This happened on your watch, Mr. Newsom. Not that it was your fault. But it still happened during your tenure as Governor and could very easily happen again and again and again, unless the state steps in and does something. PGE has proven itself to be absolutely inept as a customer and safety focused private utility.
8
People should stop blaming PG&E and put the blame now on politicians. PG&E is bankrupt and their stock is likely to be worthless.
Who will pay the bill for another fire like Paradise?
We will - the PG&E ratepayers will be on the hook for a $30 billion lawsuit. Does anyone think about that?
11
And every single company official who was dining in a swanky restaurant ("fiddling while Rome burned") should be ordered to pay the bills for all the spoiled food, closed schools, generator services, extra police, extra shelters--etc. Start with CEO Johnson who "earns" $2.5 million per year. It's obscene!
13
In 2019 This is Unacceptable! The State of California need to replace PG&E.
6
Living in the best democracy money can buy, PG&E long ago and continuing, bought its regulators, beginning with the governors who appoint the CA Public Utility commissioners, but also the legislators and the commissioners themselves.
As CA attorney general, Kamala Harris was an enabler of PG&E. https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/09/while-pge-played-cat-and-mouse-game-with-california-regulators-where-was-kamala.html
"In the POWER episode of the ABC10 series, Gov. Newsom refused to answer whether it was right to take the money from a federal offender on probation. State records show that Newsom’s campaign and his PAC accepted $208,400 in donations from PG&E while the company was a convicted felon on probation.
When asked by ABC10 about the contribution from the convicted felon, PG&E“I wish you luck with whatever you’re working on, but that’s a strange question, I don’t know what more I can say.”
https://www.abc10.com/article/news/judge-orders-pge-to-explain-political-spending-following-abc10-documentary-series/103-725817b3-28a8-4ae0-b7ad-4d117feddf64
The previous CA governor, Jerry Brown was totally in bed with PG&E... pathetic, because he worked so hard cultivating his environmentalist extraordinaire image, yet the carbon footprint of his administration was monstrous because of his lack of vision re PG&E and the resulting horrendous fires...
and his strong support for CA oil and gas extraction.
5
PG&E: "Unsafe At Any (wind) Speed"
2
I and my wife were evacuated for 10 days during the
Sonoma County fires of October 2017. Since then we had the Camp Fire disaster. Why couldn't PG&E reinforce all their power lines during the "off-season"? I guess it was cheaper for PG&E executives to save money instead of lives and hide behind bankruptcy protection.
'
7
PG&E is the poster child for internalized profits and externalize costs. They have successfully been able to get the public to pay for their disasters. California voters will remember the proposition they spent 40 million on while scaring voters into thinking their rates would go up if it did not pass. The proposition if passed would have made it illegal for local municipalities to set up their own power grid. Obviously this was done to insure they remain a monopoly. Thankfully it was defeated. This recent disaster is an example of what happens when government is run like a business. The CPUC and PG&E are in business together and work for the PG&E shareholders. PG&E rates will go up now.
7
Terrific expose! Oddly it mostly leaves out the elephant in the room-the weather. In many places where the power was out it was calm and at least cool overnight if not during the day. In my Northern California foothill town we stood outside and said 'what wind, what heat?' All of our local (25 mile radius) Weather Unnderground stations had maximum winds at 5 to 7 max mph for DAYS. Clearly not the extreme winds that take trees/branches and power lines down. I am all for well coordinated, supported, informed fire prevention measures when necessary AND PG&E has to use more accurate weather forecasting along with a way to limit/refine their PSPS target areas. We also noticed that the power came back small section by small section and have been wondering why they are not able to turn it off in the same way? I sincerely add this to the long list of things that need refining and improving while PG&E works on the real job of making their power lines safe or better yet under grounding them where they can.
3
Is it possible to bury many of these lines, or is that not something that can be done with high transmission lines? If it's possible to do so, what would the cost be and how long would it take? Surely the overall cost to customers and businesses would be lower.
6
Many Californians have rooftop solar panels but PGE Rules require they be shut down during a power outage. In lots of ways they resist changes to the grid (eg microgrids, islanding, feed in-tarrifs) that would bring clean, reliable, decentralized power to our communities. That would save lives and alleviate the suffering from shut downs. For PGE, It’s all about the bottom line.
8
California is now a THIRD WORLD COUNTRY. We have no power, no water and no roads. Legislative policies caused the lights to go out throughout Northern and Central California.
Inverse condemnation (a company doesn't need to be negligible to be liable) laws forced PG&E to shut off power to millions of Californians across 34 counties. Fearing the return of high winds knocking down power lines that could spark deadly wildfires caused PG&E to shut down power. If this were not compulsive enough Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation on October 2, 2019 to tighten the rules for utility power shutoffs.
Furthermore, the California Public Utilities Commission by consistently rejects costs prevent appropriate safety, maintenance, and reliability. Additionally, it forced utilities to pump billions into green energy and electric-car subsidies. Credit Suisse has estimated that long-term contracts with renewable developers cost the utility $2.2 billion annually more than current market power rates. Another example of regulatory over reach is the opposition to logging and prescribed burns in California’s forests.
You sow what you reap and unforced THIRD WORLD CONDITIONS are the results.
4
PG&E is: Irresponsible. Reprehensible. Unconscionable. Self serving. Greedy. Typical.
1
Houston develops federally designated flood plains and hurricanes devastate them. Taxpayer funded FEMA pays. California develops properties bordering wildfire prone forests and wonders why homes get ravaged. (no FEMA here, FEMA only goes to red states). California's largest utility, PG&E, charges the highest rates in the nation, pays their management salaries in excess of $10m, guarantees dividends to its shareholders, ignores the chorus of advisors to insulate or bury power lines, and keeps the same playbook day after day. So much for privatization. This is a Trump-like fiasco that the state needs to immediately address and ameliorate. Californians deserve better
4
Add on-site generation and storage immediately. Every single installer of wind, solar, and other generation of electricity should be in CA today. Every single natural gas generator that can be spared should be shipped to CA today. Why not use local generation to avoid transfer lines and add the underground transmission lines to reduce risk further?
1
There is inherit danger when one corporation owns it all. i.e. PG&E
Once again, corporate and share holder profit vs doing the right thing.
6
Gavin Newton must resign for these disastrous shut-down plans!
2
We here in Northern California lack an electric company that knows how to keep the lights on, and for that matter power lines still attached, when the wind blows. We have about the mildest weather in the country, and it's still too much for PG&E. Those of you from the rest of the country, look up just how fast the wind wasn't blowing for this "emergency." We'll forgive you if you're not very impressed. And the company has pledged more of the same in the future.
6
this is the utility now running two reactors at diablo canyon surrounded by earthquake faults, suffering from cracking, embrittlement and so much more.
it is absolutely terrifying to think these keystone cops are in charge of two machines that could send a radioactive cloud pouring into los angeles.
it is time for the state to step in and shut these reactors down.
be afraid. be very afraid.
7
How many people died as a result of the power cut off? PBS reported that one man on oxygen died 18 minutes after power was cut. What a poorly managed company.
3
So many people are leaving comments to the effect that the power lines need to be buried... would be good to have an article on the cost of that idea...
7
This article sugar coats the situation. Not mentioning that the power line that sparked the deadly fire in Paradise in '18 was caused by a 100 year old line, or that the gas line explosion & fire in San Bruno was from a pipeline that was a decade past its replacement date. That power lines in San Francisco that were have to have been undergrounded have not been five years after the due date - no progress on that one.
PG&E is extremely poorly managed - though you wouldn't know it by its executive salaries. And the Utility Commission has done nothing to force it to clean up its act or use the technology solutions CA is known for. Witness PG&E's proposed bankruptcy settlement which stiffs fire victims in favor of shareholders and executive. If you invest in a poorly run company, you should share in the cost of mending its ways. Newson has been mealy mouthed on this, and voters must hold all accountable!
8
PG&E sent a message: "Let us do what we want. Don't mess with us. We can make things really hard on you." Pirates and thieves, all of them.
6
This is a another warning of what is coming. Climate change will exacerbate the weakness of the nations' infrastructure and the world's. Humanity isn't prepared for the calamity that our children and grandchildren will face. Future generations will judge us as guilty of crimes against humanity.
But what does 35% of the US care about? Watching the mad ravings of America's Caligula on FOX or denying science as they read Breitbart, screaming and yelling in anger like brainwashed cultists. And let's not forget those tax cuts for the ones who don't
need them. The GOP will tell us that the only solution for climate change is more tax cuts for the wealthy.
3
Impedimentus, make that more like about 40%. Yes, pretty hard to believe that our country has been reduced to so much ignorance- and that there is even the possibility that this lunatic could get re-elected. But what's worse is that most Americans who detest Trump are STILL not paying enough attention to the global planetary crisis that is happening now- not some distant day in the future. Weapons of mass distraction dominate American culture and politics. As for the ability for future generations to judge, at this rate, I don't know that there will be any.
3
Of course trees are going to fall on power lines. The power lines run through the branches of the trees! Here in St. H. I can see out of my window lines intertwined with the branches of the trees on my street! The only solution for this is of course underground lines. As I walk up into the nearby hills I have seen cut limbs resting on power lines and whoever cut that branch felt no compulsion to take it away. Shameful!
5
Sadly, one man depending on electrical service to run a life-essential appliance, died about one-half hour after the electricity was shut off. (Reference: Ventura Star Newspaper in Ventura County, CA)
1
Is Ventura served by PG&E or Southern California Edison?
2
P,G, & E deserves a medal for bumping Trump out of the lead headline. Well done!
3
having read today's article about and interview with James Comey his observation “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” might apply.
Though at some point incompetence at the level demonstrated by PG&E going back to the San Bruno pipeline explosion on September 9, 2010 becomes malicious.
2
Now there’s an understatement. Hey PG&E don’t you wish that you had kept up with the scheduled maintenance before it came to this? Here in lies the dangers of privatization. What could possibly go wrong? 🙄
4
It is LONG PAST TIME to say "ADIOS PG&E"
I am a long-time PG&E rural customer. Power failures are a monthly event (or more frequently) -- totaling 30+ events in one year. Telephone communication "difficulties" is NOTHING NEW with this disaster of a company -- "communicating" with PG&E can turn into a half-day affair, often with no resolution.
PG&E techs cut the lock on my gate, got stuck on my road and chewed it up, left with no notice, and FINALLY admitted that they were at the wrong address; they never paid to fix the road ($3000).
It was COMMON KNOWLEDGE in the 1990's that PG&E took rate-payer dollars supposedly put in "lock box" for tree-trimming and instead squandered MILLIONS in "incentives" for top executives and their families -- weeks-long ski vacations in expensive and expansive lodges in Tahoe and Mammoth.
Hippy-dippy NEBRASKA has 100% public power and infinitely lower rates and better service that PG&E could even hope to achieve in 100 years. It is LONG PAST TIME for 100% Public Power in California. [My father referred to PG&E management philosophy as Pathetic Grifting & Extortion -- and that was in the 1950's -- nothing changes.]
6
I live in Northern California, and am a PG&E customer. The biggest problem isn't just that all this stuff happens. The issue us there is ZERO accountability. The California Public Utilities Commission, the organization tasked with regulating PG&E doesn't do much to actually stop the endless nonsense and mismanagement. PG&E has a monopoly, meaning they have total control of millions of people's power supply, therefore they must be held to the highest standards.
12
private companies never invest in infrastructures. extreme capitalism is killing the American democracy. and those behind this terrible companies call management socialism...
7
There are a lot of nonsensical comments here that demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of how electric utilities work: (1) the cost of transmission is shouldered by the consumer, not the utility, so no, PG&E does not cost minimize. In fact, they do the very opposite, because they are paid on a rate base system, whereby they earn a preset return on capital for building transmission; therefore (2) PG&E would love an excuse to build underground transmission lines or redundant lines or lines made of gold, but the state PUC will not let them because your power bill will skyrocket and then you will complain about prices being too high instead of overhead power lines; but (3) it is notable that the reason this monopoly exists in the first place is because of just HOW MUCH the government is involved: if transmission and distribution were deregulated in theory you would have other choices overbuild and compete with PG&E, but the government restricts this [1]. Ergo, no, don’t blame “corporate greed”—you have nowhere to look but your state government who has bumbled electric delivery for decades.
[1] this dates to the CA power crisis of 2000, in which the government began the process of deregulation, got spooked by prices potentially being “too high,” set a price ceiling, created a massive power shortage, and then blamed deregulation for blackouts.
7
PG&E shut off the power to my small community of Foresthill, California. It sits in the foothills of the Sierras in Placer County. There was nearly no wind at all in our town and the temperatures were mild. No one here believes that PG&E is telling the truth about why they turned off the power. The prevailing view here is it is about politics; the locals believe that PG&E is punishing Californians for being blamed for last year's Camp Fire. Whatever the truth is, PG&E's word is not worth much in this town.
6
The only reason for this blackout is to force California to grant them a "Lex PG&E", a law that prevents them from being sued. They are doing the exact same thing as the traders from Enron back in the 90s, which caused brownouts to force up electricity prices. It's greed, greed, greed and nothing else!
As a German I am prone to be democratic-socialistic in my thinking. When I was young ALL infrastructure was federally, state- or city-owned. The privatization wave of the 80s and 90s changed that, and now we have some problems, for example being sued by the energy companies when we ordered them to shut down their dangerous nuclear reactors. Ridiculous!
In a country run by me it would be like in the 70s in Germany: infrastructure belongs in the hands of the people, not companies! This means gas, electricity, roads, telecommunication, even TV. The stuff transported /through/ the infrastructure, that can be provided by private companies, at least in part. But the infrastructure itself should be maintained by people who have sworn an oath on the bible, that way the stuff should stay in A1 condition.
But maybe that's just a pipe dream, given human nature. There will be sloppiness, laziness, greed and stupidity forever and everywhere. I just have the feeling it's increasing from day to day. Thank you for this kind of "Globalization", America!
7
Too bad billions of dollars were diverted to green deams like EVs and a train to nowhere, money which should have been used to clear brush and bury lines. It's not that complicated, CA. No reason or excuse that the richest, most technically astute state in the most advanced country can't keep the lights on.
4
Humboldt County, a 1200 sq mile county larger than a few states, was the only county to lose ALL power to the entire county. And notice for a 3 to 8 day black out did not go out until 6:38 pm before the midnight shut off.
Weather was calm mid-60’s, with evening temps dropping to mid-40’s and wind was less than we usually experience on a clear sunny day.
Gas stations quickly ran out of fuel as people/businesses tried to fill tanks and extra gas cans for generators, runs on grocery stores, employers trying to determine the essential functions of businesses and try to contact nonessential employees so they minimize or avoid commuting to conserve resources. All with LESS than 6 hour notice for a multi day shut off.
To those who say we should all be prepared, many of us are prepared. Regular outages are unfortunately normal, especially in the winter. But they are generally in pockets within the county so services or goods can still be secured in neighboring cities. And those outages are normally 2-3 days. Rarely 8.
But then. Our State Senator Mike McGuire met with PG&E officials. And power was restored 27 hours later in most of Humboldt. Was the shut off really to minimize risk, or is that PGE said to the legislature, give us complete immunity or else this is what happens.
“Missteps”. What a pathetic understatement.
9
Some of us have been warning people about these critical situations and the poor planning that the governments and utilities would exhibit for over fifty years. FIFTY years! But did anyone listen? Of course not! Now you are stuck in a situation called Baghdad Syndrome and various other names, where electricity will be rationed by limiting availability. Did you really think we were just "dirty hippies" who were living in a fantasy world? I suggest you start reading a little bit of history of the 1960s. You will also find that public policies known now as the Green New Deal were put forth back then too.
4
Channeling Lilly Tomlin, "We don’t care. We don’t have too. We are PG&E, your power company"
2
Nothing like ticking off millions of voters and basically half of the state’s legislative and Congressional representatives. Poorly played, PG&E. We look forward to your imminent split-up and return to civic ownership.
3
Too bad Google or FB couldn’t keep on the juice.
Why people in CA aren’t blaming their now ‘democratic-socialist’ government for this amazes me. Keep your state blue and you won’t have equal pushback from red, no debate, no ideas from each ‘side’.
This country needs both.
What happens when the next big fire is started by someone carelessly throwing a cigarette out of his car window?
If reports are correct the fire currently burning around LA was started by a garbage truck operator dumping his load as it had caught fire. The fire then spread from the garbage to the surrounding brush. Two dead so far.
Electric wires can be one reason for the fire to start, but there are many other ways. How do you protect from all of them.
PGE was assigned the responsibility for last years fire and is now in bankruptcy. How many billions can you get from a careless smoker? a garbage hauling company? A thundercloud?
Yes, look at improving fire/safety concerns with the electric grid, but there are many other causes, equally, if not more preventable, or some maybe not.
1
I live in northern CA in an area burned through by the "wine country fires" of 2017. I feel that I had plenty of warning from PG&E. There has been plenty of notice, since the fires, that PG&E was going to employ this strategy in times of high risk. And then had at least two days of notice prior to this actual shut off that it was imminent. I work in a medical office and we had plenty of time to plan our strategy. Clearly, there is room for improvement in PG&Es management center for these events, but that will come with time.
I grew up in a quite rural area in another state, and became used to frequent power outages in the winter. I think for MOST people, outages such as this are not a huge deal, and are reasonable if it prevents fires. You do need to plan, have LED lanterns (NOT candles), and if you need full time power for some particular crucial appliance, then get a small generator (or, if resources allow, solar power with batteries).
I'm tired of so many Americans claiming to be rugged individualists, then wining endlessly when they lose electricity for three days of the year.
Many comments about just burying the lines. I would like to see that too, but I wonder how many customers would be willing to pay the increased rates for this tremendously expensive endeavor.
It is rare that I take the side of a corporation, and I think PG&E has been plenty wrong in the past, but I think that they made the right call this time.
4
PG&E has been cited for felonious actions in the San Bruno gas explosion. They violated their probation in that case. Their equipment has sparked about 10 wildfires, one of which, the Camp Fire, killed 46 or 47 people. Now this inability to adequately handle the electricity shut down. This company is criminally negligent. Until some PG&E executives are actually prosecuted and jailed for their homicidal negligence, nothing will change. Also, the members of the California Public Utilities Commission needs to be publically called out, and removed from their positions. Until there is personal liability for these folks, their business will continue as usual, and the customers will pay the price; some of them with their lives.
1
Blaming PGE is not completely fair. As a utility, they answer to the state and the PUC. Where are those people and shouldn’t they have to answer too. Interview them, ask them hard questions about how they determine what we pay and what we pay for. One question to ask is how much PGE is spending on alternative “green energy” that could be redirected for safety and technology. I think it’s billions. While important a safe and reliable source of electricity is more important. Don’t you?
3
Two underlying problems:
1. An arid environment. By the fall there hasn't been rain for months. With the influx of millions of people over the last century plus, problems have been ongoing for quite a long time. Exacerbated now by the climate crisis.
