of the utilities have ever been cool with the nebulous liability presented by inverse condemnation. I think if anyone were in their shoes, they wouldn't be either.

PG&E knows that they're way less liable for damage caused by service interruptions than they see they are for being responsible for wildfires. They're doing what California wants them to even if it's not the intent of the law.

That's mainly why I think seizing PG&E doesn't solve your problems in the short/medium term. If the state owned their lines tomorrow, they haven't seen the last wildfire. I just don't see a scenario in which the state is as eager to pick as high a number when determining liabilities.

Purchased by who, though? The cost of living is already so high that only the wealthy will be buying them.

Or Tesla is going to sell heaps of Powerwalls and solar panels

It's not just alone the paths, but also near distribution stations, which are closer to urban areas where you can't do burns. Some lines are close to urban areas. Some areas can't be burned at all because the smoke always hits urban areas. And before you can burn you have to clear a long way from the power poles themselves so that they don't get damaged. And so on.

Controlled burns aren't all that controlled in reality. It's hard to do in places that are near human settlements.

(I do disaster planning work in Australia, and while I'm not an expert on bush fires or controlled burning by a long shot, I don't see why those things would be different between the two places).

PG&E maintains over 18,000 miles of transmission lines.

I was curious myself and this article seems to describe the issue well:

https://www.kqed.org/science/1927354/controlled-burns-can-he...

TL;DR it's a mix of human resources and education issues

There are a few related risks coming into play here, and controlled burns specifically along power transmission paths may not be appropriate.

Fire risk largely boils down to:

1. Ignition.

2. Fuel.

3. Weather.

4. Endangered resources, particularly but not exclusively structures.

5. Fire spread mechanisms.

Weather is largely beyond control, but includes both immediate (high winds, low humidities, high temps, dry soil and vegetation) and long-term (drought, flood-drought cycles) elements.

Ignition is where PG&E are largely concerned. Electric lines and other equipment can and have caused previous fires. Keep in mind that activities such as mowing grass, getting flat tyres, and hammering have caused previous major conflagrations. At this point, ignition is all but a certainty.

Fuel includes both plants and structures. Due to 80+ years of near-total wildfire suppression, and exacerbated by climate change and plant disease, fuel loads are extreme.

Wildfires are typically wind and ember driven, rather than simply being a wall of frame. Hotspots and ignition points occur outside the principle fire front by distances of hundreds to thousands of metres -- a quarter mile to several miles in Freedom Units.

Structures specifically are vulnerable to wildfire largely when embers impinge on structures or immediately surrounding flammables: exposed decks, surrounding brush, eves, and the like. If immediate ignition can be limited, through architictureal, landscaping, or treatment (sprinkler, foam, gel) mitigations, most structures are actually fairly resilient, though heat and smoke damage can still result. A near wall-of-flame approach can still shatter window glass and ignite interiors through radiant heat.

To your suggestion:

What safes transmission lines more than anything is clearing any nearby brush or trees. You don't need to burn it away, you simply need plant matter not to contact transmission wires and equipment. This is generally an easier, and far more controllable approach than even prescribed burns. Road and heliocopter-based tree-trimming and removal can and do work.

Prescribed burns can work on overall fuel load. This is a treatment applied generally at a regional level, affecting acres to miles of terrain. It's generally best done during or immediately after the wet season (to avoid uncontrolled burns), and away from structures, including power equipment.

One of the huge weaknesses of many utility systems is adequate monitoring. For all the industry advocacy I've seen of "smart meters" and the like, applying sensors, monitors, and active monitoring of transmission lines, gas likes, water systems, pipelines, etc., seems absolutely primative. Smart meters are revenue-generating (or loss-avoiding), equipment monitoring and controls apparently aren't seen that way.

Finally: construction and emergency planning around wildfire events clearly needs to be upgraded. The good thing about institutional and methodical approaches is that they can incorporate collective wisdom. The bad thing is that they are frequently reactive, conservative, and cruft-ridden. Early-stage approaches are often grossly inadequate, late-stage approaches are often geared at outdated assumptions, experience, and methods.

Paradise, CA, had a wildfire disaster plan. It was abolsolutely inadequate to the situation faced. The 2018 Camp Fire began at 6:33 am. First units were on scene slightly before 7 am. As of 7:34, 911 operators were still telling Paradise residents there was no immediate danger. (https://ktla.com/2019/02/01/first-camp-fire-911-calls-reveal...). The fire entered Paradise at 8 am, some 20k (16 miles) from the ignition point, and evacuation was not ordered until about 10 minutes later, and then for only sections of the town, as the fire response plan called for staged evacuations from specific zones. Residents died in their homes awaiting specific evacuation orders which either never came, were transmitted over inadequate channels, or were never received.

Video interview / docu covering many of these points: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gxt7L4x_NQo

As with other megadisasters, a huge contributing failing was of imagination and understanding by planners, authorities, responders, and residents, both in the moment and for years beforehand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Fire_(2018_Wildfire)

PG&E were directly responsible for part of the risks, and were absolutely negligent in this and other recent disasters such as the 2017 Northern California wildfires and 2010 San Bruno gas pipeline explosion. Though the ultimate fire was all but certainly inevitable.

