PG&E may cut power to 850k California customers this weekend due to fire risk
pgecurrents.com
pgecurrents.com
Used to be the shining star of progress in the world, now this.
Looking for a place to stay/live, too.. if anyone here can help. Will be on Embarcadero, but I like the east bay, and beyond.
I'm in So Cal, myself, but I'm really trying to escape. Have been starting to seriously investigate options outside of CA. It's just becoming so oppressively broken here.
Here in north oakland I have a 45 minute commute with a seat every day on the bus.
I'll be starting from Oakland, found a spot to land that will give me a little time to work through market availabilities to find the right place.
But what you suggest is more or less what I'm aiming for, with Lafayette/WC as a possible extension if I can keep the home-to-BART commute easy.
I do like to get up at 430am and BART early, which opens things up a bit.
Decay is slow and gradual to people who live here all of the time. If you're like Chris Hedges and live abroad for some years and come back, the decline is noticeable over a longer timescale. (Slowly boiled frog.) And then there are folks like Chalmers Johnson who predicted empire and democracy are mutually exclusive, and you can see the current US military budget, undeclared wars and hundreds of bases around the world. Some examples of decline include:
- massive corruption of the political establishment
- crackdowns on publishers and journalists who don't tow the establishment line
- apathy of the middle (low voter turn-out)
- electing demagogues
- crumbling infrastructure: roads, bridges
- rust belt / lack of manufacturing
- declining birth rates
- rising xenophobia, provincialism and nationalism
- increase in volatility and political polarization of average people
- grotesque inequality with millions of homeless
- questioning capitalism bifurcating into leaning either towards fascism or socialism
- magical, tribal belief cults like flat-earth, anti-vaxx and conspiracy theorists
- highest incarceration rate on Earth (per capita) except Seychelles
- clueless leadership/elite class who cling ever more to utopian nonsense like libertarianism, meritocracy, consumerism, and technological progress/fashion
- national debt leading to insolvency
That’s why 65 million people vote for Clinton and we end up with Trump despite 3 million less votes.
It’s why pluralities of Americans support things like assault weapons bans but Mitch McConnell won’t even bring bills to the floor.
It’s why we get extreme gerrymandering in states like N. Carolina, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
The country is being hollowed out from within, the middle class is in steady decline, and our once great institutions are being privatized and sold off to the highest bidder.
It’s Milton Friedman and his Chicago boys wet dream and it’s only possible when the people aren’t represented and it’s going to have terrible repercussions in the United States just like it did in every other place that forced it upon its citizens.
We need to get rid of undemocratic institutions like the electoral college and Senate, expand the number of reps in the House of Representatives, drastically reduce the amount of money in politics, root out corruption, and make voting easier to access.
Unfortunately the Republican party wants none of those to pass in a system they can only continue to game further to win.
It’s a pretty depressing reality.
That's actually why this fire season is so bad.
The problem isn't that too many people moved to California, the problem is that California has been aggressively blocking anything that might be construed as development, meaning that conditions just keep worsening everywhere.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/06/pges_bankruptcy...
Perhaps the money would have been better directed at upgrading transmission lines, etc.
That PG&E would stop paying out dividends instead of doing the maintenance they are supposed to be doing?
https://www.kqed.org/news/11737336/judge-pge-paid-out-stock-...
This of course can't end poorly as the second such a bill is passed, all incentive to maintain equipment goes out the window.
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ca-court-of-appeal/1223894.html
CA legislators could pass a law changing this.
They have been negligent.
The costs could wayyy higher than any forest fire.
It's not for all of California. In Silicon Valley, it's mostly west of I-280, although my own area, about 2 miles east of I-280 in San Mateo County, is on warning status.
Here's the actual map:
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=64ec74b4d4...
Block ID: GEO02 Block reason: Access from your Country was disabled by the administrator.
I thought it was just worth noting as a time people think they have one thing, and discover it’s something else entirely.
Has deployments gotten broad enough that not just (curious) early adopters install them, now?
It makes perfect sense that this should work scaled up to a whole house. As long as the Sun is shining, there should be power.
