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
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.
> 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.
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...
Not sure PG&E is in a place to be throwing stones...