2. Corporate culture. From a different culture would have immediately come the obvious communication that our power might be disrupted but it would depend on developing wind conditions. And that these can't be fully predicted, location by location. We would have then known to simply look out the window to check the wind. We would have been better prepared mentally, armed with this information. We figured this out eventually when deadlines for blackouts came and went but our power was still on.
2
California is now a THIRD WORLD COUNTRY. We have no power, no water and no roads. Legislative policies caused the lights to go out throughout Northern and Central California.
Inverse condemnation (a company doesn't need to be negligible to be liable) laws forced PG&E to shut off power to millions of Californians across 34 counties. Fearing the return of high winds knocking down power lines that could spark deadly wildfires caused PG&E to shut down power. If this were not compulsive enough Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation on October 2, 2019 to tighten the rules for utility power shutoffs.
Furthermore, the California Public Utilities Commission consistently rejects costs that prevents appropriate safety, maintenance, and reliability. Additionally, it forced utilities to pump billions into green energy and electric-car subsidies. Credit Suisse has estimated that long-term contracts with renewable developers cost the utility $2.2 billion annually more than current market power rates. Another example of regulatory over reach is the opposition to logging and prescribed burns in California’s forests.
You sow what you reap and unforced THIRD WORLD CONDITIONS are the results.
Former Marin resident, here. One needs only look at the lobbying and political contributions budget to see why PGE has not been held accountable for maintenance and liability. The local elected officials are afraid of them.
2
Why is it that most affected do not know what the correct solution to the problem is? Now, please note that this fix will cost billions (a lot less over time than the current system is costing or will cost) but it will work. All they must do is to invest in an underground line system, including the transformers which would be in a shelter type structure where they could be repaired or replaced. This approach has been available for a few decades but do to the lower profits for the service providers for a decade or so and higher costs for the power but far lower costs for the fire side of this issue no one wants to really fix the problem and only treat the symptoms forever. Go figure!
Despite all the proven flaws charged against PG&E, they are still the only power provider for much of the state and if the expense of going underground is overwhelming, what other choices does the state have.
California has no choice but to attack the fire issue full strength. It comes down to act or burn. What immediate other choices does the state have?
1
You think this is bad? Wait until an enemy sets off an ElectroMagnetic Pulse, or a strong solar flare hits the earth.
We should learn to be able to survive and even be comfortable with extended electrical outages, planned or forced.
3
Implement an all out construction project to put the power lines on or underground. Use conduit made of recycled plastic.
This addresses 2 environmental issues and is cheaper than costs of blackouts and massive losses to wildfires.
If the overhead wires are unsafe to operate, why are they still in place? No other country does this. PG&E completed undergrounding of 150 miles off thousands of miles to go, what more evidence of incompetence is needed?
How can it be that there weather model is so off from NOAA and Weatherunderground or IBM’s, another example of basic incompetence.
Finally, in such multiagency incidents why does State OES not take over to put PG&E iut of its misery?
To CPUC & Bankruptcy Court: please slash them in three: Gas transmission, Power transmission and Power generation. It would also make renewables easier to connect.
1
yet the state has sever limitations to individuals using solar on their homes. different areas different rules all for pg&e to continue to reap huge profits.
1
We demand to be kept safe from natural disasters, and with help from such eager lawyers, demand someone else be held accountable and must pay for any trouble in our lives.
The problem is FIRE. Not utility companies. Breaking up, shutting down, taking over by state or federal government will not stop wildfires, and will make the problem of unaffordable utility bills worse.
The reason for-profit companies own our power grid is that in the 1970s and 1980s city, municipal, and regional government owned utilities were mismanaged and demanded constant tax hikes. And people voted to sell their utilities to private businesses with the hope that the companies would operate more efficiently and less corruptly.
Of course that didn't work. But neither will returning utility companies to local government ownership. Because again people don't want to pay taxes. But they will pay a monthly fee to a company.
This is America now. We would rather pay $1 to a company than 1 cent to taxes. Because a tax will benefit other people but a fee only buys something for me.
You want the solution: look in the mirror.
13
Maybe these utilities should do the only real thing that will work and bury the power lines underground. Any effort in this direction will be seen as positive. Yes it’s expensive but it’s the only long term strategy that makes sense.
4
Government isn’t the solution government is problem... sure.. as the article states it was left to the State to step in. Maximizing profit is not the solution maximizing profit is the problem.
3
Part of California’s embrace of sensible market regulation should have been to make this reckless company a publicly-held entity with strict parameters for revenues, profits, investment and maintenance. But no. Being part (at least for a while longer) of the USA, it had to privileged “shareholder capitalism” over all other ways of operating this regional monopoly. The costs are there for all to see. The first thing a proper regulatory regime should require is burying power lines in high-risk fire areas, as well as urban areas look San Francisco, which has neighborhoods with some of the world’s most expensive real estate but above-ground power infrastructure that looks more like what I’ve seen in favelas in Rio de Janeiro. The US is the only developed country where you see this sort of thing. It’s also the only place where the cult of “shareholder value” allows such outcomes consistently to happen. It’s also why American banks were the last in the developed world to shift over to safer, anti-fraud chip-based bank cards. They dragged their heels in the name of not channeling profits into investment, which could have “upset shareholders.” It’s time to catch up with the rest of the modern world and stop enabling the sort of shameless corporate rent-seeking (which secures favors and stifles wider regulation) and grotesquely poor corporate citizenship that fundamentally characterize the fatally-flawed American model of capitalism.
13
Thinking about the billions invested and risked in start-ups to generate data instead of solving problems like this.
We are going backward, not forward.
5
PG&E has been a super greedy incompetent irresponsibly run company. The primary cause of the Paradise fire was not meteorological but their failure to maintain lines and poles, some of which were 100+ years old, way beyond their useful life. The CA legislature and leadership made a grave mistake letting PG&E reorganize itself in bankruptcy without putting them under strict mandatory supervision and mandating proper maintenance and adequate investment in their infrastructure. The people of CA would have been much better off if PG&E had been shut down in bankruptcy, with its assets bought our by the state, and replaced by a non-profit professionally run company.
8
PG&e announced the possibility of a PSPO months in advance. We received numerous letters and emails days ahead of the shutoff late Wednesday night. Since we so informed we were able to prepare for the event with plenty of time. By Thursday evening the power was back. It was a minor inconvenience but I’d much rather have this than a wildfire. As long as there are those who choose to live in remote forest areas and expect to have the convenience of electricity brought to their homes we will all have to sacrifice for their safety.
7
All of the sudden the USA find themselves at a technological disadvantage compared to Europe. Their overground power lines, together with a network owned and managed by private companies, make them look so prone to losing money and lives in the current climate-changed environment.
Will the government decide to protect its economy and society or will it be left once more to self balancing economic interests?
In my view lines should be underground and utility network should be owned and run by the government, on behalf of all citizens, in an advanced economy.
9
Power lines! Is this a cutting edge of technology? I live in Europe where overhead power lines are non existent. They are all underline and therefore cannot be knocked down by winds or inclement weather. When I return to the US and see neighborhoods with dangling overhead electric wires running down the streets it looks like something from the 18 hundreds.
21
Having lived in the US for over 20 years, I always wondered, why all the power lines were above ground, as they would be damaged during every blizzard, hurricane or other severe weather event. Isn't it time the utilities started to put the power lines underground. Yes, expensive, but in the long run much cheaper and safer.
11
Sadly, living in Florida, hurricane repair is a large chunk of our seasonal based economy (were out of season during most of the hurricane months.
1
In Europe, most electricity cables are under the ground... perhaps California should think about the same, rather than pushing the state back into the Middle Ages.
14
Where I live the wind was exactly the same as the nights Napa, Santa Rosa and Paradise burned. The power lines that feed some areas that didn’t experience high winds are in areas that did. After an entire town burned it would have be reckless for PG&E not to have done this. Other places frequently experience weather related blackouts, sometimes for weeks in the middle of the freezing winter, this was nothing.
6
Is just clear that the utility was trying to save its own skin. That’s what they all do.
4
Although they say they did this to prevent another fire(s) from starting, it seems more likely that they did it to punish people for having suing PG&E for last year's fires.
8
Really???
I will go with liability reduction but not 'punishment'.
If they hadn't been able to cut deals with the state energy commission to get out of having to put wires underground, we wouldn't have this problem.
Oh but government is too big and we don't need oversight of corporations right? We can just suffer the consequences years later and blame the weather because we all forgot about those deals - if we ever knew or paid attention.
Stop whining California. For years you voted against big government, helping Ronnie and the Republican governors who followed, to help their corporate friends.
Now you reap what you have sowed. Just remember that Big Government is really bad. Who needs Environmental oversight, slaughterhouse inspections, reviewing pharmaceutical studies that they themselves wrote?
Jump on the simplistic 'Big Government is Bad Bandwagon' - of course it's in your best interests. And your children's and grandchildren's too. That's what the tv commercial said.
4
Although they say they did this to prevent another fire(s) from starting, it seems more likely that they did it to punish people for having suing PG&E for last year's fires.
I live in the hills of the South Bay Area of San Francisco/San. Jose. There was absolutely no wind before during or after the power was turned off. There was no predicted winds. It was not hot.
This was true of most of the Bay Area except for the highest altitudes, a very small area. Yet they turned the power off for almost the entire Bay Area.
So there was not even a safety issue here for most of the areas they turned the power off for.
9
@Robert J Berger What about the fire in the Alum Rock area caused by an "energized" line and high winds?
All the weather reports predicted high winds.
I live in the Santa Cruz mountains. It is like living in a tinderbox. The forest here is very dry, and a wind-driven fire would be disastrous. I wouldn't mind PG&E turning off the power if there was a wind storm. But this was ridiculous. There was NO WIND here. None. No gusts, not even a gentle breeze. It was still as could be. The power was off for two days for no reason at all. So many businesses were shut down, so many people were hurt. There are a lot of people in these mountains who are struggling financially. How many of them lost all the food in their refrigerators?. I would love to see the figures on the economic impact of this power shutdown. All for a windstorm that wasn't.
17
Hearing about the difficulties Northern California had with the power shut-off, I have to guess that as utilities, the state, and residents learn to do shut-offs better, things will improve. This is not to diminish any problems that people had. It's better than if a piece of PG&E equipment had started a fire in those winds.
I lived through several fires and evacuations in San Diego. SDG&E has indeed learned to do shut-offs, seemingly better and better. It's been quite a learning process.
The shut-offs are a low-tech, blunt-tool approach that works to reduce fires. Not building new homes in fire-prone areas is important too. Lax zoning is reportedly being pushed down here in our indefensible chapparal areas by developers and planning boards.
8
PG&E has a decades long history of serial industrial disasters including drinking water contamination, natural gas explosions, and forrest fires. The Company has always put shareholders above customer safety. PG&E now in bankruptcy, because of massive liability claims does not deserve to exist. The State or local governments should seize the assets via eminent domaine, pay the shareholders pennies on the dollar, and run the company with the aim of customer service and safety first.
14
There is no evidence that climate change has increased the rate or severity of wildfires. It's warmer, but also wetter.
What has increased it is a combination of bad fire management (putting out the little ones, so fuel accumulates for big ones), developing low-density housing at the urban/wilderness interface, and PG&E's failure to maintain its power lines and rights of way.
6
It is good that state agencies helped smooth out the chaos, but they should have been involved in the planning phase, we're talking months ago, to make sure a multi-phase plan was in place. It is clear P.G.E. has, for years, paid out huge bonuses to its C-suite while neglecting its infrastructure. State regulators, if state laws permit, could have insured the infrastructure needs got funded. It's all a matter of priorities, which could be a pay boost for the CEO, or it could be providing ample service to the public in a,safe and affordable manner. Chances are you can't do both.
5
PG&E did well with their initial roll out of this. They will learn from this and do better next time. Recall that the initial computer roll out of the ACA didn't go well either, but they fixed it.
In remote areas with high winds, the State and PG&E might want to offer high incentives to install Feed-In-Tariff solar. The private home, private business solar installation would greatly relieve the intermittency of a shut down. Plus it would lessen CO2 ppm emissions into the atmosphere, and in the long run, offer cheaper electricity.
Tied in to a national carbon tax with 80% of the funds from the tax that is spent on equipment mandated to be spent domestically, it would also be a big boost for new high paying jobs.
Simple planning and the will to get it right go a long way.
3
We are fine. This is the New York Times trying to make a story. It’s true, the PG&E blackouts were inconvenient for those affected in the hills. However, considering that the company was recently bankrupted by numerous lawsuits, some of which were in my opinion unwarranted, they felt they had little choice but to turn off the power to prevent yet more legal liability when the next fire hits.
The fact is that the climate is heating up, more and more people are moving to California, so fires will ensue, and some of those fires will be deadly. The utility is not to blame for all this. Even though people want a bogeyman, there isn’t one.
3
I've never been able to reconcile this: a power company owns right-of-way to erect gigantic metal towers carrying high-tension electrical lines stretching for hundreds of miles.
This is better than digging a culvert and burying them in concrete pipes?
It appears to me that this is one area of our infrastructure that needs a rethink---these days it's insensible to have wires strung up everywhere that are vulnerable to the elements and so inherently dangerous mention how hideous they look.
15
In Alaska, warmer-than-normal temperatures continued across the state in September with the greatest departures observed along the North Slope including at the Barrow Airport (Utquagvik, AK) that observed an average temperature of 40.8° F (4.9°C) – a +8.7° F (4.7°C) departure from normal and the warmest September on record dating back to 1901.
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/monitoring-content/sotc/national/statewidetavgrank/statewidetavgrank-201909.png
2
What better argument do you need to argue against an essential public service this is provided by a for-profit entity? Rather than to foresee the problems of its existing system for providing electricity, PG&E is focused on making a profit. The result is that in the 21st century, the solution to a risk of life-threatening fires is to cut an essential service to hundreds of thousands of people. There are obvious alternatives, but they will never be employed if the focus is on making a profit for stockholders.
15
Instead of working together with PG&E to create better city planning the State decided to litigate the utility into bankruptcy the cost of which will passed on to the consumer. The Governors response was typical. He blamed everyone in the past, called it greed, and mismanagement. Never-mind that one of the Napa/Sonoma fires was caused by someones own equipment that attached to the PG&E grid and not PG&E itself. The funny thing is, if you go up to Paradise right now all of the replacement lines being fixed are back up near the trees and the two lane highway that the city of Paradise voted against making wider still stands. There's no way the utility can do this on their own. Instead of pointing fingers our State Government should be working together to fix this issue which is not going away anytime soon.
3
We've had warnings for months that the power MAY be shut off, however, here in Southern CA, there weren't any warnings that power would be shut on a specific day.
Residents of CA, north or south, understand we may endure "brown outs," but cutting the power for 2 to 3 days is unacceptable and unnecessary.
Aside from hospitals, nursing homes and people with medical equipment in their homes, the average person lost ALL the food in their refrigerator and freezers, couldn't go to school, couldn't run their business, and couldn't charge their cell phones or connect with wifi (both needed for emergencies) .
A brown-out for several hours we understand, but for 2 to 3 days? Not acceptable!
We need very specific warnings. "Your power will be off next Thursday for 8 hours or 12 hours, so we can move our food, drive to another location, and make basic arrangements.
We are already living on the edge and verge of fires on a daily basis, we don't need brown outs. without specific warnings, to make life more complicated.
9
No ones seems to have done the math on this. The risk of a power line starting a fire is relatively low. Yes, it’s increasingly destructive when it happens, but shutting off power to millions of people is likely to produce even higher death counts and dollar costs. Think about turning off power to millions during a heat wave—how many elderly will die of heat stroke? How many stop lights being out will cause accidents and fatalities? What about those on home health equipment and respirators? Let alone the cost of the economic disruption? The spoiled food, etc. dismantle the private utilities. Period. Without their baked in profit and dividends for shareholders and outsize CEO pay more money can be invested in the system to make it safer. And the state is ultimately the end holder of the liability anyway—just do away with the facade already.
9
The state should take over the utilities. No more profits before people. The state is the only entity that has the resources to upgrade the energy delivery systems and accelerate the switch to renewable energy all at once.
21
This is fundamentally incorrect. The vast majority of investment in power in the US is done by the private sector, which has done far more for efficiency, reliability, and clean air than the government ever did prior to the power portion of the market being deregulated. Please look at comparable first world governments where the state controls the power grid: search “blackout rate by country” on Google and let me know when you find the US. Then search CO2 emissions per kWh by region, look at their trend since the 1990s, noting that the southeast (SERC) and Midwest (MISO) have the most regulated power grids in the US. Compare our power prices to say, Germany’s or France’s. There are actual data to observe on this, not anecdotes and gut feels about private enterprise.
5
The state of California is going to run PGE? Specifically, what department did you have in mind? The DMV? Caltrans? Unfortunately, PGE is all we have.
1
Drought, warming temps drying the landscape. Is this the beginning? Can we expect more dystopian scenarios as global warming creates a tinderbox?
Sure, we can blame PG & E's negligence for the Camp Fire, but they've been in business since 1905. No sparking wildfires to speak of.
All signs point to public ownership. Aside from that, this is the beginning. And it may be too late to reverse global warming.
4
In my country, Japan, it is unbelievable to shut off power to prevent wildfires. It is dry and cold in winter, but the chances
of wildfires are very low.
8
Is it too late to start planning for ground level cable design ?, Even with its size, California could begin to catch up with 'modern' power utility design as practised in E&A.
Other states could also do the same.
11
People want to live in a risk-free world…that utopia doesn’t exist. CA residents should have been on notice months ago power outages could happen since media outlets have been reporting on the possibility basically since the 2017 Tubbs fire. PG&E didn’t cut power in Oct. 2017 for exactly the reasons people are complaining now; it’s been the utility standard for decades that “shedding load” is an emergency, last-ditch action so utilities will rarely do it. There’s plenty of complicity to go around for the current necessity for PSPS, but it’s no surprise no other agencies are stepping up.
No utility can guarantee its equipment won’t emit sparks; CalFire can’t guarantee they can put the fire out quickly; the State can’t make it rain to stop the drought and wildfires – that’s why we have insurance, which should have covered most property losses and the uninsured and under-insured should receive financial relief from FEMA. The utility cannot absorb a $30B liability (which represents 17 years of its net income) any more than the individual whose electric equipment sparked the 2017 Tubbs fire can absorb $1.2B of related damages. Is CA State using the utility as a pseudo-insurance company, because neither CA State nor insurers want to fund $30B of damages? At this point, the utility has no choice BUT to cut power during high-risk events (to protect against further loss of lives), because that’s the world we’ve ALL created.
10
We lost power here for one day. Not even 24 hours. inconvenient? Confusing signals from PGE? Absolutely yes on both counts.
Almost exactly one year ago, I was driving through Paradise CA. It looked a lot like a lot of places in CA. Paradise even had an evacuation drill. To no avail. over 80 people died and the town was burned to the ground affecting all who lived there.
Why is this happening?
Many decades of mismanagement by PGE and PUC combined with over 7 years of drought that produced a lot of fuel. Longer fire "seasons" and people living in more exurban and fireproof areas. Most (over 90% of fires are man made) of these disasters can be avoided. In August, every PGE customer got a three part pamphlet titled Are You Prepared for Fire Season? (including power shutoffs) With this last shutoff affecting a broad swath of customers, PGE had a learning experience as did lots of their customers. We are all better prepared now.
