So then to follow up: what is the point? To deflect blame from PGE? And who pays for it?
It probably won't solve wildfires - there's still plenty of fuel, and hotter climates, and strong winds - but it can buy some breathing room. I suspect a bigger reason is to maintain the integrity of the grid. Buried power lines don't start fires, but they also don't get taken down when there is a fire, and they won't have a judge order them shut-off when there's a risk of high fire danger. Being perceived as an unreliable source of electricity is a far bigger threat to a utility than burning down a few towns - I know that was the primary reason I went solar, and a lot of my peers are also thinking of disconnecting from the grid because the grid isn't there when you need it.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/How-California-s...
[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/californias-catastrophi...
(That is, the policy is expensive, and there are numerous other hard-to-monitor causes of fires.)
See NERC's reliability report for 2020 - even accounting for fires, the average transmission capacity loss for the entire USA and Canada was mostly under 0.5%. (Page 65)
https://www.nerc.com/pa/RAPA/PA/Performance%20Analysis%20DL/...
Solar and batteries aren't a substitute for grid transmission infrastructure and cannot match the amounts of energy a good transmission grid can deliver. The best part of the grid - you don't have to worry about balancing or when you need energy. You just flip a switch.
Yes, PG&E could have done more and their investment choices led to lots of damage and loss but let's not jump the gun and term their grid unreliable. They are held to NERC's standards which are among the best in the world.
If some outlying customers switch to partial or full self sufficiency, then a utility "death spiral" can occur as they increase prices on the remaining customers in the area.
Two responses to this are:
Legally force people to stay connected and pay for the grid
Start building microgrids using distributed solar and batteries, which is apparently being done in remote Australia.
Either can be a good thing if well managed, or an inefficient boondoggle if not.
Outlying customers are difficult to service in regular times because there are many failure points and few redundancies. The solution to this is not for every farm to install solar PV as a substitute to the grid but to shore up transmission and distribution infrastructure.
Anyone who's lived in the high arctic will tell you that the #1 reason they are clamouring for connections to the continental grid is reliability. Solar, wind and even diesel generation are just not as reliable or sustainable.
Solar installs on e.g. remote mining sites are already starting to conplement and then edge out diesel generators so there are off grid use cases but if you have a grid then the most efficient thing is to use it in most cases.
But outlying customers in sunny areas are almost certainly going to benefit financially and in terms of reliability if the grid encourages them to install PV and batteries that talk to and work with the grid. Whether a grid owner will actually be incented to do so is a different question.
Solar has the further advantage that it doesn't require ongoing fuel, so you're not dependent on that infrastructure either. Sizing a battery system to accommodate your usual lifestyle while it's dark is a bit silly, but a modest amount of storage that can supply say an average of 200W will get you quite far (fridge, sump pump, lighting, internet uplink, laptop).
This is making the error of substituting average performance for the actual performance of a particular grid. The PG&E grid shuts down large amounts of transmission during high wind events:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_California_power_shutof...
> Solar and batteries aren't a substitute for grid transmission infrastructure
This is proving to be very wrong. Transmission is extremely expensive, it can be one of the most expensive parts of the grid, and, both batteries and distributed solar are being used as a substitute for transmission.
The term in the industry is "non-wires alternatives," and it was a way for early lithium ion batteries to be used profitably on the grid, even before their recent price drops. (That and frequency regulation in the PJM market).
My only gripe here is that this by itself, does not quality PG&E's grid as "unreliable".
As for non-wires alternatives, I can point to several reports, some from NERC, some NREL and others private companies that have found - over and over again - that the path towards more grid reliability involves better transmission and stronger distribution. Batteries and solar can delay the investment needed, not substitute them altogether.
> What service do you have where your grid connection is that unreliable?
I am in Ercot, right next to where the natural gas pipelines begin and where regulation ends, and I also struggle to keep the time on all of my appliances week-to-week. I don't know how the EI grid is doing, but feels like reliability has been dropping like a rock west of the Mississippi since ~2014 or so.
I used to have a computer plugged directly into the ATX power grid that had ~3 years of uptime. What a fantastical time that was.
Now, I am currently having a 50kW standby generator installed (oversized for multi-day operation). I am also investigating multiple fuel sources and smaller auxiliary units. Have to think in 2nd order terms these days. Everyone else is getting a generator installed too.
They immediately had a propane backup tank installed that could run things for 2 weeks.
Generally controlled burns are scheduled during wetter seasons for this reason. But the difficulty of getting the general public to understand this and go along with it is probably hard to understate.
With very high fuel loads, the consequences get worse as time progresses, and the odds of it happening get higher - at least without tons of manual shredding and other fuel work first, which is expensive, and what a prescribed fire should alleviate the need for.
In the modern legal/liability environment, it’s tough to do - if you do the inexpensive thing (still expensive) like prescribed fires to reduce the catastrophic risk, you get sued.
