In many parts of the world, power is unreliable due to a lack of resources -- fuel, capital, labour, distribution, maintenance. Power cuts occur, either scheduled or unscheduled, due to an inability to meet demand.
The case in California is different. The fundamental resources are present: there is fuel (or, in many cases, hydroelectric, geothermal, nuclear, wind, or solar power) for generation. Distribution systems exist. There is no shortage of local labour. Systems aren't going offline due to direct failures of maintenance.
Rather: the outages are prompted by a consequence risk. Given the extreme fire danger throughout the state, the least source of ignition creates a fire hazard, and electrical transmission and distribution equipment is a high risk for such ignition.
Previous major wildfires have been sparked by: mower blades, rims of flat tires sparking on pavement, catalytic converters parked over dry grass, sparks from a hammer. And electrical equipment.
There's a case to be made that PG&E have neglected maintenance activies not related directly to continued operation of their plant, but to risk mitigation, and I'm not going to argue one way or the other.
But the fundamental problem California's electric utilities face is not that of most of the world, where means are insufficient, but that consequence is too great to ignore. I'm coming to see this generally as a late-stage dynamic in many technological areas, one in which the unintended consequences (sometimes unanticipated, often not) simply rise to a level of major significance. You might think of these generally as hygiene factors (the phrase I've been using).
Past examples would include:
- Basic personal and public hygiene factors for maintaining public health in cities.
- Pollution control laws affecting solid, liquid, and gas emissions of activities and plants.
- Environmental contamination as with lead, asbestos, pesticides, tobacco, sulfur dioxide ("acid rain"), and CO2.
- Individual psychological and widespread sociological negative impacts of information overload, media saturation and manipulation, and computer systems overexposure.
- Running extensive high-capacity electrical distribution systems through increasingly fire-prone landscapes.
Or put another way: this is increasingly our future.