Better this than the loss of 85 lives.
4
@TNM
"Better this than the loss of 85 lives" - I agree! I would so much rather have power be cut than entire neighborhoods and towns burn to the ground again. And, as you point out, there is always a learning curve, whether people like it or not. PG&E will do better, and the public will get through this with fewer bumps, next time.
2
Why not invest in putting lines underground? Instead of paying CEOs and board members billions of dollars! Californians allows them to Have a business selling us energy while we build the infrastructure, why?
LET HAVE PUBLIC UTILITIES THAT COMPETE WITH PRIVATE ENERGY COMPANIES. Afraid of a little competition?
10
I’m not sure I understand your comment. PG&E builds the infrastructure. Their transmission business is regulated by the state and earns a regulated, capped return on capital. Transmission would have been deregulated but in 2000 the state of CA put price caps on power and created a massive shortage which led to the CA power crisis, which was subsequently blamed on deregulation despite being the fault of the state not understanding the first chapter of economics texts. As a result you have monopoly utilities that manage your transmission and distribution.
5
Putting overhead lines underground is far too expensive to even consider.
@Paulina Undergrounding power lines is very expensive, will make rates go up a lot, and it makes power outages harder to locate and harder to fix. It's not really a workable solution.
Our house was in the shut-off area. During the entire period, the wind never exceeded 4 mph where we were.
We received a recorded call from PG&E, telling us that we could get information about our status by going to a URL and typing in a 10- or 12-letter/number alphanumeric password, which it dictated, character by character, over the phone. I am not kidding.
I work out of a home office I couldn't use for two days, so I took vacation days. We lost about $100 worth of spoiled food. Not a big loss, but for what?
I used to have a lot of respect for PG&E, particularly the people climbing the poles. Another case of good soldiers carrying out lousy decisions.
5
To all the PG&E apologists:
Despite corporate arguments that this Big Blackout avoided another wildfire, what about the suffering of the hundreds of thousands who were denied electricity? The thousands of seniors who feared for their lives as they made their way in dark halls just to go to the bathroom? The countless businesses who lost income as their power was cut off? The millions of dollars of wasted food?
Though misunderstandings about how complicated the electrical grid abound, there is also a neglected human element to this colossal miscalculation on PG&E's behalf. Let us not forget that this corporation is controlled by interests outside of California. Their boardroom insensitivity to the human toll of their actions must be taken into account.
Investigators have concluded that the catastrophic Camp Fire last year started as a result of a badly maintained steel hook in a high voltage line (along with a second ignition source nearby). PG&E is now attempting to palm off its negligence, which resulted in billions of dollars in damages and the loss of 83 lives, with a bankruptcy filing that will cost rate-payers billions more.
Enough with laissez-faire arguments that a rapacious corporate giant can give us a public good for the lowest cost. To the ramparts, electricity consumers! It's time that we claim our energy future for ourselves. Public power now!
22
Maybe humor isn't helpful here or maybe it is (and I do sympathise), but I'm still waiting for the Tweeter-in-Chief to come along and explain that this wouldn't be happening in the first place if you Californians would just rake your forests properly. But nary a word is heard, though he expressed such willingness to offer Russia help with their fires not so long ago--I'm starting to get the idea that Trump might like Russia more than he likes California.
It's a pity that the reporter at the recent White House presser couldn't think quickly enough to ask the Finnish president about Finland's forest-raking program after the Stable Genius insisted that he ask him one post-rant. I'll bet he (the reporter) was kicking himself later; it would have been so perfect. So perfect. An absolutely perfect question. Just perfect.
7
It could be much worse. Try Puerto Rico and the government owned grid.....My heart aches for the Californias that have to endure this
2
Is this a Boeing owned or operated enterprise? This whole thing is all too familiar.
2
Burying power lines looks more and more affordable.
3
For decades, PG&E directors and senior officials have been ignoring the safety and health needs of its customers in order to pad their bottom line -- sending unwarranted dividends to stockholders and inflated bonuses to the top executives. The directors and senior officials are all guilty of criminal negligence. All that money should have been poured into vital safety measures -- not only cutting down trees and other vegetation, but undergrounding thousands of miles of power lines so they would no longer be a threat. Full disclosure: I was without power for 21 hours, from 11 pm Wednesday night until 8 a.m. Thursday evening -- and I live in the Oakland flatlands, nowhere near a fire threat. But PG&E designed its distribution network to minimize costs (and therefore maximize profits) rather than to minimize disruptions to its customers. My proposal is for the state to override PG&E's bankruptcy filing and take the company into receivership. All shares of stock should be given a par value of $0.01, and all directors and senior officials -- vice presidents and higher -- fired immediately. And if it's legal, their pensions should be confiscated. Most important, many of these venal, corrupt criminals need to be charged with serious offenses, tried, convicted and jailed -- hard time, not in Club Fed.
12
wow in Miami we have to routinely go without power sometimes as much as 2 weeks
4
Hard to believe that many utilities in the US are still above ground. When my partner first arrived from Germany he couldn't believe what he was seeing in terms of all the above ground poles, etc. But then, there's advantages to have your country bombed out and rebuilt, eh?
5
This is making me seriously consider solar panels and a home-based battery system (eg, Tesla Powerwall) to get off the grid as much as possible. Having lived in CA for almost 20 yrs now, PG&E has been awful. And what is the PUC doing about it? Nothing! So infuriating...
6
Isn’t PG&E spending large sum on Green energy rather than fixing the problems caused by not taking care of maintenance and updating its old infrastructure? With this blackout even people with Solar Power were in dark and all those Zero emissions cars were left without charging facilities!
It is time to get back to running the business in the interest of consumers and not these pie in the sky Green agenda.
I see lot of comments bemoaning’Investor owned ‘ utility model. Most investors are gong to be wiped out in the bankruptcy process.
1
Property owners and municipalities with rooftop solar power systems that weren't grid dependent kept their butter cool and lights on while everyone else was out of luck.
California's new building codes require solar on all new buildings with three stories or fewer, beginning in 2020. Some Northern CA municipalities, the really progressive ones derided by conservatives, require new buildings to have enough panels to provide 75% of the expected annual electricity use (~2W/sq ft).
Some may see this as costly over-regulation, but had it been implemented 40 years ago when former CA gov Reagan took the solar panels off the White House (which he apparently thought "were a joke"), and the technology had received the market advantages in R&D dollars and cost reduction, CA rate payers likely would have saved a whole lot of money and tears by now.
7
In our area of Calaveras county east of Stockton-Sacramento in the Sierra foothills PG&E said every one on the grid should have power back on by the end of today!!
Thankfully many people in our area are off grid and have solar, and/or propane generators for power so they were not affected. But it was scary if you were on home dialysis, oxygen etc. and only relied on PG&E!
3
California is a large expanse to maintain. Almost unrealistic. Staffing that many to look over that much, then having to account for equipment failures of lines exposed to harsh winds. It's very unrealistic to think that a company can control these things, in the middle of wildfire country that has been scorched for epochs. That's just how the vegetation is. With the lawsuit, they certainly won't have any money to IMPROVE anything. Your need for electric is also dangerous. Shouldn't California be all solar by now, if they're so forward-thinking? It's 2020. Get your lives together, practice what you preach on emissions.
2
Power lines in Europe are buried underground.
Why is this long term solution not being used
in California?
2
@C. Herrmann No, there are not. I see lots of above ground transmission lines throughout the UK and Europe.
3
Boeing planes crashing, no electricity, I feel like I'm living in a third world country. What's next?
3
Replacing some bare high voltage lines with insulated would be faster & cheaper than burying them underground.
5
Fire survivor here. I disagree that the power shutoff was poorly run.
First, it was the first time this has been attempted on such a scale: we are all having to learn how to best handle the new climate conditions.
Second: there were notices EVERYWHERE for weeks prior to a shutoff:info on the front page of our local paper daily, information on signing up for alerts; multiple text alerts days ahead, flyers in the mail, multiple public meetings put on by the local fire department, with multiple handouts.
We had a possible shutoff about 10 days prior, which did not occur. People actually griped about it NOT occurring!
The wind speed and direction is not as easily predictable as temperature and humidity.
It was 2-3+ days of no power. Yes it was inconvenient, but not nearly as inconvenient as the 9 days of evacuation, stress, fear, home loss and loss of life.
Low income people who need electrical medical devices should have a small generator for that purpose provided; there should be a grant for that.
I'm not getting into the politics concerning PG&E - but this week, they definitely did the right thing.
4
A major electricity blackout forces consideration of issues affecting everyone. The electricity distribution technology evolved from the work of Thomas Edison. The idea was to have humongous generation facilities that were engineered to be absolutely reliable no matter what. This model has been replicated all over the world. Today, every power generation facility has a target painted on the roof. Striking that target throws the geographic structure that the power plant feeds into chaos. The very structure of our civilization is threatened by the sudden decommissioning of central electric power plants. Broadcasting electricity is a great idea until it isn't. Today we are seeing that humans are trapped in the electricity cage. It is going to take a lot of brainstorming to get out of this dilemna.
Now is the time for Pacific Gas and sometimes Electric, to hire outside consultants to work with them and the State regulators to evaluate the cost and the time to start putting the electric service in underground protected conduits; area by area and region by region.
Those costs should then be compared to people and property that are damaged and or lost to fires directly attributable to the power grid of overhead lines.
If this is not done now, it probably won't get done.
Underground protected conduits for electrical service is not unknown system: it has been done and is being done.
5
My neighborhood has all underground utilities -- all of us paid a ton to underground these 10 years ago. I don't understand why PG&E system is not more smartly set up so neighborhoods like ours are not impacted.
7
@RSSF Yes our little downtown, not me, has underground but did not matter there or here on outskirts.
Wonder how they are selling the benefits?
Seems none.
1
Even if your neighborhood is undergrounded the high voltage lines feeding it are probably above ground.
2
As a Californian, I am disgusted with PG&E, and our state leadership for not holding PG&E accountable. By their own words, PG&E has not invested in improvements in infrastructure over the past two to three decades, yet this year agreed to pay 7.5 million in salary for their CEO over the next three years.
Some of the geographical areas effected by the power shutoff made no sense. Areas of California that are not in dry fire zones lost power. And PG&E did not give residents and businesses enough time to develop a successful backup plan.
One thing PG&E successfully pulled off was inciting fear in California residents that at any time, almost without warning, we can and will lose electricity for days at a time. And if this happens again and again, the property values for homes in the more rural, expensive areas of the state will precipitously drop.
They thought they had problems with lawsuits from the recent fires. Just wait.
16
My neighborhood has all underground utilities. I don't understand
4
@RSSF did this neighborhood lose power in this power outage?
1
@RSSF
The power isn't generated in your neighborhood. It has to come from wherever it is produced, probably hundreds of miles away. Those lines are all above ground.
3
@RSSF Do you have a power plant in your neighborhood? If there are vulnerable wires between you and the power source, you will be cut off. If you really cannot live without electricity for a few days, get a generator!
“...as climate change makes wildfires more frequent and intense.”
I’d like to see the raw data on that going back 120 years please, because I don’t believe it’s true. If anything, California suffers from overpopulation and years of municipal neglect.
People will go out and do what now? They’ll buy small power generators based on petroleum to charge their electric cars so they can get to work. Maybe these generators will have catalytic converters and maybe not.
Of course, if one uses a small gasoline power generation device to create the electric power to drive one’s electric car, one would normally have to add the SMOG created by said device to the data sheet of the car, right? And if that logic makes sense, how much CO2 plus SMOG does PG&E generate anyway when it supplies power?
If you ask me, and you’re not asking me, many reporters are negligent in this area, because most of them only know the words “Climate Change” and that appears to be enough for them. They read from a pre-made script and what does that indicate?
Four years of college and maybe even grad-school on top of that...down the drain.
2
@William Perrigo
My neighbors have been running gas powered generators for DAYS, I just took the food loss, we did not had fire conditions anyway, just loss of power.
1
Buy solar panels and a battery pack instead of getting a generator.
@William Perrigo If you live in a neighborhood with natural gas, you can get a gas powered generator, or propane, too. Most of the folks I know with natural gas generators with automatic switchovers when the grid goes out. Here in New England, installed generators will soon be as common or more than central air conditioning.
1
PG&E has not been investing in the equipment needed to prevent this problem (unlike San Diego Power and Light). Executives and shareholders should be punished
5
We were not home for the power shut-off, and returned home a couple of days later. We're currently at $400+ in damage and counting. The shut-down seems to have had a surge to it, because an appliance that is permanently connected but was shut of by an electronic switch is burned out, several other appliances had error codes indicating an abnormal disruption (normally they have no error codes they just need their clocks reset).
We lose power in our neighborhood about once a month so this wouldn't have been anything to worry about, but it destroyed stuff so it wasn't a normal shut-off.
7
Gee, maybe if executives spent PG&E's money on upgrading infrastructure instead of giving themselves more money, none of these problems would exist.
16
Maybe state government needs to take over the company, break it up and put out territories to bid, with emergency responsiveness as a top factor.
11
Couldn't agree more.
1
Would undergrounding the lines reduce this problem? Yes, at a cost of tens of billions of dollars or more. And it's not just "dig a trench and throw the lines in it". Overhead lines are not insulated and are cooled by being open to the air. Underground lines have to be insulated and surrounded by cooling oil. Would ratepayers be willing to fund a multi decade expensive upgrade like this? I doubt it.
3
Some of the lines should be underground, some not. It is not all or nothing and it seems like reasonable triage and management would lower most of the risk for an acceptable cost.
5
Why is this the norm in Europe if it is such an impossible solution?
1
If you all are so upset about losing power and communications, teach the customers to be prepared for self sufficiency. They can build their own Grid Independent small scale 12 Volt Direct Current system just to run lights and personal communication devices so all they have to do when power goes out is simply turn a few switches. A few medium solar panels, charge controllers, deep cycle batteries, and some marine and automotive 12 volt devices and you can live panic free with at least lighting and communications.
7
Solar panels on the roof. Integrated solar glass for windows. Integrated solar wall panels. So many ways to produce power locally, independently AND save money. When will we "get smart"?
11
In Eureka, on the coast in way northern California, our power was shut down and we were told to prepare for a five day outage. PG&E was planning to open a "Community Resource Center " to offer air conditioning. Air conditioning? What an insult. The humidity is 60-70% and the temperature is 65 degrees maximum. It is 40 degrees at night and frost on the ground in the morning. Our rescue mission put out a call for donations of blankets because of the cold and there was no power for heating. After the lines for gas, groceries, cash, generators, and ice, fortunately our power was mostly restored sooner than they said. Does PG&E have any concern for customers? Take precautions yes but from now on do that for everyone. Update your systems and infrastructure PG&E.
14
PG&E has neglected the power grid for decades. I remember back in the early 1980s they started a fire in Placer County that destroyed homes and they were found liable in a civil lawsuit.
9
Seems many comments here are blaming the the utility ......PG & E is a regulated utility by the California Public Utility Commision PUC. The PUC job with their $1.2 billion year budget is suppose to regulate and oversee the utilty . Cleary the PUC did not do it job.
Direct from CA PUC website front page mission statement
"The CPUC regulates services and utilities, protects consumers, safeguards the environment, and assures Californians' access to safe and reliable utility infrastructure and services.
8
We live in capitalist nation. For all public companies the first and foremost priority (and legal fiduciary duty) is to maximize profits for their shareholders. It doesn't matter if its PG&E or Blue Cross/Blue Shield and It doesn't matter if the service is electricity or a liver transplant the key is to spend as little as possible on the service and keep the most possible for distribution to shareholders. THAT is why the CEO made 8 million last year and he was worth it. If you don't like it move to a socialist country. Venezuela or Cuba are close by or if you are a traveling type try China. Of course over there they will tell you we share everything except the leaders are flying private planes and the people are living in the streets. The human DNA is about elevating yourself over your fellow man if not outright killing him. We are a flawed animal....wake up.
6
Single payer health care, state owned utilities, they remove profit from consideration, which is correct in this case.
7
I am to understand that two pines encircled leaves you empty headed.
All powerlines should be underground. Powerlines are Ugly and unsafe hanging in the air. Put all of them underground. Start now and 50 years it will be done.
6
When I travel to Europe, I’m always impressed that most power lines are underground. It seems as though our public utilities were once so good. I have to suspect it’s been the focus on big profits and deregulation that has been a contributing factor.
11
Private enterprise at its best.
4
Governor Newsom is 100 percent to Blame for this....as well as well as a long list of other things....he is Unfit to be Governor and needs to step down A.S.A.P. this State really is on the edge of going full Tilt Belly UP!
1
Newsome has been governor for less than two years. So can you explain how years of neglect and lack of maintenance by PG&E is his fault?
3
@Clark He has been in politics for decades/he was Lt. Gov all thru Brown's term as Gov. / he made a deal with the electric company so they can raise the rates if there equipment causes anymore fires....he knew long in advance they planned rolling blackouts...when he was Lt.Gov he had one of the poorest records for showing up to work....the list is long of his Failure to due he's duty....another poster child of why Voters need to Vote Democrats OUT!
I just can't believe that in order to avoid fires they leave without power to millions....
didn't they think about using candles can be even worse?????
60
@Think bout it
and what about folks needing power to live, such as on dialysis or oxygen or . . . .
They have charged consumers for their maintenance budgets and then paid our dividends and obscenely high salaries without doing maintenance. 'this was a stunt to manipulate their bankruptcy case.
23
@Think bout it
Candles are inside: they are not out in the dry and windy
grass.
8
@Think bout it
If a fire starts in a home or populated area it’s likely to be detected and extinguished before it gets out of control. When a fire starts in a remote wilderness area from a broken power line, it can easily get very large (and out of control) before it is detected.
10
Let me ask you California authorities; were there fires in which after investigating the cause, you found no evidence?
Laser Satellites.
1
private ownership of public utilities gets you PG&E, this is definitely going to change, glad it wasn't worse. Imagine a big earthquake, maybe the silver lining here is that we can see this as a shakeout cruise that went really badly, the boat didn't sink but it pitch poked.
1
The right of ways already exist, the trees are already mostly cleared, run a backhoe through there and bury the lines.
I watched as St Croix USVI replaced EVERY power pole on the island after a Hugo instead of burying the lines. Someone at WAPA (the power company) must own stock in the telephone pole business.
2
The 1991 Oakland Hills firestorm should have been the wake up call for PG&E to underground our utilities. Neglecting and deferring maintenance, in the flats as well as in the hills, has brought us to our new nightmare. We deserve better.
164
@Amy Shutkin, for ten years our neighborhood was slated and waitinglisted for undergrounding the power. Then suddenly one day we were told they would not be doing it at all because the public was not in favor of it. Don't recall anyone having actually been asked.
25
@ondelette i hold the CPUC responsible for ALL issues re PGE. It is the revolving door, the nepotism-like graft, too top heavy management [many ONLY are there to play golf with regulators].