If you do the safer option (mastication, lop and scatter, etc) you can only touch tiny areas at a time - and the catastrophic risk rises.
Logging can help, but it also requires management and care to not make the problem worse long term, and in many of these areas it’s a non-starter due to environmentalist pushback. Even if we ignore the cost in money, it delays things for decades sometimes - and by then it’s probably burned down.
One is the fire intensity for people who enjoy the outdoors and using them. High intensity fires destroy the natural resource and some will take a century to grow back. This is especially worry some because we are essentially locked into all of our forests burning down at this point.
Impact on people and homes is an entirely different one that I honestly care less about, because it affects me less.
[1] https://lhc.ca.gov/report/fire-mountain-rethinking-forest-ma...
You might send a manhole cover into near earth orbit now and then when an underground transformer explodes. As the famous saying most definitely does not go: One small leap for manhole cover, one giant leap for not celebrating your fifth anniversary of burning down ratepayer homes and national parks.
(As you might suspect, they’ve been making tidy profits every year for decades while choosing not to invest in burying power lines. The only reason there’s been such rapid change and a proper incident reaction in IT terms for an actual megacorp, is that they’re in bankruptcy court and the judge can compel them to act competently and rapidly, and shame them and penalize them for failing for the fourth year in a row to do so. Non-US folks, our power utilities are a mix of for-profit and not-for-profit, and ethical behavior that costs money is less common in for-profit ones. Co-ops are usually a good idea, but megacorps not so much.)
Not so fast ! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire
Profitability and bankruptcy sit in a mild opposition to each other.
They might have made a mistake about how much they accrued in the past, but going forward they wouldn't be able to call the decision profitable. It clearly wasn't.
If a business goes bankrupt, at least one of its past decisions was an unprofitable one. That is a difficult fact to escape from.
I believe that many US companies have made distinct fortunes based just on capital asset valuations, along with some strategic sales and trades here and there. PG&E is in the center of that, being a massive landowner for its infrastructure. Second fun-fact, when California State regulators requested inventory details for things like transmission facilities, the response was "trade secret" or "homeland security" or "you will sell this info" .. basically deny, delay and deprive. So even the agencies tasked to regulate PG&E did not have complete asset inventories to refer to..
If anyone has info on the current court-ordered restructuring since the criminal negligence conviction, don't be shy !
Unprofitable for the shareholders, maybe.
The CEO still gets to take home $6M+ [1] which sounds plenty profitable to me.
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/04/08/pge-execs-pay-raises-...
Or in the case of the Camp Fire, we're talking about a transmission line constructed in the 1920's to carry hydroelectric power from the Sierra Nevada to other areas-- primarily Contra Costa County.
Also, running a mile of power line in a California city is orders of magnitude more expensive than running a mile of power line in rural areas outside of California. To the extent that PG&E follows the law (sometimes they just steal the money, and blow up towns years later when the system decays), I doubt they make much profit in the city.
At any rate, PG&E prices are completely out of control in rural areas. All in, I paid ~$10K for a 5 foot run from an existing transformer. All they did was run three wires five feet, and re-energize their own transformer.
It took them three years.
In the meantime, we built a house with a gas generator and Lithium ion batteries.
I’m not including that expense in the $10K, nor am I including delay of construction or wiring on our side of the PG&E box.
I am including the second pole and power backing board they had us build because the first one (built to their specifications) was unacceptable.
Edit: Also, they made us bury our lines, but refused to bury theirs in a reasonable timeframe. Hopefully we’ll get buried service lines out of this.
Edit 2: I forgot. They refused to give us permission to move our box to eliminate their unburied lines. So, it wasn’t that we wanted them to pay to bury the lines. We wanted their engineers to sign off on moving a transformer, and then decommissioning their lines.
Since then, they’ve had people on our property multiple times to deal with trees that interfere with the line they wouldn’t let us pay to eliminate.
They definitely make all their money in cities, most utilities do. The monopoly license to operate in a city makes servicing rural areas tolerable, but everyone would avoid servicing them at the same rates if they didn’t have to.
Presumably the point is to bring affected parts of California back to the first world by not having to shut off their power whenever there's heavy winds expected.
It’s not going to stop everything, nor all human-caused fires (e.g., the “gender reveal” one last year), but I believe it shifts the likelihood more than you expect.
But if CA wants to reduce these fires, they desperately need to catch back up on their controlled burns. A combination of low brush fire for decades (not forest fire!) and changing environment has built up an extremely dangerous backlog of fuel that makes CA specifically and the PNW in general a massive fire risk. Short of fixing global warming and moving everyone away from the interface between nature and city, the only solution is to burn up all that fuel in a controlled way.
