PG&E to intentionally shut off power again – this time to 150k customers
cnn.com
cnn.com
All the reporting I’ve seen is missing a key, interesting fact. A judge’s court order from January requires them to do these intentional shut offs.
Source, w/ link to the court order: https://twitter.com/mikeknoop/status/1189400411175710722
Not sure PG&E is in a place to be throwing stones...
I'm no genius marketer, but perhaps on top of "please don't shoot our line workers" they could hype-train all the work that is actually happening. "See what progress we are making on our mistakes of the past!" type of message. Not sure how to say that without the needless reminder of how they got us all here in the first place, or if that's even possible, but there's got to be some type of spin out there... spin that I sure haven't seen.
See: https://www.kqed.org/news/11767619/monitors-spot-check-of-pg...
> In his report, Filip said that by late July, his team had inspected more than 1,550 PG&E vegetation management projects covering about 71 miles of the utility's power lines. That's a tiny fraction of the utility's more than 100,000 miles of distribution and transmission network. About 25,000 miles of those lines runs through areas the state has identified as high fire-threat districts.
> In more than 400 cases, the monitor's team identified what Filip termed "potential exceptions" — nearly 3,300 trees that needed work or should have been considered for removal but were missed by PG&E's enhanced vegetation management program.
Report: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6272392/Monitor-s...
> For each segment of its electrical grid, PG&E shall document the foregoing inspections and the work done and shall rate each segment’s safety under various wind conditions (from little wind to high wind). PG&E must designate one or more qualified engineers to make these safety determinations and the rating must be certified under oath by the engineer in writing. In light of PG&E’s history of false reporting, PG&E may not rely upon its earlier inspection reports as substitutes for the new inspections. PG&E shall follow all requirements of law as well as those in this order, shall follow all guidance provided by the Monitor, and shall be complete and truthful. If a power line happens to comply with all of the requirements of state law but nevertheless poses a safety issue under the circumstances, then the line may not be rated as safe until the safety issue is resolved.
> At all times during the 2019 Wildfire Season (and thereafter), PG&E may supply electricity only through those parts of its electrical grid it has determined to be safe under the wind conditions then prevailing. Conversely, PG&E must de-energize any part of its grid not yet rated as safe by PG&E for the wind conditions then prevailing until those conditions have subsided. For example, if Santa Ana winds of up to thirty miles per hour are expected in a given county and if PG&E has not yet rated those power lines as safe for such winds, then PG&E must de-energize those lines during the wind event and beforehand notify affected customers that those lines will be de-energized. In determining safety, PG&E may not take into account the need for reliability of service, the inconvenience to customers resulting from interruption in service, or its impact upon PG&E’s revenues and profits. Reliability is important but safety must come first. Profits are important but safety must come first. Only safe operation will be allowed.
The court order doesn't prevent them from doing the work to declare more of the system "safe" to reduce or eliminate the scope of the power shutoffs.
People are rightly angry. They are still being victimized today for PG&Es long history of behavior. They see no evidence that PG&E is working to correct the situation. They're told, "Hey, but you don't want a fire right" as if that is the only alternative. People want reliable, safely transported power. PG&E is not delivering.
And even if PG&E weren't to blame, they've fumbled on every one of these outages from a customer perspective. I was never even notified of the first outage. They communicated through Twitter and some other media. Even the one we had in common I rarely use and when I use I don't see every post. Their website was frequently down.
During the second outage their website often had no information, vague information, or inaccurate information. Our neighbors got power back days before we did. We literally had parts of our neighborhood all around us with power, but we went without. And during that time they announced a third outage with the same poor-quality information. We didn't even know if we'd get power back on before the next one hit. Also during that time, they stopped having humans answering their phones. Instead they just had a machine parrot the same (lack of) information that was available on their website.
So, I don't know what to tell you. The idea that "a judge made them do it" is absurd. A judge made them do the right thing or to not do the thing at all. It is their history of not doing the right thing, but still doing that thing, that lead us all here.
Their equipment is poorly maintained. Fire risk is high. What do you want them to do, keep running power in high risk areas, cause more fires, and go more bankrupt? CA taxpayers pay either way, either more disruption from power outages or more property destruction.
Note I'm talking operationally. Clawing back money from executives and dissolving the company are not operational changes that address the risky equipment and dangerous conditions. Neither of those will address this year's or next year's problems, and that $100 million would pay for burying at most about 50 miles of transmission lines.
As far as disabling the automatic reclosers, maybe they should, but I'm going to take a wild guess that that they don't do that for a reason, and not just that they are being stupid. Perhaps those breakers are tripped so frequently that not reclosing them automatically would lead to massive outages anyway, and those would be unplanned outages which would be more difficult for people to handle.
