PG&E is shutting off power in Northern California again | Hacker News Reader

PG&E is shutting off power in Northern California again

pge.com

39 pointspmoriarty51 comments

3rd time in 3 weeks. I joked that the difference between a 1st world and 3rd world country is that a 1st world country will tell you before they cut you power for 2 days.

This is not a United States problem, this is a California problem.

yeah i said its a joke.

is it? I live in California and I can no longer count know how many times visitors have come to California and been completely perplexed at how “third world” parts of it are

Including people from some extremely impoverished countries

So rolling blackouts from a series of poorly thought out policies is very congruent

yeah i live east of sacramento in the mountains. I'm in the zone thats had the most hours of power cut by PG&E.

The state is falling apart. Its changed so much in the last 20 years. I would rather the Sierra Nevadas be part of Nevada and let the bay area and LA leave us alone.

I live in SF and have said that too many parts of it seem like a third world country.

The biggest shame is how much money there is in the Bay Area and how many (already solved problems) exist here.

united | yo͞oˈnīdəd | adjective joined together politically, for a common purpose, or by common feelings

What's the point of this comment? GP's point was that this issue is limited to California, and is not a broader issue with US infrastructure.

Problems in states are problems in the United States. I would say particularly so when concerning mismanagement of public resources entrusted to private management.

California, you know the rest of us still love you, but sometimes you're a bit crazy. Sometimes you're crazy in a good way, sometimes you're crazy in a bad way, and sometimes it's hard to tell, but here's a situation where you might want to return to the fold. Nobody else is having giant, regular blackouts.

The poorly maintained power infrastructure is due to a poorly regulated monopoly placing shareholder returns over delivering safe and reliable infrastructure to its customers. Arguably a California problem since the regulation is mostly at a state level.

The drought, above average heat, and likely the dry late season winds which are huge contributors to this problem are due to global warming which is symptom of a global problem which the United States government refuses to address.

I believe there are some dams in California that are in severe disrepair caused from years of spending money in all the wrong paces.

The difference is in a 1st world country the electric utility is properly regulated with effective oversight so this won't happen.

woosh. thats the joke

Didn't California fix its regulation issues after the whole Enron debacle?

PG&E as been pulling (large) cash profits out for years while neglecting basic maintenance on the transmission network.

The lack of maintenance has lead directly to the fires.

The regulator decides how much maintenance they need to get done, and how much cash they can take out.

> he lack of maintenance has lead directly to the fires.

Since they've been responsible for a number of fires in recent years, how are they not being fined or held accountable or for not properly maintaining their infrastructure?

They are currently involved in legal proceedings. That's why they declared bankruptcy earlier this year, it was preparation for massive fines.

The regulator could say "do a better job"

Then PG&E would say: "ok, let us raise rates so it does not impact profit"

If they disagree on that, it's a long administrative and legal process to work it out.

Also, many of the employees of the regulator are either:

- former (and future!) energy company employees

- owe their jobs to politicians who take $ from the energy companies

It is a complex, opaque process (to decide on require maintenance levels) that ends up controlled by the people who care the most about it.

Problem is, the state has shrublands and, grasslands and forests which historically have been prone to natural fires. Fires happen. People also like building and living in these areas.

The state regulates PG&E, sets rates, and also establishes liability on the utility for incidental fires. So the state regulates them, they follow regulation but when something anticipated happens they’re still liable.

So the natural thing to do in that conundrum, as the Wargames villain quoth: the only winning move is to not play.

Ergo they take their energy and go home.

> Problem is, the state has shrublands and, grasslands and forests which historically have been prone to natural fires. Fires happen. People also like building and living in these areas. <

The rainy season in California is shrinking and becoming more erratic due to climate change. Temperatures in the fall are at record highs and winds are above average turning small/ manageable fires into unstoppable hellstorms that cover 10s of thousands of acres and travel at 20mph+.

We're 10+ years into this and PG&E has been allowed to increase their rates to mitigate fire risks, but instead of using that money to increase maintenance and modernize, PG&E cut big fat checks to shareholders.

Other power companies in similar areas such as SMUD haven't had similar fire issues because they haven't neglected maintenance.

PG&E management has failed the public by letting their infrastructure turn into a massive risk. They've failed their customers by delivering un-reliable & unsafe service. They've failed their shareholders by creating a massive-unrecoverable liability.

PG&E management needs to get replaced all the way to the board level.

PG&E has consistently not invested in maintaining the land around their power lines. This is an entirely preventable problem and caused by a lack of long term investment in infrastructure maintenance.

They've admitted they don't have the time, money, nor manpower to go out and play catch up with all the maintenance that they have deferred, and now the public (their customers) is suffering.

They deserve to go bankrupt from this.

I hope so too. I’m looking forward to seeing how much better the state runs what then will be a department.

> People also like building and living in these areas.