Regulation of PGE needs to move in to the 21st century. Any time PGE needs to invest they go calling on ratepayers. THAT may be why people do not support the ‘under grounding’ of the cables.
11
@Amy Shutkin Our small town is recently undergrounded-not me on perimeter-but we ALL lost power for three days because of incompetent grid management.
No wind at all, calmer than usual in fact.
And yes, we all deserve a functional utility.
13
The buck stops with Gavin Newsom, who has ceded power to PG&E executives, none of whom is elected, who now have their thumb on the switch of California’s economy. Gavin, time to step up, apologize, and take control of this situation. Your comments about this manufactured outage being an “outrage” yet a necessary evil are misleading as well as hypocritical.
1
@Bob Egerton
PGE has been a private company since it was formed over 100 years ago. Newsom has been in office since 2017. So how exactly has Newsom "ceded power to PG&E executives."?
2
One of California's smaller utility companies, San Diego Gas & Electric, has developed very good systems for predicting and managing power outages. They have an advantage in serving a much smaller area; 4,100 square miles compared to the 70,000 square miles covered by PG&E.
While PG&E was poorly prepared to handle this preventative outage and power was out for way too long, it's not like we can always depend on having power. Mine has been out twice this fall.
Good article here -https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-11/pge-power-chaotic-pge-behind-others-micro-targeted-blackouts
1
We should mention what happened in San Bruno back in 2010 when an entire neighborhood was destroyed and people lost their lives, not because of the company's power lines, but because of failing to maintain its gas lines.
7
No different than any above ground service.
2
Similar - my community (shares border with SF along 101) was not slated for a planned outage, presumably because high winds were not expected. Nevertheless, a small wildfire broke out around the base of a transmission tower on the very outskirt of the town. No explanation yet. "Unmitigated mess" - yes.
1
Sure sounds like arson to me.
Look - we've got global warming, fire risk, and electricity. Nobody died. No property was damaged. Puerto Rico - still suffering from power outages. The Caribbean - still recovering. If you want the lines buried, be happy with a monthly bill $100 more per month - and you'll then complain about that. Stop complaining, and realize how good you've got it.
2
The PG&E shutdown mess is yet another example of a corporation privatizing profits and commonizing costs: it doesn't account for the massive individual monetary losses (rotted food and medicines; missed work shifts; wasted fuel in traffic jams; medical costs due to accidents and non-functioning medical equipment; etc.) and has happened because of PG&E's claim that improving their infrastructure is "too expensive"--just multiply the food losses of individual refrigerators at say $200 each x 1,000,000 households without power and what do you get? $200,000,000!!!
And that's just for starters, for just a single 3-day outage, and there are sure to be more if this is their "solution" to the fire risk. But these losses are individual and no one will be doing the math, certainly not PG&E.
And how many people will actually die due to this shutdown? Harder to calculate, but there will be deaths attributable--starting with pedestrians on unlit streets, and vehicle collisions, due to lack of traffic controls, but also diabetics using unrefrigerated so unsafe insulin and other medical lapses (sleep apnea and other medical machines). And this only accounts for a few days!
How many of these shutdowns are they planning? When all is said and done, PG&E is merely shifting the infrastructure improvement costs they should be bearing onto individuals and their private monetary losses and risks to life, and major inconvenience, with no corporate liability for those costs. Good business plan!
8
The good news: no major fires in this half of the state.
The less-good news: because there were no major fires, PG&E will do it again next week.
Fifth biggest economy in the world, living like a third-world country.
6
As a survivor of the 2017 fires in Sonoma County, I fully understand the imminent danger and reality of largescale wildfires. I also understand that PG&E shares some responsibility in their management of electrical infrastructure.
That being said, seeing neighbors and commenters berate and insult them for incompetence or ineptitude here is pretty disheartening. Many of the on-the-ground employees are locals who need to put food on their table too. PG&E's negligence played a role in the fires for sure; but weather conditions were unprecedented. Folks weren't prepared as well as they should've been, too.
Do your part: stock an emergency kit, read alerts frequently, have a plan. This round, I was aware of Red Flag conditions/weather nearly a week before the power shutoff. This is the new normal; this is climate change. Let's not fall back on simply blaming PG&E for outcomes (whether fires or blackouts).
7
This is why you need to regulate and not deregulate utility companies, there has to be some form of accountability.
6
24 hours notice for a plan that was known by the utility as a possible course of action. Then people run to the stores that have empty shelves. Always have several days, weeks, of food on hand at a minimum.
2
Fiddlesticks. We were without power at our home in Paradise from Wednesday night until Friday afternoon. It is easy to read by oil lamp on the breakfast table. And if your refrigerator is full, it is only because it is full of stuff no one wanted to eat. Good excuse to clean it out. And thank God the phone couldn't ring. On the other hand it is hard on businesses who are struggling to operate in a ghost town. And I don't understand why the schools were closed down, adding to the woes of parents trying to cope with no power.
3
Our community was out of power for 62 hours. We had gusts of up to 20mph forecast for a 24 hour period. As it happened, that only occurred once. Oh, and the ground and brush and trees are saturated from heavy september rains. Can't begin to imagine the financial loss endured for this utter non-emergency in our area.
This is clearly an attempt to get the state to indemnify PGE so they can go back to profit without risk and pocketing the money earmarked for maintenance.
6
Saturated? That’s crazy cause a fire burned one town over in Moraga. Nothing is saturated in NorCal right now and if your house had burned there’d be finger pointing at pge for that.
@d ross
No, the trees and brush are not saturated at this time. There is an inch of rainfall, plus time for the vegetation to absorb it.
The wind forecast is less reliable than temperature; they
have to use the available data.
Everyone has a whining criticism but nobody is offering up a better idea. It's not negligence it's climate change (our collective negligence) that has upped the ante. Yes, burying lines would help but it would be incredibly expensive and the vast majority of customers go ballistic if their bill increases 5%. Everyone - particularly you complainers - should step up and help with this unavoidable situation by installing power storage, or a generator fueled by a large propane tank, at your home - or neighborhood - so you can run independently during these inevitable outages. Take some responsibility. Can't afford it? Then lobby your government to assist. Scream all you want but you are doing nothing to help. Electricity is not a constitutional right.
7
@Curtis
I believe your mentality is the reason we so frequently find ourselves in this situation. Rather than confronting the situation head on to resolve it you tell people to buck up. No. PG&E should use their profits, our money paid to their monopoly, to maintain their equipment. Salaries should be capped, no bonuses paid to corporate officers or managers and no dividends paid until the grid and infrastructure is pristine. I refuse to cave to corporate greed. Done.
7
If you lived in CA and had dealt with the corrupt entity that is PG&E - you would have a bit more understanding of the frustration involved with this situation.
1. The company has over the years given execs huge bonuses prior to declaring bankruptcy. Yes, this is not the first time the company has declared bankruptcy.
2. Company has time and time again given execs huge bonuses rather than using the money to maintain it’s safety infrastructure.
3. The San Bruno explosion which is touched on lightly in this article caused the deaths of 8 innocent people and revealed that the utility had no clue about the gas mains it is responsible for maintaining in populated neighborhoods!
5. In above resulting litigation it was revealed they had conspired with CA PUC to put a sympathetic admin judge in charge of case
PG&E is a terrible, corrupt company and the CA PUC really isn’t much better - they have are in their pockets and allowed them to get away with murder for years.
4
Well, here is a bright side. This is a mini-rehearsal for a coronal mass ejection, a violent solar storm that, if we are in the path of the particles ejected by the sun, will, basically, fry the electrical grid on the side of the earth facing the storm, and maybe worse. Plus, there is the problem of all the computers, including every modern motor car. Think chaos. Think breakdown of civil society and law. Anybody preparing for this?
6
@PJTramdack ... unfortunately, no. because no one cares... until it hits. Or how about an EMP?
They were happy to make money hand-over-fist for their executives and shareholders for decades and decades, all the while allowing their infrastructure to become dangerously decrepit.
Then this decrepitude began igniting fires and killing people. So they decided that, in order to avoid this killing and destruction in the future, they'll just withdraw the service their customers have been paying through the nose for in order to avoid killing more people and destroying more homes with their faulty equipment. But this withdrawal of service has resulted in ... how many deaths so far? Not as many as would be killed by wildfire, you might respond. But that's a classic false choice.
Executives should be jailed and laws enacted requiring regular upgrades to equipment-- to be paid for, not by their customers, but by their shareholders and executives.
Either that, or the state should take over and run these organizations-- not because we love socialism, but because we love life. Your choice, utilities.
10
The act of making PGE liable for damage even if they are not at fault - known as "inverse condemnation" - will make the utility behave in an increasingly risk averse manner. They have to date behaved reprehensibly, of course and are responsible for some huge disasters. But this solution to preemptively cut power on a massive scale is only going to exacerbate the problem. These protracted blackouts are going to increase in frequency and duration as long as PGE is liable for damage regardless of whether they are responsible or not.
I don't condone their decision, I just understand it.
3
@Kathy B They were at fault.
1
I'm in west Sonoma county, and the area had almost no wind at all, and that continued throughout the last few days. So the weather predictions were way off mark the whole time gale force wind was expected. My power was never shut off, luckily.
This was just one scary boondoggle, except in SoCal.
There must be far better ways to handle predictable weather events.
Underground electrical — Berkeley, CA. did it, almost twenty years ago, so should nearly everyone and everywhere else.
Start with problem areas.
Where I live in Lane County OR. the county hires an armada (Note this is an out of state company, Wright Tree Service.) of Tree workers every year to cut the trees they cut last year and the year before. Then there are the orchard trees they wreck, the views the power lines interfere with, trees cut in ridicules ways, and the summer traffic on our many two lane highways.
It is not as disruptive as most people think. The conduit is more easily up dated and it can accommodate water and household gas supply.
2
@The Iconoclast Berkeley, CA, has not undergrounded more than a limited number of power lines, principally in the hills. The costs are borne by property owners and can run into tens of thousands of dollars per property. If this approach is taken for high load transmissions lines, through mountainous terrain at several million dollars per mile, through national forests and steep country, there will be the question of who pays the billions of dollars. It's a bit like putting subways through already densely over-used cityscapes. The infrastructure or in this case rocky substrate makes this very difficult. In some places this makes good sense, but somehow the resources to do this must come from somewhere.
2
I live in the area that had power shut off.
My motto is "no power and no fire is way better than no power with fire."
I lived through the night of no power and 3 visible fires in 3 directions, as we evacuated with no warning, no power and no information - 2-3 days of inconvenience is nothing.
We had months of notice that this was going to happen during a red flag warning.Then we had days and days of warning: the local paper, multiple texts, mailed flyers.
There were several days of increased warnings before the power shutoff.
The complaints are valid only for people who require electricity for medical machines or have limited mobility. PG&E could and should provide information and rebates for purchase of a small generator that can run that needed equipment, for all low income residents. We could and should do better for those people.
But the vast majority of us simply have to accept that climate change is real and this is the new reality.
If you don't want it to get worse, work to elect people who understand science.
11
The Really Big Tragedy of This Is Yet to Come: Personal Generators
Californians are resourceful & Affluent people, they will not be denied a vital resource for very long as there are too many ways to alleviate that. The most horrid one at the tip of my brain is personal electric generators. Imagine the amount of exhaust gases created when 1,000 homes are running gas or diesel generator much of the day.
Californian, I will try offer you a choice, hopefully, you will see it as a positive solution. Form a collective to create your own energy farms; harness some of that energy coming across those hills & mountains, work positively with PG&E & the state but retain your ownership/association. Bear the burden of putting the lines underground & keep it community owned & managed. Big govt can sometimes be as bad as big business. Look for solutions, not scapegoats or even culprits.
Last, I do wish you well & remember, “More Trees & Less Fossil Fuel is The Solution Forward. Plant & water some trees each week. Trees are a Proven Climate Change Solution.” Thank you & Vote Blue in 2020.
2
I don’t understand why people were surprised by PGE’s incompetence. They have proven time and again since the early 2000’s that they are unable/unwilling to,put public service and safety ahead of profits. Last year the Legislature and Governor had an opportunity to take more significant, admittedly radical, steps to force the company into reorganizing into smaller, nonprofit until aimed at serving the public. But they decided to basically bail the company out and give it ‘another chance.’ So ratepayers and taxpayers will be forced to pay for its incompetence again and again until more people have died. How many more people have to die before our leaders realize the company is irreparable.
3
Because of climate change, wildfires will always be a California issue. We need to look at more distributed systems. Rather than having each homeowner buy battery backup, individual cities can buy them at scale to enable localities to function. Now that each new home has solar, we actually could become more self-sufficient as city-wide clusters.
1
Definitely time for reverse metering. I don't understand why we don't have it already. Does PG&E prevent our having it? It would lessen the amount of electricity coming across woodlands to get to SF.
San Mateo County had power outages, and closed their county parks to school outings and even hikers. But one could still go to the next open space. Did that make any sense? There needs to be planning starting right now.
When I was in my twenties I believed that the CEOs were paid so much because they were kind of geniuses.
Today I sadly realize that they are paid so much for other reasons, not because they are smart.
7
PG&E failed to address a deteriorating infrastructure problem for decades. And now that they got caught with their pants down, they make the customers of the utility suffer for it. I think we need to reorganize this utility from top to bottom. I'll bet salaries for the executives over the last 30 years were not stagnant.
13
"Everybody wants to go to Heaven, but Nobody wants to die" is a quote from a former Prime Minister of Canada who was discussing taxes and government services. The theme out of America the last thirty years has been that nobody wants to pay taxes for government services, yet the expectation is no change to the quality of services provided. Embarrassments in America include the Flint water crisis, New Orleans flooding response, Puerto Rico, and California power. The NT Times climate change narrative included in the Californian story is flawed logic.... The human created problem is inadequate maintenance of the power grid due to underfunded public infrastructure.
12
PG&E is not a public owned utility. I'm sure that the management and shareholders got their cut before any reinvestment in infrastructure and deferred maintenance items.
5
This is an indication of just how dysfunctional our economy is in the Age of Reagan.
In the Age of FDR, before 1980 we used to have electricity.
Now without economic regulation we have private sector businesses hastening Climate Change which causes the conditions which require PGE to have to cut power.
Also we do not have tax money to help PGE to upgrade systems because we do not tax the ultra wealthy proportionately. Instead we have a new class of Robber Barons with generators at home for power.
We have no one to blame but our fellow Americans. This is what they voted for.
24
Inconveniences to private homes (except where medical issues are at stake) is not a major problems in the face of a general preventive policy. In fact, we may have to learn to live privately in more sustainable ways--these shutdowns may be rehearsals. But major issues, hardly mentioned in the blackout's coverage, have to do with the disruptions in hospitals, nursing homes, schools and universities--sites of major public and critical services to the public. I'm not sure so much disruption is worth in preventive scenarios. The public has not even been informed how frequent these high wind situations tend to come up during the season.
Then all the haphazardness, at least in the educational system. Had schools and universities not been informed about PG & E's policy shift long before? The uncertainty, and the decisions made on the run, were disconcerting: cancel classes, shut the whole campus down. Are we subject to cancellation of classes every time it gets windy and PG & E decides to shut down the system? Where are the backups? Do classes need to be cancelled? Can't teaching can go on without electricity during daytime? Why can't libraries be open? Will students have to make up for lost classes in December? Can we afford another shutdown in a couple of weeks or a month? Universities and schools need to do some planning if shutdowns are going to be a permanent possibility.
4
@tdb Yes. My hospital 2 blocks away has a jet turbine generator. Noisy but it does the job.
There is a vital lesson in this California; you all need to buy an independent off-grid solar power system like I have. Buy solar panels, deep cycle batteries, charge controllers, portable inverters, all enough to have basic lighting and radios. I have some of these with an independent series of lights around the place that I need only turn switches to activate. Just enough to light up the place and be informed is better than nothing. I can go indefinitely without grid power having non-perishable foods and propane cooking apparatus. Think in terms of Camping. Just don't have fires outside the home and be really careful and attendant to those in the safety of the kitchen. I've been doing this stuff since 1995. When I had power outages, I confused the power company trucks driving around who saw only my house lit up.
8
Well lucky you— you’re the one in seven who statistically have adequate solar exposure for PV electric to be a viable option.
6
It's a 12 volt direct current system I use marine and automotive 12 volt devices on . Use your imagination. Teach yourselves on the web.
4
@Solar
Uh? Your thinking roofs. So put the panels on the sunny part of the property and run the wires to the house.
1
PG&E's shareholders are doing just fine, the company has paid out massive dividends in the recent years. I assume with approval from Sacramento. That money plus the huge amounts that were spent on lobbying for laxer regulations surely would have been better spent improving infrastructure.
12
This is absolutely unacceptable. The utilities should be nationalized, end of story. It's not just California, look at New York, the water in Flint, it goes on and on. This is what you get when you quit national good in the hands of profit making private organizations. It simply doesn't work and it must stop
11
The last thing the oligarchs and their politicians want is putting private utilities in public hands - it’s one of their upward wealth transfer mechanisms.
Until we start electing people who speak out against these inequality-generating policies (think Sanders or Gabbard) and stop supporting centrist, pro-business sits like Biden, nothing will change.
7
@Ed Watters
Warren 2020
I was driving through the valley the night they shut down the power. The winds north of Sacramento were gusting to 45 mph, knocking cars this way and that. PGE saw it coming and this was their answer. Fine. But PGE went cheap in laying thousands of miles of power lines over and across chaparral and foothill forests, lands that dry to a crisp each summer and the result of badly placed poles, towers and derricks were the horrendous fires of 2017 and 2018. Though they are in the midst of efforts to mitigating the cross-hatching of wires and tree limbs, it has been pretty haphazard and disfiguring to the tree lines, to say the least. The alternative though is worse - a downed line during last week's windstorm, which, remarkably, they knew was coming, would have resulted in the same intense fire somewhere in the vicinity. But poorly planned is putting it mildly. It was a shock to the system - ask the hospitals, university research labs, nursing homes and elderly residents. RIght idea - ridiculously incompetent. It cost more to bury the power lines because of the expense of digging each time there is a problem. But the state is choking in power transmission lines - you find them in some of the most beautiful stretches of scarcely accessible mountain regions and along majestic lengths of the coast. Time for a little eminent domain if there ever was one.
2
Ever hear of a water line getting blown down by the wind???
3
Don't worry about it, the PG&E executives and some top customers managed to get their wining and dining in before the power went off.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/PG-E-gas-employees-wined-and-dined-just-before-14512194.php
8
PG&E hired lobbyists instead of doing safety upgrades.
https://theintercept.com/2019/10/11/pge-power-shutdown-california/
12
You can bet the cyber warriors in Russian, China, Iran and Korea are taking note.
4
Sounds like a 3rd world country.
5
I woked into my 95-year-old neighbor's living room to find a candle burning less than a foot from her bed. My other neighbor didn't have electricity for her CPAP; the other neighbor needed oxygen and his family had to go out and buy a gas-powered generator to make sure he didn't die while sleeping.