Nobody is talking about letting them off the hook. They're in bankruptcy court and judge Alsup is taking things seriously. But being mad and assigning penalties isn't going to fix the fires or the blackouts any time soon. It would have been good years ago to dig through PG&E's financials and get mad years about their misuse of maintenance funds, but nobody did that, or at least nobody got sufficiently mad if they did. It's too late to be mad about prior malfeasance once a disaster materializes.
Actual solutions would be to raise rates immediately by a lot, like 50-100%, and pay people starting now to go out and mitigate problems (clear vegetation) and start to coordinate repairs. Every $.01 (per kWh) rate increase generates $6 million per day assuming an average of 25,000 MW and no usage-based pricing (and completely inelastic demand). 25e6 kW times 24h times $.01/kWh
Easy.
Step 1: the $100 million from the safety budget that got redirected to the CEO? Get it back. With interest. Use that $100+ million to start undergrounding lines.
Step 2: disable the automatic reclosers like every other California utility does during fire season.
Step 3: submit a dissolution plan to the CPUC
That'll get them how much, maybe 10-20 miles? LADWP just paid $130 million for 11 miles of undergrounding (although it was a higher voltage line in an urban area which is a bit more expensive)
Closer to 100 miles.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/pge-underground-power...
1. Deliver reliable, safely-transported power as nearly every other utility in the United States is able to do.
2. Fix the problem.
3. Handle the outages like professionals. Maintain lines of communications with customers. Keep information as accurate and up-to-date as possible.
(1) has been made impossible for decades according to PG&E. (2) isn't really happening[0], fault PG&E. (3) might be completely outside their wheelhouse.
[0]- https://www.kqed.org/news/11767619/monitors-spot-check-of-pg...
But sure, it's just the past people are angry about, so let's let PG&E off the hook.
Remind me again, which regulations required PG&E to keep such poor records that blowing up a San Bruno neighborhood was a result? Which regulations forced them to dump toxic chemicals (hexavalent chromium) into the Hinkley water? Which regulations forced PG&E to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on stock buybacks instead of undergrounding high risk wires? Which regulations forced PG&E to pay out copious dividends instead of vegetation management?
Did CPUC directly tell them to break the law? No, but CPUC approved every budget that criminally neglected maintenance. And when the San Bruno explosion happened as a predictable result, CPUC worked with PG&E to pick a judge they liked.
https://m.sfgate.com/crime/article/Officials-demand-criminal...
So yes, our state government shares responsibility for all of it.
No.
Did CPUC directly tell them to break the law? No, but CPUC approved every budget that criminally neglected maintenance.
You mean the maintenance budget that PG&E redirected to executive compensation?
So yes, our state government shares responsibility for all of it.
Well, no. If you steal a cookie from a cookie jar that's your own damn fault. If you steal a cookie from a cookie jar that's not the fault of your parents for leaving an unlocked cookie jar within reach.
If any California governer ever wanted PG&E to invest in maintenance, they just had to say the word.
Last time around they shut the power off for days and still managed to start 5+ fires.
I don't think this is a good excuse when dealing with public safety. We should, however, acknowledge all parties culpable.
"Over the past decade the company contributed around 245 times to political action committees which in turn made their own donations." [0]
The government is also to blame.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/us/pge-california-politic...
More coverage. [1] https://www.abc10.com/article/news/investigations/governor-n... (sorry for the ads)
[2] https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-aler...
Edit: Formatting
That's likely the force at the root of why there is so much pressure for profit over safety.
The business decisions are optimized for the demands of investors, and the total magnitude of the dividend paid to investors like many of us probably dwarfs the bonuses paid to the execs.
That system was working fine (and in lower fire risk service areas, like most areas east of the Rocky mountains, it still is) until the true unmodeled risks of poor maintenance and climate change finally manifested, and here we are on the other side.
California is a matchbox, and barring major changes in energy generation and distribution technology and infrastructure to lower the risk, it will be risky to deliver electricity here no matter who is providing it, be that PGE or a hypothetical state owned utility. The benefit of the latter is that it is freed from the financial obligation to investors, and can focus on safety and delivery.
It's not just the dividends. It's the $100 million from their safety budget that they blew on executive compensation. There's also the hundreds of millions of dollars annually that PG&E is spending on stock buybacks every year.
California is a matchbox, and barring major changes in energy generation and distribution technology and infrastructure to lower the risk, it will be risky to deliver electricity here no matter who is providing it, be that PGE or a hypothetical state owned utility. The benefit of the latter is that it is freed from the financial obligation to investors, and can focus on safety and delivery.
It's risky to deliver electricity anywhere. PG&E is reckless and dishonest above and beyond the norm.
All of those are ultimately spent for the benefit of investors, whom the executives report to via the board of directors. It doesn't change the argument that PGE's incentive structure is tilted toward their investors' demands first, and safety/ratepayers/public after that.