I happened to travel along the next W-E highway north of Paradise in 2015, taking CA-32 and CA-36 from Chico, CA, to Mt. Lassen, in early October. I was struck by how bone-dry the forest was, as well as the temperatures (~90F) and humidity (low). Thankfully winds were nonexistent. But as someone who's spent a fair bit of time driving through remote, mountainous, and forested terrain, I felt distinctly uneasy and could directly perceive the risks. I was happy to be through the region, despite its beauty (and it really is a fantastic drive).

(I've done a number of rural-country road trips since 2000, and the memories of both fire scars and regions later consumed by major fires has left a strong impression.)

News of the Camp Fire three years later did not surprise me. The friend I'd visited in Chico was my first source of news of the fire via social media posts.

There are numerous videos of the Camp (and other) wildfires on YouTube. This is a well-produced synoptic overview by Vox which does a fair job of conveying the scope, scale, speed, and effects. Nothing but seeing in person can truly do the phenomenon justice.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=nwup6tA_OzQ

The liability risk from the fires is so high nobody is going to want to invest money in PG&E to fully clear all the fire prone lines. Also significantly raising prices is usually not allowed. Instead the existing share holders just try to bleed out whatever money they can.

When the free market does not work for a necessary public service it should be time for the government to take over.

Why would the public sector do better?

Well, like hundred years of propaganda starting from the Edward Bernays times convinced generations to accept this broken system of privately owned monopolies, which has this inherent perverse incentive to rent seek with no limit and neglect actual products or services they are supposed to provide.

You can, there are some fairly straightforward principles of building in these environments to prevent the spread of fires, the technique works. Now, getting folks to care about fixing their homes, when they are insured for such a small proportion of the costs they generate, is a taller order.

I think you're right on target with that observation. A compromise of limited liability and aggressive infrastructure upgrades may be the way to go.

Where did you infer that? Literally the first sentence is...

>The CEO of Pacific Gas & Electric Corp. told California energy regulators that the state will likely see blackouts for another 10 years like the one imposed last week that left as many as 800,000 customers without power.

Not only that, but it's impossible to claim that future blackouts won't be of the same magnitude. The blackouts are determined by weather patterns, none of which can be predicted this far out. It's entirely possible we get another weather forecast in a year that calls for the same region-wide high winds and dryness.

Conversely I find it interesting how quickly discussions of California quickly morph into the implication that there is little worth considering outside of the specific economy of 'silicon valley'.

I can think of no one - from the people I've known since Kindergarten from the people I've met in the last few months at my new job - who can be described as 'super-rich' or living in 'shanty-towns'. There are plenty of working class folk living quite comfortably but their stories don't fit into our 'outrage culture' so they are conveniently ignored.

This comment makes no sense. In developing countries power gets shut off, because there is not enough of it. CA actually over produces power. The shut off is a result of acute climate change and dry conditions that have affected the state. And unlike a developing country, a corporation in a developed country is responding to legal risk and shutting power down. This is exactly opposite of a developing country, where corporations face no legal risk of their actions at all

> high price communities where everything works, surrounded by large swaths of shanty towns where nothing works.

This isn't something that's only attributable to CA. Economically depressed towns relatively close to highly concentrated areas of wealth are all over America. Also, the scale of poverty in places like the south, Appalachia, the rust belt, rural America often meets or exceeds that of third-world countries.

Ya except Mill Valley and Sausalito in Marin county both experienced blackouts during the most recent shut down. Both of those cities being rather wealthy.

After living in LA for a few years, it certainly does feel exactly the way you describe within the city.

But those juxtapositions are literal blocks apart from each other. The Google campus is next door to a shanty town in Venice, and their security sic the police on them for any minor infractions (or just made up ones). Very similar situation with the redevelopment downtown.

It really does give you a bleak portrait of the tolerance for inhumanity within the context liberal Capitalism. California is ostensibly as “wacky leftist” as the US gets and it’s a bleak, cruel place in many regards.

California has one of the lowest average IQs of any state. If you remove the tech workers and the old-time republicans, there's not many big brains left to go around.

This never goes over well when I say it but, on my most recent trip through America driving across 5 States, much of what we drove through did not look like what I would consider developed. For hundreds of miles the only towns we'd come across had nothing but fast food places a gas station and usually multiple churches and then just houses, no schools, no grocery stores, no hospitals or doctors, though usually a pharmacy, and not much else for at least a hundred miles in any direction from these places. Between these would just be highways dotted with billboards telling you not to kill yourself or smoke meth. You could always see the 'towns' coming about 50 miles away though, first you'd see the massive McDonald's sign in the distance, then maybe a Burger king sign or a gas station sign, a massive monolith spiking 100m into the sky. A lot of it felt really bleak.

> Small enclaves of super-rich

Indeed, and these same people often constantly prattling on about progressive politics.