What the heck did PG&E have in mind? And to tell the truth, I blame Gov. Newsome. Everyone should have been informed about the hazards of not having electricity (for me in Sonoma Valley), it was more than 48 hours.
8
@Zighi - Why on earth is Newsome to blame?
Now do you understand why there are crosses on the poles?
Residents who lost power - stop whining and buy a generator.
2
@62: no one is whining. On the contrary, we who lost power would happily go without it for a week if it could potentially prevent another fire. I literally do not know ONE person who whined about not having power. You are missing the point. This is about a giant fumble by PG&E, and frustration that our power lines aren’t being buried. We are scared to death that we are going to be torched alive in our sleep, and eager for a better solution. Have some humanity.
What’s lacking at PG&E is a culture of operational excellence. Only if the leadership places operational excellence above all else, can we expect to see a change. It is time for the governor, the legislature and the PUC to get off the stick and force the monstrosity to break itself into several companies, each more manageable and each with new leadership teams capable of building organizations that can earn the rating of operationally excellent.
1
PG&E is operating under California's PUC regulatory power. The legislature has passed laws and regulations that dictate exactly how much PG&E can make, spend, charge, and what they can invest in.
The Liberals running California have let their hyper radical political agenda run wild, and now are just looking for anyone available to shoulder the blame for their insane policies.
Now that California has made PG&E corporately financially responsible for any fire or any kind of damage that can be traced to a downed power line in a storm.....anything..... what other choice can they make but to shut down power when any potentially damaging weather event could cause them billions in damages?
6
@Rocky Ignorance is never a good excuse for making incorrect statements. The underlying problem is that PG&E applied for permission to charge customers for various projects designed to increase the safety of their transmission lines and gas lines, but instead spent much of these funds on other things. Top executives received very nice bonuses. Just this week, they threw a big party in a winery in the same area that burned in recent years, to celebrate some success or other. What I find truly radical is the concept that the utility that provides the essential service of supplying electricity for millions of people and businesses can siphon off profits for shareholders while serious liabilities remain unchecked. Radical is the notion that the public is beholden to shareholders (i.e., big institutional investors) for their safety.
1
@Rocky
"Corporations are people too, my friend."
an individual responsible for the deaths of as many people that are on PG&E's tab would be in prison with a life sentence.
Everyone wants a million dollar payday.
5
When you find yourself sitting in the dark, with a fridge full of spoiling food, in 2019, in one of the richest places on earth, you will vote for any candidate who promises to fix it.
8
And you will be had.
1
This exhibits the effects of the Friedman Doctrine, alas...
The US doesn't need to be brought to its knees b
Unacceptable! Not the new normal! Outrage. So what will PUC do? Pass a rate increase, keep PG&E solvent. Make money for PG&E investors — most important. The PUC has allowed PG&E to literally get away with murder for decades. There is one thing and one thing only that the PUC can do. Take PG&E public. In the meantime, PG&E should have to pay and pay now for all the infrastructure they put off for years while corporate execs chased higher profits. PG&E doesn’t have the money? Go after the executives, past and present. Go after the institutional investors who profit while California burns. They don’t have the money? Make them work for once in their lives — cleaning brush beneath the rusted and failing monuments to their greed and stupidity
5
After two days of suffering by residents and businesses from a useless PGE power shut-off, the PGE execs went off to celebrate their victory over consumers with a fancy dinner party in the wine country.
Let PG&E go bankrupt from their poor power network management and make that critical source of power a public utility designed to serve the people.
8
this was crazy. they shut off power to millions of people, and hundreds of businesses lost millions of dollars, food went bad, sick people suffered, there was no gas, all because pg&e can't be bothered to maintain its lines.
there is no telling the heat of the rage this has generated against this heedless, inept, expensive public utility.
10
This is absurd. If you're a power company and the only way you can prevent your company from causing damage and harm is to turn off the power(?!) then it couldn't be more clear that you don't have the wherewithal to run a power company. This is a deal breaker and PG&E should be broken up immediately.
8
I used to live in San Francisco and was a PG&E customer. The best way for anyone back east to understand it is to compare it to the MTA. Lots of money thrown at a project with little to see for it.
6
This article was a bit like reading how the vicious dog made a mess after it was chained up so that the little kids could walk home from school safely. We should all be glad that another town didn’t get incinerated, despite the loss of leftovers in the fridge that spoiled during the black outs.
2
Just a question:
Is this the future?
3
So I hate that for the CA democrats.
I think Trump is right, let's trade CA for Greenland.
3
Lost power? Stop asking the government and big business to solve your problems. Buy a generator.
3
@62
then spend money on kerosene, gasoline or propane, and risk fires, CO poisoning, etc.
No, but thanks.
3
The scene certainly appears a likeness to the scene in the "Close Encounters" Movie in which the mother was chasing the young son along the roadside on foot and three or more Angels suddenly glided by.
The power lines carry signals which might now be off. Are you people in California feeling perhaps calmer? The poles do have crosses you know.
My family lives in Woodside California, heart of the fire risk zone. We lost power for 2 days. We would GLADLY bear this mild inconvenience as opposed to losing our home or lives in a fire. People whining about PGE should look at what’s happening right now in LA, or the past 2 fire seasons up here, for a little perspective and humility.
And the NYT should stop feeding into this culture of outrage that blows every precaution or misstep way out of proportion.
6
California should buy the assets of Pacific Gas & Electric and run it with a unionized work force.
Electricity will be dirt cheap and there won't be any problems.
3
Oh,for sure! That'll put it out of its misery!
@Jeff good luck on dirt cheap power.
California is looking more like a third world country every day.
6
Then why are we still paying your bills with our taxes!?
2
Everyone wants a payday. You want something for nothing. You could accept that providing power and downed power lines was an acceptable risk, but no,,,you want everything and no risk. You get what you demand. Live with it.
2
A chance at public relations but another self inflicted disaster.
It would be interesting to know how many times PG&E did test blackouts and restarts or did they just pull the plugs on thoughts and prayers?
1
Bury the power lines. Too expensive? Look at what the human, financial and economic costs have been over recent years. Pay now or pay (more) later. Many European countries have figured this out. It's time the US did as well.
5
A native Marinite, I don't feel sorry for Mill Valley residents for a single second.
Learn to live without power and smoothies for a day. PG&E is truly trying to keep your Teslas charged without endangering lives.
1
@Alice Simon: Not everyone in Mill Valley drives a Tesla or is otherwise unworthy of your pity, nor would anyone here ask for it. It is important that you know that every single person here would gladly go a week without power if it would help prevent another catastrophic tragedy. That was not our beef. It was the manner in which PG&E handled it all that people take issue with.
1
Ahhh ... the decision is to pay someone $250,000 to run a US$ 17.14 billion (2017) company to make everything perfect...
Now THAT sounds socialist.
1
I agree. They should be paid much less than that.
5
Until we can upgrade our electrical delivery system out of the 19th century, I think a far more precise protocol needs to be developed for when and where shut-downs occur. Beyond the obvious challenges and losses of those fending without power, those of us who live among ranches, vineyards, and produce farms face a double challenge: No water. The pumps that supply our well water also shut down, putting livestock, crops, and basic sanitation at risk. PG&E’s lack of consistent or useful communication added yet another level of concern throughout this ordeal, and may well have turned out the lights on public trust altogether. I think we need more local management of our utilities, where specific needs and threats are better understood, management more accessible, and solutions more applicable.
5
Second 'safety' power outage for my community in the last couple of weeks. Despite the dire warnings, the wind speed here never got above 10 - 15 MPH. In fact, during the first outage, it was dead calm the entire time. And mostly calm the two days we were without power this week. Somehow, if they need to do this, PG&E has to use a finer method to target truly dangerous areas. Here's an idea: Every time they turn the power off, all PG&E Executives, along with whoever makes the decision to turn the power off, should have the power turned off at their houses, regardless of whether or not they live in an affected area. theirs should be the first houses turned off, and the last turned back on.
5
Schwarzegger was "elected" to fix this
Now that California ( finally ) has a Democratic super-majority, I bet that you'll see some action
Republicans have always blocked infrastructure projects in this space, insisting that the "private sector" can do it better
5
@Marion Grace Merriweather you are woefully misinformed about CA
1
I don’t understand why people think they got no warning. Papers have written about PG&E considering turning of power in case of bad Diabolo winds for a year or longer. The weather forecast warned us a week or so in advance that there is a red flag warning. The papers wrote about the PSPS coming for days before, the county and PG&E sent out notices. Anyone paying any attention would have known days before the actual outage, to prepare. Yes, they could have done a better job with charging centers - both letting people know about them and equipping them. And they should have spent all year educating people who rely on electricity for medical equipment how to navigate through an outage. But apart from that I have to say I vastly preferred this outage (for us it was 1:30 a.m on Wednesday to about the same time on Friday) to PG&E burning down our home with everything in it, our huge glorious and irreplaceable oak trees and our fences, which is what they did in October of 2017.
Of course PG&E could decide to invest in safety measures and pay their shareholders less, which would be the responsible approach. They won’t do it unless they are forced to. Right now it seems like they decided to inflict pain on their customers to show everyone that the public will suffer if they are held responsible for starting fires. I hope the politicians will not fall for that but make safer equipment and infrastructure mandatory - and push solar and batteries to get away from the grid entirely.
4
If this does not spur demand for battery-supported rooftop solar, I give up.
13
I live in Northern California and we NEVER got a notification after the initial one announcing the shutoff from PG&E, even after the power came back on. The web site did, as noted, crashed and was totally useless. Fortunately we had our earthquake kit set up , a propane fireplace to heat one room adequately, our stove is also propane. The water heater is electric so I was expecting to heat water on the stove but it didn't come to that. Had it been a 5 day outage, as advertised, things would have been much grimmer. PG&E deserves all the criticism it gets but so also does the Public Utilities Commission which has been totally complicit in letting ALL profits be funneled to the stockholders rather than using an adequate amount to modernize the system, create a better grid and maintain the equipment and right of ways.
6
tell me again why we don't need to spend money on infrastructure.
16
Despite all the rhetoric this is simply a matter of PG&E transferring the liability for decades of neglect and mismanagement from the utility to the customers. PG&E is currently facings billions in fines and settlements because of the damaged caused when their faulty equipment ignited some of the worst fires in the history of the state.
Rather than face additional liability that would lower dividends for share holders they place on the burden on the hundreds of thousands of customers that lost power. These households may have lost a few hundreds of dollars in spoiled food, or had to buy a generator or maybe spend a few nights in a hotel. The losses were bigger at some business and state and local governments spent millions.
But for PG&E the lost revenue and some over time were a pittance compared to the legal liability they faced if their equipment failed and again caused massive wild land fires.
I was lucky. Although I had more than a half dozen communications from PG&E saying the power was about to go off the lights never so much as flickered. There was about a 12 hour shutdown for about 500 homes in the 55+ community where I live in San Jose.
4
SD G&E spent money installing technology to enable them to cut off power with extreme precision, isolating outages to only to areas where it is absolutely necessary--where the wind is really blowing and the vegetation is a threat.
PG&E never spent a penny more than it had to on equipment, putting all the money it could into investor dividends and executive pockets.
It had to send out crews to flip switches because it never installed more modern equipment that would enable it to switch off remotely. It shut off power to widespread areas because it had no way to isolate shutdowns to smaller areas where the wind was actually blowing, because it never spent the money to be able to do so. The money all went to profits.
13
Power outages wreck havoc. But what if the trade-off is the risk of sparking massive fires, like the one occurring concurrently in Southern California?
Forget the money aspect for a second. The trade-off is difficult, period. The outages are a short term, but necessary, solution. Our electric wasn't designed for the impact of climate change. The long run solution is to bury the lines and create self-sustained microgrids, but it's an expensive solution.
We'll have to choose between fires, power outages, large grid investments to move power lines underground, and relocating folks that live in a areas with high fire risk. It is not an easy choice, but it's one week have to face.
2
Seems to me a compelling reason to install solar panels on roofs. That, combined with a battery system, should be enough to keep a few lights on and the refrigerator running.
California has abundant sunshine. Why more people don’t install solar panels is beyond me in state committed to 0 CO2 emissions.
Of course, this merely minimizes inconvenience; its does not excuse PG&E. They have been lax in maintaining power lines and that must change.
6
@Bill White Solar won't fix this problem. Most rooftop solar owners use the grid as their personal battery - they are not really off the grid. Unless you install a hefty amount of batteries ($$$$), your power will still go out even if you have solar. That doesn't mean solar isn't a good thing, it just isn't a solution here.
I am looking out of my window right now at the telephone pole in the accompanying photo: my house is right below it. Our power was shut off for 3 days. While everyone in Mill Valley was more than willing to be a part of any action that might prevent another catastrophic fire, we certainly are not happy with PG&E. The whole operation was handled shoddily, and the dissemination of information was nearly non-existent. The re-start date was nebulous...we were told maybe 5 days, maybe 6. People had 24 hr advance notice, but all of the food in our fridges and freezers mostly had to be tossed. Such a waste of food and money. All because PG&E hasn’t maintained their infrastructure, or buried their lines. This was a COA move, not a fire safety move.
This reminds me a bit of the Ford Pinto cost/benefit analysis conundrum. Yes, it would take billions to bury the lines, but PG&E is liable for about $30 billion from our fires in ‘17 and ‘18 alone. The problem isn’t going to go away. They MUST bury the lines wherever possible.
11
Why aren’t people talking about Gov. Newsom’s ties to PG&E and all the money they have given to him and other lawmakers, who have shielded the monopoly from real liability? I voted for Newsom, but corruption in any party has to be called out and stopped. Now I know. PG&E does not maintain its equipment, and uses its profits to pay millions to management and pay shareholder dividends. It’s obscene. Where are the criminal indictments?
5
How many people who rely on home medical equipment, such as oxygen died? Can you tell us?
6
@Researchdude
At least one according to news reports: an elderly man who was relying on electricity to provide his O2.
PG&E had known for years that their antiquated and outdated supply system was causing the fires. I assume in their quest to maximize profit they continually put updating infrastructure on the backburner until the liability and responsibility cries from resident/customers became loud enough.
It is time to put the transmission lines underground or finally slow walk out Nicola Tesla’s “unproven and impossible” method for wireless transmission (denied by Westinghouse as how do you charge for it?).
Those who were intelligent enough to utilize government solar subsidies for residential rooftop panels and battery storage have got to be chuckling. Maybe PG&E will allow them to sell energy back again?
It is high time corporations display responsibility not just to shareholders, but to the world.
7
@Fox W. Shank PG&E requested to move power lines underground over and over. And each time the regulators and consumer advocates told them the cost were excessive and a waste of time, until the natives fires last year PG&E isn't a model company, but there is ample blame to go around.
Power was out for 40 hours in my neighborhood. I discovered I can file a reasonable claim for the food spoilage that was in my freezer which was half stocked with perishable food and topped with frozen water bottles, yet thawed despite my precautions. Here's the link for others in a similar situation:
https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/customer-service/help/claims/claims.page
2
I think you’re owed that, but good luck considering the dozens of wrongful death and property loss class action suits against PG&E ahead of you that led to its bankruptcy in January.
Amazing the website is even up for you to have seen that link. If I were cynical, I’d say, “Get in line.”
2
actually, in bankruptcy, his claims for loss of his food comes ahead of all the other claims
So why is PG&E allowed to put electricity lines on wooden sticks?
6
PG&E can't win. If they raise rates so they can afford better maintenance, people scream and yell and sue. If their poorly-maintained equipment causes fires, please scream and yell and sue.
10
They have plenty of money to modernize but they chose to funnel it to their shareholders instead. There is absolutely no need to raise the rates.
8
@JimBob and didn’t I read the CEO in 2018 pocketed $11 million?
5
@Alex You want to compete in the marketplace for competent people to run a big, complex company, you're gonna have to pay. Free market, right? You want some government stooge running PG&E?
2
Too many wealthy people are getting off scot-free, not paying fair share of taxes while hoarding ill gotten profits on the backs of working and middle class. Pitchforks and torches seem to be the only way we can get through to them. The people at PG&E are nothing more than murders and thieves. Their ham fisted approach of cutting off power in order to punish the general public for holding administrators and shareholders accountable, is nothing less than criminal.
2
But they’ve banned shampoo bottles.
2
I hate to tell you folks but as a firefighter who is close to retirement, if you don't get ready to be self sufficient for WEEKS not days, you're gonna be in a world of trouble. It is simply impossible to effectively battle some of these fires not to mention other natural disasters. In my dept we have 6 people on duty at any one time. None live near work. Assuming the water system works we'll pick a house, make a stand and fight. Move on to the next one. We'll save what we can. Most will burn.
Of the ones that don't burn I hope you have a generator for your home oxygen, your meds at hand etc... We'll be setting up poker tables and handing out bandaids in front of the firehouse.
We have simply not made the investment in natural disasters that Japan has. They still suffer monumental losses of property and life but they are better prepared psychologically as well.
Take this as a wakeup call. You're on your own and always have been.
I blame the ourselves/emergency services for implying we can handle everything and we'll be there for you. We won't.
8
My thoughts exactly. We have grown very complacent.
4
Isn't time for criminal prosecutions and jailtime for the
the utility executives and their managers?
3
@Joren Maksho
For what crime?
The death of 80+ souls last year in a wildfire started by an electrical line?
1
As a rate payer in PG&E territory, I wonder if this was a Kabuki play to get the state to somehow indemnify PG&E against future claims related to fires that their equipment might cause.
There are estimates that the cost of these blackouts caused $2 billion of lost economic activity.
7
In an effort to avoid another disaster, PG&E created another disaster. This company has a history of poor management and excessive corporate salaries.
9
Welcome to liberal mismanagement. They can’t clear right-of-ways for 13.8 kV lines. Can’t thin forest lands from underbrush and dead & decaying timber. Underinvested in distribution system upgrades. But the plastic straw ban & needle distribution systems are going great!
5
@Once From Rome
Trump's Republican party has the solution—climate crisis denial, Big Oil as the EPA and rakes; lots and lots of rakes.
1
For all those saying, why not just get solar:
California has, by far, the most installed solar PV systems in the United States. As a general matter, the California government promotes the adoption of Solar PV Systems and seeks to limit obstacles to their use.
However, adoption in the residential setting requires compliance with housing, electric, building, and energy codes, along with other bodies of law in order ensure the safety and reliability of the systems. While some codes are expressly permissive of solar-plus-battery configurations, others require or assume interconnection with the grid.
Of course, until all applicable laws allow residential customers to disconnect, they must remain connected.
3
@Michelle
Buy a good gas generator and gasoline.
Have a flashlight and batteries on hand.
This is more akin to a hurricane than anything else.
My power, just north of Santa Cruz city limits, was out for 40 hours. I had my generator ready to go, and put our fridge and basic computer networking on it so had full uptime. my home weather station never recorded any more than < 10 MPH wind gusts over a couple hours thursday morning. Even more annoying than the power failure, our internet, xfinity (comcast) went offline about 5 hours after the power and didn't come back until the power was restored, my wife relies on that to telecommute, so she had to travel to an area where she could at least get faster LTE than we get at home, and used her cellphone as a hotspot so she could work.