The vegetation there has been on natural cycles for years of burning hot every few years. Sure power lines start the file, but they will start anyway: large hot fires have always been part of the life cycle of that area. This is very different from the low brush fires that are a natural part of most other forests.
To be fair, climate change and changing habitation patterns are also making this much worse.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/11/californias-...
Historically, most California forests had low intensity burns every few years. Now, these same forests haven't had a fire in 100+ years, resulting in extremely intense fires that leave behind ashen moonscapes. This is not the historic normal fire cycle in CA.
Let's be absolutely clear that this is only true for a limited number of forests. The evidence for this is the existence of very old trees.
Unfortunately many forests will become increasingly susceptible to fire as dry seasons are extending in many areas due to climate change.
Lots of tree species are able to survive a forest fire once they reach a certain size. There absolutely are very old trees in areas that burn frequently.
There also always is plenty of oxygen. In dry summers, there’s also plenty of fuel. What’s lacking is sufficient heat. The ignition temperature of wood is difficult to assess, but wood can start burning at 125°C ≈ 256°F (https://www.warrenforensics.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/P...)
It doesn’t get that hot without help, e.g. from a campfire, a magnifying glass, or sparks from electricity.
I also wonder if the unions representing linemen have a strong influence on "bury" vs "overhead" since most of lineman's job involves work up a pole rather than a tunnel.
Lastly - burying anything in the ground in areas where the ground has been known to move (California is the "Earthquake" entry in the Bingo game of "choose which natural disaster" that is the continental USA) is liable to be a non-trivial endeavour, one which will require ongoing inspections and the like.
A point to keep in mind here, PGE is a company. Their primary goal is to not be the cause of the wildfire and pay damages. If it also reduces the frequency of wildfires, great.
The article here refers to PG&E, Pacific Gas and Electric, an investor-owned private utility serving California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Compa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_General_Electric_Comp...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/12/06/pge-reaches...
The primary problem remains fire suppression practices, forest management, and changing climate. This seems like a very expensive way to eliminate a quarter of our wildfires.
Maybe its just “the solution”.
But doesn't help the fire. As long the dry woods are piling up, which it eventually will, something else will trigger the fire. And amount of fire won't be even reduce by 25%.
But the court won't be able to blame PGE then, that's the whole point.
This is much, much cheaper than burying them, and they hire students going into forest, and related fields to assist with the work (heavily supervised).
It is not even remotely hard to believe that Quebec has far, far more rural power lines than California.
What's the difference? State run organizations like Hydro Quebec, are IMO not apt to create short term profits, by sacrificing long term cost saving measures. There is no CEO of Hydro Quebec getting a massive boost to income via stock profits, or awards due to profit targets met.
The goal is instead, make delivery the safest and most cost effective over the long term.
By burying wires, I suspect it achieves two things. Ensuring a CEO, or department head won't cost save for a bonus, and not trim wires, and to maybe do a one time write down.
To highlight this?
I accidentally had a tree fall the wrong way (I has ropes too, one slipped) during a cut. Hydro Quebec came and cut the tree from the wires, restored power, for free.
In Ontario, where power is private now? I would have paid thousands.
Why the difference? The loss of life, because someone tries to save money and deal with it themselves, isn't worth it. Especially when state paid health care, and disability exists.
I'm 100% a capitalist. Yet some things make sense, run as a non profit, where costs are counter to societal safety and goals.
And they trim trees in CA too, but unlike QC which is typically green in the summer, CA is typically full of dry vegetation and a spark in the grass is still going to start a massive fire.
Not really. While it's true that a state run organizations might not cut costs to meet profits, that's just replaced with cutting to meet budget requirements. eg. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
It is established with a specific mandate by a province or the federal government, but run at a pretty long arm's length while still being accountable to the legislature. Some crown corps, like Hydro Quebec, produce their own revenue, so they have some market incentives to perform and are not subject to the whims of the annual government budget.
There are lots of other examples like this outside of utilities. The US Postal Service, Amtrak, the Export-Import Bank, and many others.
Doesn't that describe PG&E? It's run at "long arm's length" from the government because it's a private company, but it's also accountable to the CPUC.
> Some crown corps, like Hydro Quebec, produce their own revenue, so they have some market incentives to perform
What are these "market incentives to perform", and how does it not lead us back to square one with "these companies will cut costs to boost profits"?
I think that's the major part. It will look good for them from an ESG perspective. Also, I think some states, like CA, are talking about making the company pay for any fire starting from their equipment. So they are probably hedging that risk. If they wait, it could take them too long to complete the burial and then still be subjected to penalties under new laws in the future.
Edit: why downvote? These steps may reduce a small percentage of wildfires (10% from electric utilities and PG&E isn't the only one). I think the main reasons they are doing it are what I stated about. I doubt the company truly cares about this unless it reduced the financial risk and helped them in the ESG space.
And I guess some smaller fires might cost a lot, if they are near rich people's estates.