> It's risky to deliver electricity anywhere.
California is a uniquely risky place compared to elsewhere. It has the combination of a very heavy rainy season, causing massive vegetation growth, followed by a very long dry season. Both are being exacerbated by climate change. On top of that, California has a booming population, with people living in ever more remote fire prone areas, requiring electric transmission lines to those areas.
Areas with year round precipitation don't have nearly the same fire risk.
> PG&E is reckless and dishonest above and beyond the norm.
Perhaps, but that has more to do with answering to investors, and not the underlying physical risks.
And yet it's PG&E that's starting the record breaking fires. It's PG&E that's blowing up neighborhoods. It's PG&E that's poisoning whole towns. As it turns out PG&E is not the only electric utility company in California.
PG&E is doing things in a uniquely wrong manner.
All of the other Californian power companies are much smaller, and I'm not sure they're doing massively better. According to a New York Times article a few months back, the example state officials have pointed to of what PG&E should be doing, San Diego Gas & Electric, only managed to cause "far fewer fires than PG&E" thanks to their own aggressive monitoring and targetted blackouts - which is to say that they're still causing fires - and they're far smaller than PG&E.
Edison settled the lawsuits over the Thomas fire without admitting guilt. To me that seems like a good indication that there was a much less clear case for negligence than there is for PG&E. Guess who started the largest fire…
It sounds like their fire prevention shutoffs haven't been going so well either: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-11-01/southern....
Edison started a fire as they started to turn electricity back on. How many did PG&E start while the power was out? The last count I'd heard was five.
San Diego Gas & Electric, only managed to cause "far fewer fires than PG&E" thanks to their own aggressive monitoring and targetted blackouts - which is to say that they're still causing fires - and they're far smaller than PG&E.
Maybe it's time to shrink PG&E down to a manageable size? I'm not suggesting the other utilities are particularly well behaved, rather PG&E is worse. Take, for instance, fire prevention efforts. Edison disables their automatic reclosers during fire season. PG&E? lol. They're thinking about it.
You mean shrinking the service area?
If so, some other entity will have to take over distribution in the areas removed from PG&E. It's not like those areas are going to go off-grid.
If those entities are locally owned and controlled (i.e. municipal power, as some CA cities have) it might make those more incentivized to proactively deal with maintenance issues - after all - people don't generally want to endanger their neighbors. But if it's just a slightly smaller investor-owned utility, it's not clear that they'll be incentivized any differently than PG&E is.
And remember that PG&E's size is part of what enabled it to achieve economies of scale, which in turn results in higher profits and dividends for investors.
Finally, even if you shrink PG&E, you still have the problem of maintaining transmission lines, which have been responsible for starting a number of fires. Some entity has to be responsible for maintaining those.
Of course, part of the game rules must be player punishment, otherwise the game is severely broken. But yes, you don't fix anything by focusing on the players.
It goes beyond the line maintenance issue - that is really a red herring IMO:
Clearing all fuels X-meters around lines doesn't help when you have hundreds of acres of fuel that hasn't burned in almost 80 years on either side of it, as we do here.
The bigger issue is that California has gradually seen a decrease in controlled burns in these areas.
A controlled burn is a fire set by Cal-Fire/Forestry managers in order to mitigate fuel buildup in fireprone areas.
When I was a kid, it was common to have pretty large controlled burns. My father was involved in setting them up.
Anecdotally, in speaking with him, as more people (reaD: money) moved into the area, there was more and more uproar about controlled burns - eventually they just tailed off because people would be scared, complain about the smoke, nuisance etc.
TL;DR: Maintaining the lines and clearing brush doesn't matter when you have thousands of acres of fuel that hasn't burned in 60-80 years. That is a state/regional management issue. And when you buildup that much potential energy in an area, the laws of thermodynamics tend to take care of it.
I'm not sure why people keep pushing this narrative about PG&E doing everything right when it was clear they did many things wrong. They've been found criminally negligent multiple times now on separate occasions.
As to whether or not their equipment caused the large fires is another issue and another discussion altogether.
The entire reason why they have to shut down their systems is because for years they've been making shit up in order to avoid having to do actual maintenance. And now rather than performing the proper safety inspections and maintenance, they're shutting down the systems due to their prior screwups.
If I remember rightly, the case which set this precedent involved a fuse correctly failing open and managing to set fire to some brush beneath the pole which had grown up in a few months since they'd cleared the entire area around it. There is no maintenance standard they could follow that would protect them from liability; all they can maybe hope to do is decrease the number of fires and the consequent costs somewhat.
What seems to be the case instead is that "best-in-class industry practises" would be completely fine but are deemed to be too expensive.
So their choices are:
- Actually employ best practices.
- half-ass it and possibly be punished for it (too risky).