I was watching www.windy.com and even 24 hours before the power shutdowns commenced, the wind forecasts were NOT showing any more than mild breezes over much of this area. I think the max forecast I saw 12-15 kt winds on the crest of the Santa Cruz Mountains on the Peninsula and Summit areas here, a totally normal event around these parts, hardly reason to shut down power to millions of people.
in the 40 hours the power was out, my generator was outputting an average of about 500-700 watts, and had a total power generation of about 17 KWH. it burned about 5-6 gallons of gas (old gas that I had on hand).
4
@Left coast geek
Is your generator in line to your electrical panel?
What make and model, please?
@Susanna no, its a standalone 2000VA 'inverter generator' (one of the quiet ones), its an off brand thing I bought at Costco a few years ago.
I put it on the brick patio in the back yard, and ran a tree of extension cords to the things I wanted to power.
I'd like to get a whole house generator, permanently installed on a pad outside the garage, wired to the main panel with a transfer switch, but this would cost around $10,000.
I would have been fine with the power outs if there was going to be a windstorm in my community. But there wasn't one, nor was there ever one predicted in my community. Yet the power was still shut off for more than 24 hours. There is more wind now as I am writing this than there was during the entire power outage.
4
Can’t believe the obvious is not mentioned here. Powerlines above ground are the issue. Utility have to pit them underground just like in the rest of the developed world or major cities in the US. Instead of huge pay for CEO Bill and shareholders put the money to bury the lines . Problem solved!
6
@Obvious
Electric utilities would love to underground. This would be a huge investment and far more expensive than overhead lines. In the industry parlance, this is called "rate base". The utility has the opportunity to earn a rate of return on this investment. CEO and shareholders not doubt will be rewarded for it.
Your electric rates will be going up.
2
Exactly!
In their fear of being held liable for another wildfire's massively costly damage, the power company thinks it's better to shut off electricity to millions of people and businesses as a precaution at the first hint of danger. Quick trigger, no decent plan for handling the power shutoff and its aftermath, inadequate and inept mechanisms for every aspect of this.
Regarding the larger picture, it's important to note the ways in which people are at fault for much of what we're experiencing in these wildfire crises. Allowing homes to be built in extremely fire-prone areas, failing to require homeowners to clear brush around homes, faulty management of forests that need periodic clearing or controlled burns, no upgrades of infrastructure, and so much more that put people at risk and cause this wrong-headed response from power companies that want to protect themselves from another suit holding them liable for the cost of a wildfire.
4
@TRJ To be clear, it was 700,000, not millions. California’s population is around 35 million.
@Tim Perry A story in the Guardian reported that power shutoffs by PG&E affected some 1.5 million in 34 counties. I don't think the final figures are in and those may vary depending on the source, but anyway it was a lot of people affected. In my original comment, I was talking more generally of the power company's willingness to shut off power to so many people in order to protect themselves from potential liability. I wasn't trying to be exact about the current situation but being more general in saying PG&E is willing to affect even more people than this week.
“The impacts to individual communities, to individual people, to the commerce of our state, to the safety of our people, has been less than exemplary. This cannot be the new normal. We can’t accept it as the new normal. And we won’t.”
This is the response I expect to hear more of as an inconvenient truth becomes a very inconvenient reality.
2
Hopefully this will accelerate the adoption of rooftop solar, at least for those who own single family homes. A decentralized power grid is also of great importance from a national security standpoint.
3
@Anonymous most people with rooftop solar panels still went dark, since unless they had expensive battery backu systems the energy went into the grid.
that windfarm up on monument ridge is looking pretty good right now.
3
@Anonymous Rooftop solar systems send power TO PGE, who then, "sells" it back to customers. Unless people had a backup system, solar customers went dark too.
3
I work in an affected area. I can't believe a power company can be so irresponsible as to not ensure the safety of chronically ill, oxygen dependent or otherwise energy dependent people are safe prior to such major action. These set of events should be studied and never repeated.
5
Our power generation and transmission should be run in the public interest.
We might decide to better maintain the system, keep better records, bury power lines in fire-prone areas, make our grid 'smarter' with some decentralized elements, incentivize customers to deploy batteries that can be used for resiliance and peak power management.
We might decide that we don't need executives who make millions per year, or require super-luxury perks and first-class accomodations for their work-related activites.
12
@Scott Newton does anyone really think the government would do a great job either. One look to NYC Subway system should give pause
1
This will make people think more favorably about putting solar panels and battery back up in their homes.
1
PG&E should neither enable or accept responsibility for the poor decisions made by those who choose to live in high fire risk areas. The company should focus on urban areas and leave the rural areas to the State of California. If the State insists that they provide electricity everywhere, then the company should be granted sovereign immunity.
1
The state does not insist that electricity be provided everywhere.
1
If you deem all the places where power went out high risk fire areas, much of it temperate rainforest, then the entire state is uninhabitable by your standards. As this article points out, other electric utility companies in California, where there are regularly higher winds and temperatures, have implemented far saner policies than PG&E.
4
Lights are still on over at Stanford, where the academics who thought privatization and deregulation was such a good idea.
4
What deregulation? PGE is very highly regulated.
4
and PGE has always been privately owned.
5
This was caused by the California progressive government. The legislature has forced PGE to delay periodic maintenance and invest in inefficient and unproven energy alternatives. When you force industry to abandon the profit motive in favor social programs the result is inefficiency. If progressives want this stuff pay for it with tax dollars. These kinds of fiat crushed the Soviet and Warsaw Pact economies.
7
@Kent Kraus Where do you get your info in this? Clearly not the NYT. You are completely mistaken about California and PGE but that hasn’t stopped you from writing here. PGE is a publicly traded, for profit company that has delayed maintenance and upgrades to its infrastructure for decades while declaring bankruptcy numerous times after many disasters caused by its negligence—including criminal negligence. Read up about the gas leak in San Mateo County to which this article refers. Criminal negligence is rarely found against a company (even when companies are deemed “persons”) but PGE has that distinction. It began this current operation with insufficient servers to connect the public and without regard for the major disruption the rolling blackouts would have on people’s health and lives. It’s a bankrupt company in the clearest sense of the words and it’s a monopoly. The State has actually protected the company by passing liability limiting legislation. Now it is finally acting in Californian’s interest to hold it accountable for its corporate irresponsibility.
7
I was there in the dark. This is so very third world and is totally the fault of the state government ofr failure to demand oversight after San Bruno. That explosion and numerous fires have cost homes and lives. PG&E is allowed to continue to give huge pay outs to their shareholders and huge bonuses and salaries to their management and CEO at the expense of the California citizens.
And watch...there is more...now they with demand a utility payment increase to fix things.
11
Totally the fault of government? Nah. PGE has the lions share of fault by far.
3
PG&E needs to take some lessons from utilities in the upper Midwest. They bury the power lines so that people don't lose power in blizzards. Expensive? Yes. But in the long run, less expensive than wildfires.
4
@Roger Demuth
Topography makes is a LOT easier in the Midwest
1
@Marion Grace Merriweather Colorado, too, where it's not so easy.
Indeed the PG&E (and SCE) blackouts are problematic to both customer and company, one must wonder: Why do persons living in fire areas fail to purchase small generators that would meet their basic needs of refrigeration, a few lights and essential medical equipment?
These folks must take some personal responsibility.
5
Two things: Go solar if you at all can. And - California needs to take over PG&E.
7
As a PG&E customer, I say that the money going to dividends and bonuses and board members should first go to fixing the many, many problems that PG&E management know exist. If there's anything left, then pay out to shareholders and the like. Management needs to do the right thing. Where is the PUC in enforcing such discipline???
Planned outages are not a long-term solution.
12
Looks like profits are not the universal cure for every ill. Who knew.
13
This is why we installed our own independent totally off the grid electric. It includes solar & wind (I LOVE my wind turbine) with battery. We feed our excess power into the grid. My expectation is that expanding population will overwhelm the public utilities
2
With the unreliability and deterioration of infrastructural institutions like PG&E, a likely antidote is to do it yourself. This crisis may serve as a catalyst to encourage solar panel adoption and (Tesla) Powerwall batteries, which can store the energy absorbed by solar panels. This "microgrid" extricates you from relying on PG&E and decreases carbon emissions.
5
Could be worse, they could own nuclear plants. OOPs I just looked it up, at least they were safe.
2
While California lacks necessary infrastructure and modern power capacities, the Legislature spends its time providing free abortions on state university campuses. Time to send the whole Democratic ilk, from the Legislature to the Governor to Pelosi, packing and without power (over other people).
5
Lack of infrastructure is a national problem. Red States are in worse trouble by far.
5
@Nick CA pretends to be a national model and has the population that needs it. Don't lecture me about Kansas. Blue California hasn't built a road or dam in years, and its venture into "high speed railroad" was a boondoggle like most of Governor Moonbeam's ideas. And let's not talk about America's major cities, most of whom having been Democratic monopolies for decades, are generally going down the pot and rat holes.
1
Or they could just run their lines underground.
4
@Clark Landrum The cost would be prohibitive, but Californians are used to high taxes, so why not try quadrupling their utility rates.
1
@Stratman , the article says that they are "facing $30 billion in liabilities from recent wildfires". That would bury a lot of power lines. A little late now I suppose.
2
Are those harder to track/evaluate in event of earthquake?
1
The biggest problem was that no one even had cell service. Even the old land lines weren’t working. If there was an emergency there would be no way to contact for help. If there was a fire, no one would have been notified. The website that was given beforehand to customers never worked. There was $billions lost in productivity and goods. Every grocery store had to throw away all of it’s refrigerated and frozen food. PG&E needs to get a new communications division and director. Nothing was explained. Even local supervisors had no idea what was happening. At least the cell towers should have back up generators or batteries. The whole thing was out of control and one giant mess. Oh and yeah, people are mad.
28
@Deb My wife had full cell service over a two day outage. The big Santa Rosa fired knocked out many cell towers for a year.
Clearly there was no shareholder value to maintaining all those power lines.
How is your shareholder value now days?
7
The power shutoff represents a massive failure on the part of government AND Pacific Gas & Electric. Why wasn’t the government involved in creating preparation plans for this? Further, why is there a total lack of imagination about how to fix this problem? For example, the state could have issued bonds last April to enable every school district, hospital and municipality to finance solar and wind microgrids. These would provide power during the times when power must be shut off (usually 5-7 days max). This microgrids system ultimately could then be built out to begin powering these facilities on a regular basis. The goal should be to get off fossil fuels and remove PG&E negligence from the equation. Microgrids begin to solve this problem.
7
Underground utilities as in Europe!
7
@Barbara Much smaller distances to cover in European countries.
2
@Barbara And your rates will go up to pay for it.
At this point dig the infrastructure under ground
Yes it cost a lot more, but the effects of wild fires will be minimized. The substation can be put in underground bunkers.
3
PG&E’s systemic problems have gone unchecked for decades. It has now been forced into bankruptcy following California’s devastating wildfires. The company’s wildfire insurance was grossly underfunded to the tune of $1.4 billion compared to actual liability of more than $30 billion not including potential punitive damages, fines tied to future claims. Ratepayers can expect whopping increases in their utility bills.
In its effort to make the state free from carbon-dioxide emissions, California pushed utilities to buy renewal energy.
Clean-energy initiatives, such as Solar and wind-energy designed to fight the effects of climate change will be a major casualty.
Never missing an opportunity to make money from other people’s misery,
Hedge funds are already offering to buy settlement claims from insurance companies.
The filing comes a day after the company announced the resignation of its chief executive, Geisha Williams and three other executives who were paid millions for their gross incompetence.
11
It is and will remain the new normal. PG&E and it's putative regulator, (the PUC) are too closely entwined to function properly. There is no consciousness by either party as to the effect of a basic change to the rate structure in the 90's that disincentivized the utility to put the majority of it's net profit back into plant, into infrastructure. The result is plain.
7
The candidates are always talking about the crumbling infrastructure and putting people to work to fix it, maybe this is part of what they are talking about. Maybe now is a good time for local and state officials to get together with the utility companies and plan for the near future, and if a company can't handle it maybe bring in another who can...
5
Rather than work on their infrastructure, PG&E is shutting off power to try and pressure the legislature to grant them immunity for future wildfires. It’s a passive aggressive move that shows that PG&E needs to be brought under public control.
17
There's been little talk about the economic toll of the power outage, especially on small businesses. When you're not open, you can't make money. The outage also hurt self-employed individuals. E.g. Airbnb hosts could not accommodate guests. Uber drivers were left with fewer customers as most people stayed home. My dance teacher had to cancel classes.
PG&E spokespeople conducted interviews full of PR nonsense and no direct answers. Clearly the top brass directed them to "spin" the story. One spokeswoman was at such a loss for words, she resorted to saying she what she was "hoping" for—ridiculous.
California should not be at the mercy of a private, for-profit corporation. And don't get me started on PG&E's executive wine party the night before the outage began and on the anniversary of the 2017 deadly fires.
20
Although we have a PV system, it needs the grid to be active to work. No power, no PV. I need to get a 240 VAC generator so that the PV system sees ‘the grid’, and we will have power for at least the time the sun is up.
We do have a 60KW battery in our EV, so we could run at least the fridge overnight.
Coping with no power was not what I thought the future would be about.
1
Like health care, utilities should not be profit-driven. Raw capitalism undermines community in order to profit the few; social democracy empowers market forces while regulating greed and exploitation for the benefit of the many.
16
The gripe up here in N CA for many of us was not the shutting off of power to prevent wildfires. It was the fact that we were deprived of power despite calm local wind conditions. For the 3 days that were supposedly apocalyptic, our maximum gusts were 6 mph and the weather was lovely and balmy. PGE claimed they had to inspect every inch of the lines before restoring our power but that assertion was false. For many of us, work was disrupted, health issues went from manageable to life threatening, and hundreds of dollars in food was lost. PGE cut power irresponsibly. That's our issue.
24
Fellow Californians: what if we put up a referendum requiring our state to take over the assets of PG&E and turn it into a public power company?
And requiring proper investment in 21st century technology and responsible maintenance. With the goal or maximizing safety and service for the public (instead of maximizing private profits). Think it would pass?
17
@Jerome Cooper Not without Governor Newsom's support. The governor of course does not want to own the liability associated with 'owning' the transmission lines. Also the cost would be enormous and that alone makes it not feasible.
1
Yes. Yes, it would.
1
How much of this should be blamed on the state of California and it’s government. Hardening the grid takes money. Lots of money. Although our base rates are much cheaper here in Florida, FPL the states utility is incentivized to harden the grid and protect against loss of power during hurricanes and any wind events. The public service commission allows many more maintenance costs and replacement upgrades to be added to the base rate and capitalized. It’s not that PG&E does not know what to do, their former CEO came from FPL, but that the Public Service Commission wants these costs to come out of earnings. There is never enough money for this in a system that is trying to operate in a rapidly changing environmental climate in a state that has every increasing demands for energy and no cheap access to low cost natural gas . Even large solar and wind fields need to travel large distances to teach the coastal population areas.
4
Did you know that when the power in an area is shutoff all of the electronic communication towers quit transmitting? When PG&E shut off the power there is not only no lights etc. there is no phones and no internet. With land-lines the phone use to work when the power was down.
When the power was restored PG&E notified us that "The power is on" but other than that you have no idea if the shut down will last a day or a week.
6
PG&E is one of the worst utility companies in the nation. They have deferred maintenance for years to increase profits. Weather-related power shut downs take weeks to repair. There are a few municipalities in California that have their own electric plants. PG&E has lobbied to make these illegal, and of course, these municipalities see how terrible PG&E has been, and they have been able to resist. This company needs to be brought under control, because they are not serving the public interest.
19
Was cutting off electricity to more than a hundred thousand homes supposed to be a kind of test of the area's ability to handle such a "real" emergency? It WAS a real emergency--one that PG&E created!
Without the ability to charge up phones, of course communications went flat. Of course websites failed (not many affected households had the ability to use their computers). Of course homes and business refrigerations flooded. Of course people in hospitals and nursing homes were put at dire risk. With all this happening c/o PG&E, the fires still rage.
4
@NotDeadYet - Why on earth would anyone on the west coast not have a backup plan of some kind? Without any warning, everything around me could be rubble. So, I have a kit with a solar powered battery that works in Seattle winters. I have a water filter. And most importantly, I have at least a month's worth of meds stocked up after talking about this doomsday scenario with my pharmacist.
Hospitals can have back up systems.
https://newsroom.uw.edu/media-coverage/haborviews-solar-array-largest-any-washington-hospital
I've never understood why power companies aren't made to bury power lines in areas where they're a potential problem. Trees and power lines just don't mix well. It isn't just the fire hazard; look at Florida. Every time there's a hurricane trees fall on power lines and power is out for days. Presumably cost is a factor but the cost of liability is rising also, as PG&E already found out. Another case of a short term rather than long term view.
6
For a new CEO of a company to fail to understand the scale, magnitude and human impact of his decision in sending panic waves by threatening to shut power for 7 days, shows how much he should not be the decision driver of a huge power company. It was the length of time that threw the citizens into dilemmas. I wonder if the fact that PG&E donating huge sums to the present government had anything to do with the impotence of the state government in the face of such a sweeping decision by PG&E.
The weather was not a factor. Let’s try another excuse.
4
We are in an area where the power was shut off. It struck me that our country’s infrastructure is in sad shape and needs to be addressed.
4
This is funny. After catastrophic fires, California blames the utility for its scandalously negligent and greedy business of providing electricity through overhead power lines.
PGE, swamped by fire claims, ends up in bankruptcy and, having no more money to pay for more settlements, sees that its only alternative is to turn the power lines off during fire season.
Seems to me California needs to make up its mind -- will it have power lines or not? If it's going to have power lines, it's not going to be able to sue the owner of those power lines every time a fire starts because a piece of tumbleweed gets blown into the live wires? Someone needs to make a choice. Maybe a better choice is to not allow half a million people to live in wildfire zones. Or have them live with no electricity when the hot wind blows.
5
@Tom B.
PG&E was granted rate increases, that were supposedly going to be used for replacement of old infrastructure and proactive maintenance. Instead, the company paid the money out in shareholder dividends and executive bonuses.
For example, the tower that failed in Paradise (which burned to the ground) was 25 years past its useful life.
19
@Tom B.
So it’s blame the victim time?
A monolithic utility company raises rates, pays exorbitant executive bonuses and provides shareholders dividends. All this after they are found culpable for a fire that killed 80 people.
PGE needs to be held accountable for this latest dangerous fiasco. They should have used the bonus and dividend dollars, as well as profits, to bury the power lines, hire more arborists to cut down tree limbs that were in danger of falling on power lines, and invested in practical prevention methods.
To suggest people move because of a corporation’s poor management and non-existent disaster management/recovery plan is absurd. It makes me wonder if you own a large block of PGE stock.
6
@Tom B. It's too easy to blame PG&E and the politicians jump on the bandwagon of blaming PG&E and offer no real solutions. Who in their right mind would risk losing $30 billion on another fire? People would rather complain on social media them simply buy a generator.