That's the minimum requirement. Power draw varies on sub-second timescales; just because your power meter shows a continuous draw of 4 kW doesn't mean it's actually continuous, or that 4 (or 6, or 8) kW of solar panels would cover the spikes. When they don't, you get brownouts.
You wouldn't want your house to shut off because of a passing cloud, either.
Solar powered houses do not in fact need batteries -- a large capacitor bank would be plenty. It's just that a capacitor bank capable of running it for (say) five minutes, at a draw of several kilowatts, is enough power in a scary enough form factor to need armoring. Batteries are far safer, and also let you use power at night.
All the things that matter come with switching power supplies. Switching power supplies can adjust. They normally handle everything from Japan at 90v to Nigeria commonly exceeding 250v. They also internally have capacitance.
For everything else, it just doesn't matter. I couldn't even tell if power for the toaster oven dropped to 70v for 200ms.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance
You mean electrical storage.
PG&E sucks, doesn't care, and probably the people responsible are still making bank.
If anything, I would expect a publicly run utility to be less efficient at capital allocation. All "excess" capital may get used up in the inefficiencies instead of investments.
Consider the challenges of city-wide transportation networks in providing service, maintaining infrastructure and investing for the future.
Alternatively, neither private nor publicly run capital is good at discounting the far future.
Sending the capital to maintenance would be a politically driven project right now for public utility. For private company even right now it is still a conflict of interests between maintenance and shareholder interests.
Consider the following regarding NY, DC & SF subway systems:
"How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways Disruptions and delays have roiled the system this year. But the crisis was long in the making, fueled by a litany of errors, a Times investigation shows." 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
"Metro sank into crisis despite decades of warnings Metro’s failure-prone subway — once considered a transportation jewel — is mired in disrepair because the transit agency neglected to heed warnings that its aging equipment and poor safety culture would someday lead to chronic breakdowns and calamities." 2016 https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/met...
"Past decisions haunt BART as it seeks voter OK for $3.5 billion bond" https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Why-BART-s-futur...
It's amazing we're debating the pros/cons of public vs private utilities while we have an example of an incredibly corrupt private utility that needs to be shutdown and with execs thrown in jail for gross negligence.
>Six of the 10 most destructive fires in California history were started by electrical equipment. PG&E’s equipment has sparked 19 major fires in 2017 and 2018. The utility was blamed for last year’s Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 86 people. SoCal Edison is under mounting scrutiny over potential links to the start of the Saddleridge fire in Sylmar. Edison’s power lines also started the 2017 Thomas fire in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties that killed two people.
Maybe they can start by replacing old, faulty equipment that is causing literally millions in damage and fatalities?
They should not have spent the decade before the fires of the last three years paying generous dividends while deferring fire safety maintenance, as they were excoriated for this April by the judge overseeing their felony criminal sentence for the San Bruno gas explosion (who had the matter before him because the PG&E actions leading to the 2017 and 2018 fires were charged as, and ruled to be, violations of their probation for that criminal conviction.)
Or, maybe, repeatedly committing deadly crimes in the operation of public utility should mean you are no longer entrusted to operate that utility, and the instrumentalities of the crime should be forfeited to the government the same way they would be from any individual criminal, with someone else (public or private) less prone to deadly criminality given the job.
The main risk is high winds swinging the lines and trees far enough to contact, the resulting short can cause fires.
For this reason there's a standard for how far back trees should be trimmed for safety. Said standard was an excuse PG&E made for an additional funding request. When funded they didn't do the work, but instead paid a dividend.
So now we have richer stock holders and a utility that's decided to turn off the power instead of trim the trees.
On KQED Forum one caller mentioned that bankruptcy allows clawbacks of payments (bonus, dividends) that are deemed improper.
Perhaps this is one way we can fund actually making PG&E state-owned.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/editorials/stor...
When that turned out to be wrong, they need to 1) stop causing fires and 2) complete the maintenance they should have been doing.
The problem is that #2 may take years to get caught up before they can begin operating normally again.
So where they are now: they operate a high risk service during certain whether conditions, and they’re responsible if anything goes wrong.