- Moan loudly about how horrible everything is, shutdown much more than necessary and wail how you are "forced" to do that. If you are obnoxious enough about it for long enough some legislation will be passed to allow you to half-ass it.
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I'm not saying that PG&E is not to blame...it may well be that they've done a bad job but it's not black & white. I feel like the opinions you outlined above reflect the public narrative… that PG&E are the devil and 100% to blame for everything when the fires were caused by multiple factors…i.e. PG&E equipment, weather conditions, fire service etc. Public narrative is a gross oversimplification and those in a position of power control that narrative (i.e. the politicians).
PG&E is legally allowed only a small profit as a percentage of revenue. Without it they couldn’t raise private capital, and would require public funds directly. They have every incentive to spend as much money on maintenance as is required, assuming the politicians allow the rates to rise.
They also have an obligation to spend their safety budget ON SAFETY RELATED ACTIVITIES. Instead they blew their wad on a cash bonus for the CEO. If they can't find the money to maintain their equipment maybe it's time to claw back the $100,000,000 they stole.
How about we just get that money back before jacking up rates?
In particular, (a) PG&E has a history of falsifying inspection reports, (b) PG&E must keep power lines clear of trees, (c) the power lines can't arc during high winds, (d) because of the history of falsified inspections PG&E must re-inspect things. These terms don't seem particularly onerous, especially with respect to making power lines safe during high winds---I assume that's the sort of thing every energy company does already anyway. In particular, what do you mean, in this context, when you say "best-in-class industry practises"?
This wasn't so much a statement about PG&E as it was about CA law.
You realize how large these fires are, right? It is an incredible achievement that they are contained even a little bit. These fires can be so large and burn so hot that they create their own weather patterns over hundreds, even thousands of square miles.
Saying "fire service has show itself not capable of containing" fires is nearly as ignorant as blaming beach life guards for being "incapable of containing a hurricane storm surge"
Lifeguards don't contain storms...
Fire services saved my town just last month when the largest fire in our counties history was set to erase it from the map. They can make a stand where they need to if they have time.
Source: "Inside the fight to save Windsor from the Kincade Fire" [1]
1 - https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/10278596-181/inside-the-f...
Well, they are going bankrupt because of the liability they bore for the massive fires their equipment triggered the last two years, so it's not too far fetched a claim.
What ulterior motive could they have for doing blackouts now?
This is not to absolve PGE of the responsibility. They apparently asked the PUC for ratepayer money, and received it, to do fire prevention maintenance, but then supposedly didn't do it, at least not enough [1]. All this while paying handsome dividends to investors (including our 401ks and pension plans). If true, that would be the bigger scandal.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/18/business/pge-...
Enron's problem was obvious, though. They controlled both the distribution lines and the generation facilities, and were allowed to participate in an energy derivatives market too. And either no caps on profits or no meaningful caps. And California let that happen. It's like letting wild cats live on your ranch and then being shocked, shocked when they start killing your cattle. Except in this case I think California was actually shocked, because the politicians were too clueless to realize what could happen.
[0] http://s1.q4cdn.com/880135780/files/doc_downloads/2019/Alsup...
The ground is soaked. I don't see how a fire could spread in this weather.
What next - safe drinking water? good schools? police protection?
2. In certain disaster prone regions, you can only do so much to shore up a centralized power utility even if corruption magically disappeared. This is mainly because there’s only so much tax revenue even in high tax states like CA
3. It’s better than doing nothing and waiting for Superman to come.
https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/environment/2019/10/11/...
> But less than we're spending on fire recovery and prevention.
You sure it's less?
The weather here is no longer nearly perfect all year. It looks like we'll be having a month every year where there's so much smoke in the air that you can't go outside.
PG&E was too busy spending its income on cash bonuses, dividends, and stock buybacks. It really is just a matter of money.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/pge-underground-power...
Maintenance also becomes much more expensive, although less frequent maintenance may offset that. Non-maintenance changes, such as adding new service, etc would be much more expensive.
I don't know about California regulations, but in Washington State, the regulator does not allow the utility to spend general funds to underground wires unless it's strictly required; the cost must be assessed to only the customers it benefits, which is fair, but can generate a lot of pushback.
Underground power lines cost $5-10 million per mile and PG&E has ~100,000 miles that would need to be buried. A lot of PG&E's lines are in more rural areas which tend towards the cheaper side of that range, but it's still a ton of money.
As displeased as I am about these shutoffs (trying not to rant), it has shown me the strengths and weaknesses of my preparedness plans; and it's helped keep me motivated and keeping things regularly rotated, etc.
- - - -
Just a little history of PG&E shadiness: http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Hetch_Hetchy_Stor...
TL:DR; SF has been supposed to have it's own power from Hetch Hetchy for nearly 100 years and PG&E has MITM'd the scheme to this day.