2
This is not about preventing wildfires. This is about limiting risk and avoiding stockholders' loss. Areas that had high winds (during this particular power outgage, such as the City of Sacramento (and capitol city, I might add) were spared from the shut-down, while areas such as the smaller communities in Nevada County, where winds were light and not a threat were completely shut down. And some areas in that county remain with out power even today.
13
@Aus Sacramento uses municipal power not PG&E
Also not many forest fires in the city.
1
It's a failure because the website crashed and some people couldn't charge their phones? I'd say it went ok. Consider there are several large destructive fires in Southern California and no fires of that type in Northern California.
I cringed hearing Gavin Newsom's feigned outrage on the radio a few days ago. Just more of the same big-corporations-bad Warren-esque rhetoric to rally up the left wing.
PG&E is not without fault, however consider the position they are in. Before the Camp Fire last year- California's most destructive fire ever that killed 85 people- before that fire PG&E planned to do a planned power outage. However there was such a public backlash after a previous planned power outage PG&E changed their mind. Turns out it might not have made a difference anyway because PG&E didn't plan on taking offline the high voltage transmission line that is believed to have started the fire, but still- PG&E is in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
The complexity of the failings and corruption within California's electric power sector would make an excellent investigative series for the New York Times. Perhaps a good place to start would be the corruption of former CPUC president Michael Peevey. Despite an FBI raid that uncovered damning evidence of corruption with regard to the San Bruno gas explosion and the closure of San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant, no charges where brought by then attorney general Kamala Harris. Ditto silence from Newsom.
4
@Stephen - No matter what course of action is taken, Americans will flock to the forums to complain.
Meanwhile in Syria, everyone would be happy sitting in a dark Sausalito mansion with candles burning for a couple of days rather than listening to more bombs drop.
1
Really! But the honchos will still get paid, right? But how about those that lost their perishables? And the sick?
6
@Robert Koch
Right, just cut a check for everyone in California as an apology for the outage. You all deserve it.
This country should not be subsidizing utilities or health care. Privatized profits, socialized routine upkeep, maintenance, insurance for nuclear plants and storage for their spent fuel rods; children dead from no insulin, and multimillionaire CEO salaries and stockholder untaxed gains?
This hoodwinking started long ago and snowballed unstopped.
4
As a public safety professional who lost power for almost 3 days both at home and at work, I will say that no doubt, there would have been fires without the shutdown, as the winds were severe at certain times. But I have three comments for PG&E, because this can't become the new normal:
1) With all the weather stations, predictive intel and command centers that PG&E has, you should have known that power could have been cut oh, 12 to 20 hours later when the wind really did blow. And in smaller areas at higher elevation.
2) You need to have much finer grain in the switching so that big chunks of urban areas don't go dark as collateral damage. The economic loss to small businesses was huge.
3) and finally, if your major transmission lines can't handle high winds on this scale, then they need to be upgraded. This is not rocket science.
I suspect that this event will sell as many solar power systems than all the rebates have. And it likely did more for community disaster preparedness than all of the classes that I have put on!
24
Forget PG&E. get some solar panels and a battery. Then you’ll have electricity regardless of wind.
7
How does one transmute
“missteps,” and
“ things did not go well,” to
“Fail better?”
From
Personal Unaccountability to
Personal Responsibility
for what is done, which shouldn’t BE, and
what is not being done, which should BE?
3
As a result of the PGE blackout, my husband and I were without cell phone service for three days. Because there was no heat, I wrapped myself in blankets and read books. We used camp lights at night. The traffic lights in our small town were not working. My brother told me yesterday that he waited 45 minutes in line to get gas at the only gas station in town that was open. I kept wondering out loud what tragedies were occurring because folks were unable to call an ambulance or fire truck. How many people were injured in traffic accidents? The folks I've talked to about this blackout think PGE contrived it. Shouldn't PGE expected the Santa Ana winds to blow and have already done what they needed to do to the lines to make them safe?
12
Money should have been invested long ago in technological advances. But as usual, when a hefty profit is at stake, money is diverted.
Now, yes, the state does have this decision to keep power on, or turn it off to prevent widespread destruction.
Not a good place to be.
4
Although no doubt more costly, I'm not so sure that burying electrical utilities would cause any more damage to the landscape than clearing and maintaining paths for overhead power lines does. Two advantages to underground utilities: 1) no more risk of power lines starting fires, and 2) no more maintaining clearcut pathways for power lines.
3
@jaco Understood. I was kind of alluding to the fact that had the distribution lines been buried originally, PG&E and the state of California might be in better shape today. However, one has to consider that the risks of anything buried beneath earthquake prone ground would present its own risks.
@RJB buried originally? In1920? 1930? 1940? 1950? 1960? 1970?
1
There was little to no wind in the area I live in but PG&E turned off my power anyway. I was out for about 1 1/2 days. In fact, in Scott’s Valley where I live, last week’s was some of the best weather we’ve had all year. And yet there I was in the midst of a total blackout. After calling PG&E, I was told that if I lived within a hundred mile radius of a targeted transmission line, I would lose power. It’s 2019 and with all the advanced technology we have, all the available computing power and talented engineers in this country, they don’t have a way to more surgically target areas for power loss. PG&E has obviously failed to upgrade its systems. It was like the 1950’s all over again.
16
Turning the electricity off is not a solution. Neither is cutting down all the trees, PG&E's other solution. We need all the trees we can get. It's time for local, distributed solar energy with battery back up for these rural towns. Plenty of sunlight. Our California Cap and Trade money can pay for it, giving local, public control of the power companies. I live in Los Angeles where we citizens own our power. LADWP wouldn't dare cut off the electricity and they are moving full steam toward solar energy.
6
@S.Starr
PG&E seems not to like solar power. It cuts into their bottom line, and that's all that matters to them.
Gasoline driven generators, lighted candles, camp stoves and fireplaces burning wood were a WORSE fire storm threat to my neighborhood during our 60 hour power outage than the the possibility of downed power lines.
12
It is time to take over PG and E.
I wish there were a way to claw back the dividends, salaries and bonuses given to the executives.
I have lived in CA for 20 years and have lived through many fires.
Why were they not improving the infrastructure all along to prevent the fires?
GREED, pure GREED.
They need to be taken over NOW.
13
If PG&E and other utilities didn't need to transmit such large amounts of power over long distances the stress on the equipment would be much less and the chances of sparking a wildfire would be near zero.
The solution is distributed power. Put on houses, over parking lots, in neighborhoods. The largest loads are during the day, at the same times the heat and sun reduce the effectiveness of cooling the equipment - Solar panels. The great fear is that a small spark will grow into a large fire because of high winds - Wind turbines.
Our electric infrastructure evolved out of the concept of having fewer, larger generating facilities because, at the time, the were by far the most cost effective. Technology has changed that paradigm faster than company's and government's thought processes have. The understanding that moving the generation closer to the consumer is there. The understanding and willingness lags for several reasons.
3
This doesn’t make sense in 2019. If it was 1939, maybe. What’s the point of all the tech and science advances when our water and power aren’t safe and secure? This isn’t just a PG&E issue. There are others behind the times. Flint’s lead in water is another example. This should be a Presidential election issue to be discussed. The power companies pay their senior executives very well, with lavish retirement packages. In return, their customers are receiving service you’d see in Mexico or South America.
5
This doesn’t make sense in 2019. If it was 1939, maybe. What’s the point of all the tech and science advances when our water and power aren’t safe and secure? This isn’t just a PG&E issue. There are others behind the times. Flint’s lead in water is another example. This should be a Presidential election issue to be discussed. The power companies pay their senior executives very well, with lavish retirement packages. In return, their customers are receiving service you’d see in Mexico or South America.
4
Localized solar co-generation hubs seem to make sense. Typically, residential solar is fed into the grid, then "returned" to the customer via the same grid. Storing all or some of the solar power in neighborhood backup hubs that can be tapped into on-demand would decrease dependence on large utility companies while also promoting green energy. Seems like this should be especially feasible in tech- and solar-rich CA.
4
There is a big disconnect here in PG&E. I believe that that the company has a great level of inadequacy when it comes running as a company. The company had an issue prior to this current black out that killed 80 people and still weren't unable to come up with any strategic ways to prevent it from happening again or held accountable. In addition, the company were aware of the information and failed to inform the public . PG&E knew at-least 2 days prior to the blackouts, this misinformation is unacceptable. This could cause greater amounts of deaths and accidents because residents lost power so abruptly. Someone from the government official need to take a great look into business to ensure that this issue that CEO is doing their job accordingly . Because leaving information out to public and to have a state official " not authorized to speak publicly " means their is a disconnect in the company and it needs to be addressed so it wont happen in the future.
3
Sales opportunity for generator companies, solar and wind too, though good luck, city folks—you’re outta luck.
1
I live in Anderson, CA and I survived the CARR Fire and I helped through the CAMP Fire and I’ve seen the horror of what PG & E and their negligence has done. People were burned alive in their vehicles trying to flee. Elderly were found trying to hide in bath tubs .. they died horrific, terrifying deaths. PG & E were convicted in the San Bruno explosion.. hit with huge fines and consequences.. and even that did NOTHING to make them care about human life. They’ve been murdering California residence for years now. When you know that there is danger, yet do nothing .. that IS murder. Now, they shut us off for days.. to “protect” us. It’s led to deaths, too. People who had Zno warning but a less than 24 hour notice that power MIGHT BE turned off.. HAVE DIED!!!!!! When will it ever stop? Again, I’ve lived it, seen it, and due to the CARR Fire, I, myself, nearly died months after that fire due to full respiratory failure. Please don’t feel sorry for PG $ E ( yes, the $ was intentional) because they do NOT deserve it. The people they keep murdering do! Thank you.
14
On the plus side, PG&E still managed to hand out $11 million dollars in performance bonuses to their management team. They just have a different idea of bonus-worthy performance than their customers do, apparently. The way they handled this outage was a nightmare.
25
PG&E's plan was inept, clumsy, stupid and didn't work. Someone should be fired in many parts of their planning, implementation and review of the outage.
Don't reward incompetence! The planning was terrible (there should have been regions or zones for notification and a server to support each zone. There should have been an express commitment to update the status every 3-6 hours. The maps for power outages should have coincided with power shutdown areas. The CA PUC as an overseer of PG&E should resign in shame.
Finally, the fire problem is not just a PG&E problem. Houses in higher fire areas should have fire resistent roofs and walls. No loans to houses that are not fire retardant. We need a better fire insurance industry (some of it will have to be public because private insurance industry is terrible). Blaming PG&E is just blaming the deep pocket and not the govt and society for being inept, asleep and ignorant.
3
Yeah, it's always better to err on the side of comic relief, taking a giant wrecking ball to a gnat shows great judgment.
This was yet another problem made worse and caused by PG&E, sometimes I think just to annoy and harass its long-suffering customers.
5
For POG&E, It really is damned if they do and damned if they don't.
Further, once a wildfire starts, it's hard to reliably determine where the spark that started it came from. The evidence has gone up in smoke.
There are many causes of the wildfires in California. It's the weather (perhaps exacerbated by climate change) that spreads the fire. The triggering spark many come from power lines, or from careless or even malevolent individuals, just plain bad luck. The politicians and the lawyers find it convenient to blame it on PG&E; sometimes they may be right, but not always, and maybe not most of the time.
A lot of the blame goes to people who insist on building homes in vulnerable areas. PG&E is legally obligated to provide these folks with power, regardless of the risk.
Underground power delivery seems like a good idea, until you look at the cost, and the cost of maintenance, which are usually prohibitive.
There are no easy fixes. Californians, all Californians, need to be careful where they choose to live and build their homes. Juries need to realize that money paid to trial lawyers is money that PG&E can't use to maintain their facilities. Politicians need to regulate with a bit more wisdom and perhaps a bit less unsubstantiated finger pointing.
It's a very bad situation, my sympathy to those inconvenienced, and especially to those who lost friends, relatives, and property in recent years due to these fires.
2
Yeah, it went wrong in all of these ways. But even if it had gone as planned by PG&E it would have been a fiasco. PG&E is a supremely dysfunctional organization. We heard at the last minute that our hotel which had lost power would have to close, and would stay closed until Monday. Our flight to California was just hours away. The hotels that were still open were making the best of it. Most of them raised their nightly rate to around $400. Given that our hotel will not have power until Monday, your numbers of folks and businesses still without power might be much too low. Obviously this should have been a public-private project. They are after all a utility, that is, a natural monopoly. I was quite surprised to learn that PG&E had done this all on their lonesome, without consulting state leaders at all. That was reckless, feckless, you name it.
14
Having spoken to our "local" lineman yesterday, I didn't realize that despite new equipment, every leg of the distribution network had to be visually verified before being restored and switched on.
But even more concerning was to be told of the attendance of lawyers at the Service Restoration Groups through the affected blacked-out areas. Lawyers? It was inferred to me that they needed evidence to justify the large grid shut down.
PG&E resides and provides service in Silicon Valley. If PG&E needs web page support to supply continuous failover systems, look in your backyard. There are plenty of organizations that help our/their utility, proudly.
Despite many good sounding initiatives and claims of action, PG&E seems to be slipping back to their "pre-reorg" habits. If PG&E can't figure out whether it's going to be windy, despite millions of dollars invested in weather gurus ..... there is something wrong on in a much larger systemic scale of the organization.
How do other unitizes manage storms? Surely they also have power lines that run through trees when it's windy? Might there be a broader knowledge and best practices to be shared?
13
This is a corporation with an attorney who knows nothing about gas and electricity as the CEO. A company whose management was at a party celebrating on the night the power was turned off.
They recall retired rank and file because they don't have enough trained staff, then work the people to the bone with excessive overtime.
You can bet I'll be looking for every possible way to cut my PG&E bill.
8
Get some solar panels on your roof. The windy weather wont be a problem; you’ll still have your power. Make sure all your appliances are energy star and upgrade your insulation to cut down on a/c needs.
2
The chief of executive officer of PG&E has been in the power generation and transmission industry for over 25 years
The reason for this blackout is that PG&E stopped trimming trees around its equipment, and has failed to replace some overhead wiring with underground cables.
There is nothing new about delivering electric power in high winds and dry climates. It is sheer disinformation to blame this situation on global warming. According to the article: "Residents were left asking why so many people had to lose power and whether rolling blackouts would become routine as climate change makes wildfires more frequent and intense."
15
Privatization comes through again!
16
PG&E was never government owned and thus it was never privatized.
Just burn all the trees and brush down and get it over with.
2
Blame should be spread widely. PG&E has been for too long focused on short term profits, for example the San Bruno disaster. But it is in principle regulated by the state. We voted in the legislators and governors who "let" this happen; our first rate news media has been too focused on short term issues - which seems to be Donald's latest tweet - to give us an adequate awareness as California's infrastructure's decayed.
Quoting Carnegie Mellon's Costa Samaras, “Nobody is investing for climate resilience at the level that’s necessary and that’s really what’s concerning about this incident – this is one of the richest areas of the country and if we can’t even figure it out there, we’re going to have problems. This is a real learning opportunity to find where the resilience gaps are, find out who’s vulnerable, and fix it before it gets worse. The challenge is not just for PG&E but for the whole ecosystem: businesses, municipalities, counties.”
Yup. We should look at this as an opportunity to think about if and how we wish to reinvest in infrastructure from education to mass transit to electric power. And figure out how to take care of our fellow citizens: telling customers power will be going down without providing facilities for those who must have electric power to live - think someone on oxygen - isn't enough. That's something for state and local governments and not a PG&E responsibility, at least while it's not a government-owned utility.
13
What, no mention made of the party at the Silver Oak Winery the night before? (right after the event, is when the plug was pulled).
To refresh your readers who might not have heard the full details, but the night before PG&E de-energized Napa and Sonoma Counties, they threw themselves a big party--two years to the day--after they burned down large swaths of both counties.
Tellingly, PG&E now has their PR dept running puff pieces on the radio (KCBS) on the pleasures of "camping at home".
They need to be taken over by the State and broken up.
29
PG&E is a corrupt company, that is no secret to us Californians.
After the San Bruno explosions that killed 8 people (injured dozens more) they were caught in the act of shedding old paper documents related to that stretch of pipeline. Just one of many despicable illegal acts they were found guilty of. The PUC also was in on this.
This is a company that has been kept in business by the rich and powerful. They are and have been a complete disgrace and need to be made penniless and the executives thrown in prison.
26
Greed.
12
Hundreds of thousands of burning candles in homes scattered across California is PG&E's answer to fire prevention during wind storms. This is unacceptable!
249
@Bruce Savin :
No one should be trying to light their homes with candles.
Here in Florida, with hurricanes prevalent, old fashioned oil lamps (so called "hurricane lamps") are used much more often than candles. Also, there are battery run lamps which last for hours. Generators are also popular, though expensive, and I gather they can spark fires though ours never has.
13
@Bruce Savin Thousands of candles. The most romantic emergency ever.
5
@RLiss It doesn't matter that people "shouldn't" be lighting candles. Probably lots of people did anyway.
6
What would be really useful would be a reasoned analysis of what would be needed to minimize both blackouts and fire danger. So far I’ve seen that nowhere. What would such measures cost and would rate payers be willing to pay? There have been many complaints that the money that went to shareholder dividends could have gone to making PGE’s network more robust, and that‘s true, but I’m guessing that the cost of fireproofing a reliable system dwarfs the share of current revenues allocated to profits.
So instead of simply recounting people’s frustrations over the status quo, how about some reporting on what it would take to fix the mess we’re in?
5
First: No redundancy in critical communications systems. This is an intrinsic characteristic of essential services and was clearly missing. Second: No planning of any relevance. I have lived in states where the norm for new electric customers is to receive an inquiry from the utility about critical health issues (like respirators) so plans can be made for alternative life-sustaining service. Did anybody have a data base of health care facilities of all types? Because you need that to reach out and find out if back-up generators are available. Where back-ups are not in place, you work out a way (low cost loans, grants) to get them installed. Are there sufficient supplies of water for the population? Water and fuel for police, fire and EMS? There are checklists to be developed months in advance of the winds, so that you don't wind up looking like the north end of a southbound mule. And people will be a whole lot safer. We look more and more like a third world country every day not because we don't have resources but because we don't have the imagination needed for useful planning.
5
yes, yes yes to publicly-owned utilities. And also, for those property-owners who can afford it, solar panels and batteries or micro-fuel cells are an excellent idea, and, it seems to me, the state should have a program to aid all who want it. At the college where I teach, the installation of solar panels on all the parking structures has saved the college over 1 million dollars a year in electricity costs as well reducing that much fossil fuel damage to our planet.
9
This sounds like a failure of public (government) planning along with PG&E errors. It doesn't mean that shutting down the grid was a bad idea.
All critical government areas needed advance warning; as well as hospitals and nursing homes.
Warning should have gone out on the airways and cable; maybe warning sirens? Their emergency generating systems should have been in place before a planned shut down. A safe community shelter should also have been set up; and major efforts made to identify those who were at home and helpless to contend with the blackout on their own, and transport them to safety.