So what should they do given their current position? (As in right now.. no “should have”s that they can’t change.) shutting down occasionally seems pretty reasonable from their point of view.
If they need to do rolling blackouts to prevent fires that's fine. Are the people that designed the system so poorly being blamed for leading us to this situation or are they being handsomely rewarded?
What the state should do is seek some kind of emergency court judgment that electric power is an essential service that PG&E is not allowed to cut off for mere financial liability reasons. Then get a court order that says PG&E has to turn it on, if they refuse, jail people until they find somebody willing to follow the court order.
Basically, if the state's doing their job, they'll tell PG&E they made their bed and now have to lie in it. Meaning they're forced to run, and if more disasters happen due to their reduced maintenance, they go bankrupt. The shareholders and bondholders are wiped out, and since it's an essential service, the state runs it using tax dollars until they can find new investors willing to take it on. In practice, this probably wouldn't happen until the state was done fixing the maintenance backlog on the taxpayers' dime.
Since homes were destroyed and lives lost as a result of their actions, the people who originally decided to skimp on maintenance might be criminally liable and end up in jail, IANAL though.
The state would have a hard time being absolved of the _increased_ liability for such a thing.
In this case, while I completely understand the bigger picture, that would be the state telling them to make unsafe decisions.
Because that's worked so well for our publicly owned security services (police)?
We definitely need to shake things up but bringing something under the umbrella of government doesn't magically make it not suck.
But the state-owned public utilities are just as incompetently run. For example, the state-owned water utilities are mentally disabling young kids all across the country.
There is a common problem whether state-run or just state-regulated. The government wants to keep rates low. So they refuse to perform proper maintenance and upgrades.
Public vs Private is a non-issue. Good legislators and government is the real issue.
Fire due to power lines falling? California is not Nevada, that is certainly carbon consequences.
PG&E Safety Alert: Due to weather forecast, PG&E may turn off power in a portion of our service area. More info: pge.com/pspsupdates. Text UNENROLL to unsubscribe.
PG&E Safety Alert: Due to weather forecast, PG&E may turn off power in a portion of our service area. More info: pge.com/pspsupdates. Text UNENROLL to unsubscribe.
Most likely, they will shut off the power sometime between now (9 pm) and 3 am. It seems they do it while people are asleep to minimize numbers of angry customers calling in.
PS: I have the generator out, fueled and cords laid down ready to continue runnig the refrigerator and Netflixing while Xfinity lasts the first 18-24 hours until they shutoff internet/phone (VOIP)/TV. We're lucky as we still have Dish that we are about to get rid of and rebundle with Xfinity.
Canada is blocked?
They deserve some blame, of course. Clearly arson is wrong, and so is negligence. But how negligent are they really being? It seems like the latest fire was caused by a tower that was regularly inspected.
> The most recent audit of PG&E’s work in Sonoma County, conducted in 2015, found 3,527 maintenance and repair jobs that had been finished past their scheduled due dates. A 2013 audit of PG&E’s North Bay division, which includes Marin and Napa counties, counted 9,520 repair or maintenance orders finished late and 3,270 still overdue.
> The commission ... counted more than 1,000 late repair or maintenance jobs in six of PG&E’s nine Bay Area districts.
> No other California utility, or utility division, was found to have more than 1,000 late corrective actions in audits the commission performed from 2013 through this year. Only the Sacramento Municipal Utility District came close, with 993 late repair or maintenance jobs cited in an audit this year.
> The 2015 audit of PG&E’s Sonoma operations, for example, included spot-check inspections of PG&E equipment in Cazadero, Guerneville, Rohnert Park, Santa Rosa, Sonoma and Windsor. Problems found include one instance of vegetation growing too close to a power line, one of vegetation obstructing the climbing space on a pole and several instances of improperly installed guy wires, which help hold a pole in place.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/PG-E-diverted-safety-... ...
> Pacific Gas and Electric Co. diverted more than $100 million in gas safety and operations money collected from customers over a 15-year period and spent it for other purposes, including profit for stockholders and bonuses for executives, according to a pair of state-ordered reports released Thursday.