Edgier take: People are forced out to these areas because California cities allow very little housing to be built.

Not-a-PG&E-customer here: where's the animus against specifically catching up on infrastructure maintenance debt coming from?

Corollary: why was said animus not directed to PG&E at the time that maintenance was neglected?

I haven't followed this closely, but last year's camp fire was blamed on poorly maintained infrastructure and the PG&E line was that there was a lot of poorly maintained infrastructure around the state.

To the corollary; most people don't complain about the lack of maintenance until the lack of maintenance becomes a clear problem.

That said, I do not know what sort of details PG&E put out in prior reports. I don't know what, if any, public oversight was in place and I don't know if there's merit to the idea that PG&E has been deferring maintenance in exchange for short term profits.

The regulator specifically approves the maintenance levels.

Sigh. PG+E texted me to say that maybe our power would get turned off. I immediately checked online, where it says that our power will not get turned off. I guess they have multiple databases that are out of sync with each other?

I am not an expert on electricity infrastructure. However, as a software engineer I can tell that PG+E's software systems are low-quality and full of bugs. I can only assume that the rest of their operations meet the same low quality standards.

Has anyone seen any plausible estimates of the additional fire danger arising from the use of all the small generators that are firing up during these periods?

I'm curious if all this represents a greater risk than powering up the lines. (But at least PG&E won't foot the bill...)

I notice some of the over the air TV channels have no signal. Wonder whether the PGE power shutoff has affected the TV towers.

Very likely given where they are likely to be situated

It's fascinating that we're apparently tolerating them turning people's electricity off and burning down large parts of the state. You'd think we'd only accept one or the other. Or in a crazy utopian world, neither!

This sounds like something you read about in the undeveloped world.

Something is very wrong that this is happening in the USA, let alone a state with the 6th largest GDP in the world.

I think the rich and wealthy valley brains need to solve this problem too. This company is definitely done, they already have caused a fire despite outages.

PG&E is a government granted monopoly.

Not much SV brains can do about that.

In other words, this is a problem of power, not brains. (no pun intended...)

Apparently they've started several large wildfires over the years. . .

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/18/business/pge-...

For those who can afford it. It's a great time to get home solar. Even a small 3.7kW solar panel system can help out with the basics if not more.

Small battery-less grid-tied systems go down when the grid is down, it's a requirement for safety so a malfunctioning grid isn't kept hot by residential sources.

I do think this will sell a bunch of powerwalls to rich californians though.

It's like they're trying to get nationalized

At some levels of regulation, there is no meaningful difference between private and nationalized. Owning the means of production includes certain rights like deciding what to do with the capital/equipment. Every regulation that controls your actions with the equipment or what your workers can do is, in part, the state seizing the means of production. Similarly with taxes. The difference between a nationalized PG&E and a private one is that if the state lights a forest fire due to poor maintenance on the lines, the state isn't going to allow you to sue them.

Well, since they have a government-granted monopoly, and they have been doing a very terrible job, the only group that can seemingly improve things is the government. Now, it may be true that there isn't a huge difference between the state taking full control, or the state finding another private utility company, or the state implementing more regulations on PGE. I agree that may not matter that much, but the point is that the state government absolutely needs to fix this, because no one else will.

>At some levels of regulation, there is no meaningful difference between private and nationalized.

The one regulation missing for this in PG&E's case is mandating profit reinvested in infrastructure ahead of shareholder dividends, buybacks, and|or executive compensation.

I think you'd get better results with a system that increases competition and incentivizes things like quality of service. The competition has the side benefit of decreasing those profits you seem concerned about.

Forcing them to spend money internally just incentives internal costs to increase, not to improve quality of service.

i have this conspiracy theory: PG&E is normalizing power shutdowns around this time of year and on Nov 3, 2020 they'll shut off power to specific areas while people are voting for the next president.

PG+E probably doesn't care so much who the next president is, though. State politics matter a lot more to them, because the California government determines the formula for how much profit PG+E is allowed to make.

i mean you're probably right, it's a wild theory. but, maybe their leadership is made up of hard right conservatives that are willing to do what it takes to keep power (political, not electrical power...ha)

I live in the outage zone so i've been hearing some conspiracy theories.

Trying to get a govt bailout, diverting power to a big secret government project, or (here's a good one) prepping us for more outages so they can start taking people (specifically anti-zionists) in the night, Bolshevik-style. lol.

those are some interesting theories. the big secret gov't project is probably like stranger things then. they need the power to drill a hole into the upside down!

I've been suspecting PG&E is letting the chips fall so they can appropriate resources needed to modernize the grid in preparation for EVs charging in every home.

It's a lot easier to get a massive infrastructure spending bill passed in a crisis when the state is literally burning down.

What would be the point?

And doesn't everyone vote by mail?

well, it's a conspiracy theory so it's half-baked by definition. the point would be voter suppression to affect the outcome of the election, of course.

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