> The documents link a deficient PG&E safety culture - with its "focus on financial performance" - to the pipeline explosion in San Bruno on Sept. 9, 2010, that killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes.
> The "low priority" the company gave to pipeline safety during the three years leading up to the San Bruno blast was "well outside industry practice - even during times of corporate austerity programs," said the audit by Overland Consulting of Leawood, Kan.
> "A cursory review reveals that a significant portion, in the millions, has been awarded to the CEO," the commission staff report said in a reference to former PG&E head Peter Darbee, who retired last year.
https://www.salon.com/2019/10/09/after-choosing-profits-over... ....
> [PG&E] chose to diverting money from power line under-grounding projects — among other infrastructure initiatives — to “other high priority system improvements” like boosting corporate profits and paying executives even more. Despite their recent bankruptcy filing, the company's chief executive officer Bill Johnson received an annual base salary of $2.5 million for a three-year contract — double the salary of the previous CEO.
> Thanks to a subsequent California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) investigation, the public learned that between 1987 and 1994 PG&E diverted $495 million from its budgets to maintain its systems to boost corporate profits.
> Decades later, another an investigation by the California Public Utilities Commission found that PG&E diverted more than $100 million in gas safety and operations collected from customers over a 15-year period to spend on bonuses for executives, among other profit-makers for key stakeholders.
---
Given the decades-long pattern that's documented here, we not only can hold PG&E 100% responsible, we should. Defending them for attempting to operate in WUI areas holds no water when they consistently chose to cash out funds that were supposed to be used for equipment maintenance.
PG&E's practices are indefensible, they are wholly responsible for the deaths and property damage they have caused, their "just turn it all off" solution is absurd, and they should cease to exist if only to give future executives a reason to have a moment's introspection in between sips of top-shelf liquor.
PG&E has a history of astounding incompetence and negligence, so probably very. PG&E blew up a San Bruno neighborhood because they were so lax about record keeping. I just heard something blow up about half an hour ago (sounded like a transformer). I still have power, but the last time this happened (a month or so ago) PG&E cut power for nearly 20 hours before even bothering to send anyone to investigate (overall I was without power for 22 hours).
It seems like the latest fire was caused by a tower that was regularly inspected.
The easy answer is that this infrastructure should be underground so that it can't cause these sorts of fires in the first place.
From reddit:
From OP's article: "The utility says the transmission level outage on the power line relayed and did not reclose."
Which means:
From OP's article: "The utility says the transmission level outage on the power line relayed and did not reclose."
Unless I'm mistake, the "re-closing" refers to a line that becomes de-energized somehow- the circuit is broken, or "opened". Sometimes this is because a physical cable broke from wind or a tree branch, sometimes it's a technical malfunction; so PG&E sends some juice through the (potentially physically broken) line to see if the current returns, and attempts to restart the line.
Basically, the re-closing sends live current through a line that may be physically compromised, in order to see if it's not compromised and can be turned back on simply. So, in this case, it seems likely that a) wind broke one of PG&E's major transmission lines, causing it to fall onto the tinder-like brush below the tower, and then PG&E sent juice through that broken line, at least once (in the past the re-closers would make three attempts.)
PG&E apparently let one of their cables fall on dry brush, and then sent sparks through it, possibly multiple times, starting the fire.
This poster goes on to point out that Southern California utility companies typically disable this behavior during fire season and other posters pointed out that typically older reclosing mechanisms were just dumb relays that you couldn't easily disable while newer infrastructure will be using SCADA devices that you could easily disable.
Is it feasible to put the very high voltage lines underground? I know it is done for residential areas.
Briefly take control, then sell it to a utility that knows how to run and maintain a large-scale power system.
I'd rather not imaging a power company the size of PG&E overseen by the same bureaucrats who oversee the DMV.
Meaning, the "old" PG&E is already dead. We can beat said dead horse over exec bonuses and tree trimming failures all we like, but its somewhat beside the point. How to go forward?
Specifically, in Chapter 11 right now they're surely aggressively trying to re-negotiate every financial thing they can touch. Another fire opening up another lawsuit right now would almost instantly torpedo any deals in the works.
Its a remarkably lose-lose situation.
BTW, I'd like to see how much they've spent retrofitting their website to handle the load of the customers trying to find out the details of the outage as it relates to their neighbourhood, and how soon after the start of the cutoffs that their website will go down again.
Prior discussion:
Is a utility forced to make decisions that could put the entire company at risk? IDK. I’m asking.
Answer: Santa Ana Winds + above ground power lines + fire suppression. From the article:
It’s counterintuitive, but the United States’ history of suppressing wildfires has actually made present-day wildfires worse.
“For the last century we fought fire, and we did pretty well at it across all of the Western United States,” Dr. Williams said. “And every time we fought a fire successfully, that means that a bunch of stuff that would have burned didn’t burn. And so over the last hundred years we’ve had an accumulation of plants in a lot of areas.
“And so in a lot of California now when fires start, those fires are burning through places that have a lot more plants to burn than they would have if we had been allowing fires to burn for the last hundred years.”
In recent years, the United States Forest Service has been trying to rectify the previous practice through the use of prescribed or “controlled” burns.
But if you block the fires for a long time, you get not just more fuel building up, but more flammable plants building up. The whole process created hotter fires, that can damage or kill even the resistant plants. There is no phoenix to rise from those ashes.
Prescribed burns are done, in theory, when the fuel+heat+oxygen equation is barely favorable enough to sustain a burn. This clears the fuel and maladapted plants and leaving the rest more or less intact. But a sudden wind or a nearly certain rainstorm that doesn't happen and you have a lot of explaining to do to the public.
I read an article last year about this, I think also in the Times, and it pointed out that this was mostly a California thing; other states continued with proscribed burns, while California stopped for aesthetic reasons.
The article was spurred as a fact-check piece after the president tweeted that last year's fires were because of California's mismanagement of its forests, in spite of federal agencies trying to continue the controlled burns.
It came right around the time someone on HN posted a very cool interactive map that used satellite data to show all of the fires burning across the country, and sure enough — when you hovered over the fires in other states the pop-up text indicated they were controlled burns, but the California fires were all enormous out-of-control conflagrations.
Another 2/3 is private land.
There is more bureaucracy around things like air quality regulations, but in general it's not an "aesthetic" issue causing these problems.
Many of the issues are around "interface" fires where cities butt up against forested areas. Doing a controlled burn of some remote wilderness is fine, but doesn't accomplish much as far as human safety. This is exacerbated by things like the massive drought CA suffered, and other climate change related problems. For example, millions of CA tress which would otherwise be green and healthy have died or are afflicted by disease as a result of climate change, which makes them into tinder that fuels these "conflagrations".
If you do a controlled burn nearby a heavily-populated area, you always run the risk of things going out of control and having unintended consequences. The issue as far as PG&E goes is that their POWER LINES and other equipment have not been properly maintained, which is 100% their responsibility.
They are obligated to clear areas around their lines and make sure everything is operating safely. The Paradise fire wasn't caused by State mismanagement, it was caused by sparking PG&E lines and transformers catching immediately adjacent growth on fire. That's not a State of even a Federal management issue or responsibility.
They are a for-profit corporation though, so other than fines and penalties for their negligence, they have no incentive to do better. They pay out massive salaries, bonuses, and dividends (bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/04/16/new-pge-ceo-salary-double-geisha-williams.html), yet their solution to "safety" here is to just shut everything off and act like it's a problem caused by others.
There are many interrelated aspects at play, but insinuating that the State is somehow just a bunch of misguided hippies not following common sense is just silly.
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=64ec74b4d4...
The announcement is for 850K customers, while if it were really for all of their CA territory it'd be tens of millions.
Also, the page pointed you to this one https://psps.ss.pge.com/ to check if your address is in the impact zone or not. Seems like it works this time.
I find it more likely they themselves are under contract to create, buy, transfer, use, so many megawatts over so much time than the customer will have to pay for service that was turned off.
Yes, but they're weighing that loss of revenue against potentially having to pay out billions in damages if they cause another fire. It looks like the last fire is going to cost them over $18 billion, since that's what they're trying to cap it at last I saw. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-09/pge-looks-...