It means: California's regions are going to have to convene public meetings and develop emergency plans. Because - at this point, it looks as if shutting down the power may be necessary in dire conditions.
Whether PG&E survives or becomes a government or public private entity, a hard look at costs and planning must to be done. There are going to be expensive changes. But while there may be savings in going public, or in restraining profit taking, the residents - the tax and/ or rate payers are going to be footing a large bill.
2
If this is what the privatization of essential utilities will look like in the future of climate change, I say it may be time for our government to start to take cover essential infrastructure again. At least they won’t be worried about their bottom line or their shareholder profits and be paying CEOs billions in salaries. This is what happens when you put the bulk of profits towards shareholders rather than the modernization of infrastructure and services to the people.
The people at the top are destroying our nation with greed.
20
Too big to manage efficiently. Our structure is all wrong for the 21st century. With renewables, lots of local power generating areas feeding into a main grid could be managed more efficiently than centralized power feeding distant areas. Cannot do anything now, but our grid is antiquated. We need to rethink the whole thing from end to end.
8
The assumption here is that if these lines were properly maintained there would be no or minimal danger of them causing a fire.
1. What does the regulation say about maintenance of this Utility?
As I was taught they collect a dedicated amount on each bill to do that necessary maintenance. What did they do with this money?
2. What was PG&E's maintenance plan? Did they follow it?
Reports after the San Bruno explosion said they did not do what they claimed to have done in filed paperwork. What was done to make sure they got this problem fixed once that was known?
2
A subtle message to California PG&E customers: "You have two choices. Either live in the dark until the wildfire risk abates or give us immunity from liability if we continue electrifying you during dangerous times."
3
@Dayton D. Dog
You realize that the utility acted according to a plan approved by the Public Utiliites Commission?
@Dayton D. Dog Yup, and immunity makes far more sense than the bankrupting lottery of litigation by a subset of those with fire losses. Either the Times or the Post just reported that 70,000 potential claimants from the most costly of recent fires (Santa Rosa) aren’t even filing claims in the bankruptcy.
@Sendero Caribe
You realize the public utilities commission let them get away without doing the maintenance that is the cause of this problem?
It's as if you think that title alone makes them the responsible party here. But like the crooks who "supervised" the building of the bay bridge, they are corrupt and or industry hacks who have no intention of using their authority to make PG&E spend the money it should on maintenance and whatever else it should spend it on.
1
Can't the state subsidize homes/businesses getting off the grid, with rooftop solar and batteries and get to the point where they can just remove power lines altogether? I do not know if that is possible...but it seems a lot more sustainable and safer. Also, municipal utilities are great. Basic services should not be provided by privatized for-profit companies.
5
Get used to it, the future generations will marvel at the ability of their predecessors to have running water, sewer, and electricity non stop and to travel over large distances as they please. The future will be darker, and not just for lack of electricity.
3
I live in the Mountains above Santa Cruz at the very southern end of the shut off area. Conditions were NOT anywhere near being a fire hazard ...temperature was in the low 70's and and there was no breeze...nary a leaf on nary a tree in our yard or our neighborhood was even moving.
Make no mistake about it...this was a POLITICAL power outage, with PG&E trying to squirm out of responsibility for years of neglect while they funneled profits to there executives and their investors. We were punished because they had to pay damages for their inept operation over the last years.
Up here in the Santa Cruz Mountains, we generally lose our power during big storms that hit our area. There IS a storm brewing now, a POLITICAL storm and one of their own making. I have a few things to say to my State Representatives and our public utilities commission...and none of them are good.
30
@Steve Dumford Do you think weather prediction is an exact science? There was a very large low pressure system moving into the Great Basin (Rockies to Sierras.). It was certain to generate a large high wind event, and it did. Those winds could easily have shifted 50-100 miles south, putting Santa Cruz in their path. What would you be saying now if you’d been burned out then?
“PGE should have preemptively shut down the power!”
Weather forecasting is never an exact science. Yet we were reading the weather reports and the reporting for our community was exactly correct. There was no wind, nor high temperatures, nor was there any wind predicted in our region. Yet the power was still turned off. I would love to know which forecasts PG&E were looking at because all forecasts we could see by government agencies and local universities showed no threat of wind in our region.
1
@LF
You expect no advance planning, just check the latest weather report and decide where to turn off power? PGE planning missed some things, but they dealt with the situation as best they could.
They had been posting about the possibility for nearly a week-- there was lots of notice. Anyone saying differently, they simply didn't want to believe that it could happen!
We lost power just after midnight on Wednesday morning. As of Tuesday, afternoon we had ice, and batteries/lights. We have propane stove top and solar-assist hot water. We also were fortunate that nearby town has their own power utility (REU) so they were energized. I was able to top off petrol tank and get coffee that was mandatory.
I did order a french press coffee maker and powerful camp light that is rechargeable to have NEXT TIME, as I am sure "Public Safety Power Shurdown" will happen again.
2
doesn't change the fact that the reason for these power outages are a PG&E made problem by neglecting to update their systems and keep the lines free from brush and branches for decades. they didn't want to spend money to put lines in the ground and then decided to stop line maintenance as well laying of thousands of their line workers in the mid 90s. they are criminals that have created a power grid so old and decrepit that no outside company is willing to come in as it would mean many billions of dollars to be instead
invested to make up for 30 years of total neglect
4
Here's how it played out for many of us. A few days before the power out, we got a call that there might be a power outage due to high winds. We looked at the weather forecast, no predictions of high winds from any reliable sources. Then we were told the power would for sure go out Tuesday during the day. We got various times for the shut off. Still no predictions of wind. Then the power got turned off Wednesday, there was still no wind. The power stayed off for more than 24 hours... No wind the entire time. It seemed to us all along that PG&E was either entirely ignorant of how weather forecasting works or were purposefully turning off more people's power than was ever necessary.
PG&E had a valid reason to shut off power throughout the state. . I live next to Paradise so around here we agree with the principle of avoiding fires. BUT PG&E does not want to be sued again.
The warning system of pending power outages was very vague. "PG&E may shut off power. It could be for up to a week or more. Have a plan.” My plan to go 80 miles away -- bu had no idea in advance that was still within the vast 'possible outage' area. I use medical equipment needs power. My equipment is not optional. There were no identifiable locations named in advance to find a 'public' generator. I have no idea what immobile patients did.
I got a quote for a home generator. The contractor suggested two choices—at $13,000 or $16,000. I could find much cheaper ones. I am 70 years old and in no so great health, and have never been mechanically skilled. But electrical contractors are busy just lately.
PG&Es website kept crashing. The outage maps were difficult to read in any detail before the planned outage(s). The interactive ‘search for your address’ maps were not up until the second day of the planned outages. The police department and my doctor had no suggestions in advance.
The latest PG&E bankruptcy promises that they will come out whole on the other side of the case. There are felony and civil tort rulings. The senior execs should be personally liable for the bad acts, and pay a penalty not funded by the company.
I am still scared.
5
Same problem we've had since Reagan: money is being redirected into the pockets of a few, executives and shareholders, rather than being reinvested into updating infrastructure systems. Greed is killing this country. Until we undo trickle-down economics, nothing is going to change.
12
‘This did not go well’....yeah, understatement of the year!
Total chaos: 24 hour advance notice, thousands of households scrambling to buy ice, batteries, gasoline, generators, food and water...the elderly living alone left to fend for themselves. Fire danger actually increased a hundred-fold with the number of people lighting candles and hearth fires.
PG&E has failed miserably...yet they always seem to find the cash to line the pockets of their millionaire CEOs and stockholders. What a travesty!
Bottom line: Public Utilities should never be privatized. It’s long past time for the state to seize control of PG&E and it’s assets. Even California could do a better job than the current crop of racketeers running that show.
4
This isn't an issue in Ohio. Housing is cheap, too. Come on Californians!
2
And the view of the ocean ( don't tell them it's Lake Erie) is great!
1
In hindsight everything is 20/20. Right now, in my opinion, people are angry and that’s fine. But what if they haven’t cut off power and we had another fire like Paradise?
I commend PG&E for thinking first on preventing disastrous fires that kill and destroy with speed and ferocity. Things didn’t go as planned. Equipment is old and don’t operate to specification any longer. All that is true, but it takes time to change all that. Next year PG&E should do better, and the year after it should do even better. That’s when people will have all the right to criticize.
3
It's amazing there was no looting, rioting, mayhem, no runs on gas stations and stores. No major loss of life and property. And the power was restored mostly successfully. Definitely unprecedented and clearly a success. Looking forward to the next time!
2
Like Bill Maher said Friday night, people used candles for lighting! How dumb is PG&E?
2
The economy of California is the largest in the United States, boasting a $3.018 trillion gross state product as of 2018. As a sovereign nation (2018), California would rank as the world's fifth largest economy, ahead of India and behind Germany.
Whatever is going on out there, it seems their electrical infrastructure is like third world.
And try raking the forest, as the president suggested
2
The California Public Utilities Commission and their relation to PG&E is a case study in regulatory capture. It's time PG&E start being held accountable.
4
Hey so if high winds are the problem why don't they just put the wiring underground.
4
@Clyde
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
2
That sounds great; however, it would be nearly impossible to fund that.
2
because they spend every dime too pay dividends to investors and bonuses to executives. even today while under bankruptcy protection. they are criminals that know they can get away with murder, and I mean that literally.
2
After 9/11, it seemed obvious that IF the terrorist threat were real, utilities such as water and power systems should be guarded to prevent mass poisonings, blackouts, etc. They weren't. I knew then that the concept of "homeland security," borrowed from the Nazis who used the term to justify their genocide and conquest for the betterment of the Heimat--homeland--was a crock to be exploited to make Americans docile and afraid and remove scrutiny from a war of choice brought against a nation that had NOTHING to do with 9/11.
I can only wonder who the real owners of PG&E are, since its largest shareholders are LLCs, entities used to hide the ownership of things sometimes bought by "dirty" money (like largely empty Manhattan super-luxury apartments).
Could the "real" owners be Putin's buddies, intent on destroying America and the Western Alliance from within as long-term revenge for losing the Cold War? Could it be their cat's paw Trump getting his revenge on a California whose GNP is far more than Russia's but whose liberalism piques his irrational ire?
Or is it simple greed?
3
@Carl Ian Schwartz
It's economically impossible to "guard" over the more than 100,000 miles of distribution lines and almost 20,000 miles of transmission lines PG&E is responsible for. That task makes "the wall" look cheap and easy.
Although, security has been stepped up in both water and power systems, it will never be 100%.
Consider, for example, that someone with access to most "city water" connections can, with just a little bit of equipment and ingenuity and (this is the hard part) a good supply of potent poison, back-feed poison into the water supply to poison "down stream" customers.
Fortunately, the hard part is getting enough poison - esp. one that can infect a lot of people and doom them to death before anyone notices - such as an alpha emitter like Polonium-210.
I'm glad no major fires broke out in Northern California due to these high winds. I'm sure they can improve their processes, but who knows what might have happened had they not turned off the power.
2
you mean what would have happened if their transistors and power lines weren't 75 plus years old for the most part!? we wouldn't have seen any fires and gas line explosions. that's what would have happened
4
@hartmut What difference does that make in this year’s fire season? None.
1
Very poor reporting; power was turned off in parts of the North Bay by noon Wednesday; our power on the coast went off 11 pm that day and back on by 6 pm Thursday. Preventing wildfires is important but a system that relies on turning off power to 2.4 million people to accomplish that is unacceptable. This is Third World functioning.
5
This is a techniocal problem with a technical solution. Unfortunately it is not cheap. California needs to require new houses to be 50 feet clear of trees and have fireproof roofs, and bury power lines.
2
Just do what most other countries seem to manage with ease: Put the power lines underground.
1
Don’t confuse distribution power line in cities with high voltage transmission lines out in the middle of nowhere. Nobody, nowhere in the world buries high voltage transmission lines.
1
@BWCA
This is not exactly true - burying high voltage transmission lines is possible at a cost of about $5 million per mile. Consequently, less than a percent of high voltage transmission lines are buried, but the number is not zero, either.
Why don’t they have a better delivery system than poles and wires. Couldn’t they bury lines?
1
Very costly to bury 13,800 volt transmission lines.
Our area south of Santa Rosa was without power for 36 hours. The winds never blew more than 15 MPH. This whole event was absurd.
2
Who from PG&E management should be seriously fined or tried for their crimes?
2
the whole executive level should be held responsible with fines and incarceration. that would at least stop the criminal behavior at the top.
1
the governor
"“We were not prepared to manage the operational event.”
Private industry run amuck. Why would you undertake an event of this magnitude, killing those who rely on medical devices, if you weren't prepared to manage it. What a mess.
4
And Trump wants to get more dirty cars on California’s roads!
2
Could this shutdown be the reason why--except for my smartphone--I have been unable to log on to YouTube in recent days (said website being based in Northern California)?
unlikely. living in San Jose, our power wasn't cut and all websites were up and running.
The electric grid wasn’t designed to be shut down. It’s not a light switch in your house that you can simply flip on and off without consequence.
If you want the power to remain in you indemnify the company when it follows the rules. Inverse condemnation in California is the reason they must turn off the power because even when the utilities follow the rules they can be sued.
When a fire starts no matter who starts it in California the utilities are always blamed by lawyers no matter the fault. All they have to do is show that an electric facility was involved in some way no matter of it was the cause.
1
what do you mean by following the rules? tree trimming and equipment updates have been neglected since the company downsized their line workers by thousands in the mid 90's. transistors and wiring are outdated. one of the PG&E fires caused last summer was caused by a power line that was 93 years old. The gas lines that caused the death if 8 a few years back caused by old corroded gas lines. so no PG@E has been run like a rogue criminal Enterprise. the executive level should have been imprisoned, that wouldn't make us safer immediately but send a message to PG&E leadership that you can't commit murder in order to write bigger checks to executives and investors.
1
Almost all of the fire risk related to PG&E is the result of power lines in the air, going through forests, very dry forests. From May to October, we get almost no rain.
Virtually all new developments have power lines underground, even in earthquake prone areas. The exception is our tinder dry rural areas. PG&E is mandated to provide cheap power to pretty much anywhere.
Regardless of PG&Es competence or lack thereof, our electrical grid fires are caused by our demand for cheap power. PG&E is heavily regulated by the Public Utility Commission, which has been less interested in safety and more interested in price.
As the Briceburg Fire approaches containment, the fire crews and bulldozers are heading back down the hill. We let people build homes in the middle of fire-prone areas and then spend billions to defend those structures.
How about no new construction without underground utilities? "We can't do that - it's too expensive!" Either way, we are paying.
2
I live in a mostly rural Northern California county. We received conflicting information all day Tuesday. Every couple of hours the PSAs changed, power's going off, nope, we're not going to be effected, the black out will last three days, nope, be prepared for five days in the dark. The last oscillations were literally a couple of hours before the blackout began during the night. There was way too little time to prepare, especially in the face of a projected five day outage. No one seemed to know what was happening, and if anyone did, they weren't communicating effectively. In the end, we were turned back on Thursday night, but by that time many schools and business were sufficiently disrupted to close until Friday.
I understand the need to prevent wildfires. Every Californian does, but while part of the fire danger is geography and weather related, it's also true that PG&E has neglected its infrastructure. They don't do enough line maintenance or tree and brush cutting, and they need to bury transmission lines.
6
Combine investor-ownership and a national government devoted to spending all its money blowing things up in other countries rather than building things up in our country and you see this easily-anticipated 'emergency'. Is an event an 'emergency' or an 'accident' if it is known to be in the cards? I wouldn't blame regulators much either as they were likely captured. The villains here are the predators err I mean the "investors" and their corruptionists err I mean lawyers and lobbyists.
4
this is the failure of state government
Many comments about PG&E being investor-owned, as though that were the problem. It's as regulated utility, which means shareholders get a regulated return. It also means that its operational performance is subject to scrutiny. So where is the article about regulatory competence?
New Jersey had the same issue regarding maintenance of way (with the concern centered on storm-related damage). One major utility had consistently trimmed trees; the other major utility hadn't. Storms happen. So when Irene and Sandy hit, the customer experience was predictably different.
Regardless, as long as we live in a society that prizes features above robustness and resilience, we will see this sort of mismanagement.
3
1. Look at this as practice for a magnitude 7 or greater earthquake in California (93% chance during the next 24 years.) Will weeks without power be the utilities’ fault then?
2. The people demand electricity, utilities supply it. Their “negligence” in wind/fire events pales by comparison to our responsibility for creating that demand.
3. Utilities require capital to make improvements to their systems. That capital comes from investors in their for-profit parents. Without capital utilities cannot improve infrastructure as many here demand. Historically the trade-off has been to attract investors with a lower but stable rate of return that reduces investor risk and thus can compete with potentially high return companies, e.g. Amazon.
4. The regulated return on investment model only works on the assumption of a fairly steady-state set of operating risks. It does not work in the face of major disasters that likely bankrupt the parent company and wipe out investors. The wipe-out, I might add, comes largely from my fellow plaintiffs’ lawyers.
5. Whatever PGE’s management failings, what real choice does it have now except power cuts? We’ve had massive fires due to power lines for the past five years or so. Should PGE just ignore the risk that power lines will cause another?
We demand electricity. Ultimately the fault lies in ourselves.
1
The State should run the utilities not the Amazon of electricity and the 'markets'.
2
@notPge That’s a political choice, not a solution to the problem. If the state owned the power distribution system over the last five years would any major fire been avoided? If funding for long-term capital aimprovements were in the hands of politicians with competing priorities would utilities be adequately and consistently funded? I doubt it. If the notoriously stingy and immensely bureaucratic Public Utilities Commision ran utilities would wildfires be avoided? Give me a break.
California has to consider putting all of the power lines underground, especially in vulnerable areas of the state. Most power lines in Germany are underground.
It is a very expensive project, but how expensive is it to rebuild homes and lives? How expensive is it to have no power for days on end, for restaurants to lose food and customers, for people to have to scramble to keep their lives afloat? Let’s be proactive and build a better electrical infrastructure. Also, let’s break PG$E up! Electric power should be owned by the people, not a giant corporation.
4
You are confusing distribution and transmission lines. CA does bury many local distribution lines. However, the service territory of PG&E just can't be compared to Germany. There are many more remote and mountainous areas and very challenging terrain. Electric rates are already outrageous... burying every single line will make them even worse.
I am not defending PG&E (I interned at the CA state regulator), but it is important to be clear about the issues at hand. For years, PG&E did not have a culture that promoted safety (c.f. San Bruno explosion). This is the natural result.
Some of us are accustomed to frequent power outages and have learned to follow the scout motto: "Be Prepared." Our outages range in duration from a few hours to a few days. We keep a few gallon jugs of sterile drinking water in the pantry. We also keep a dozen rinsed out milk jugs filled with water for toilet flushing and when we know in advance that an outage is likely we fill the bathtub and laundry tub. We can get along comfortably for 24 hours with a few candles and by the light of a couple mini LED camping lanterns. We do NOT open the freezer door. We are strategic about opening the refrigerator. Our house is well insulated so during below-zero weather we don't need an extra quilt on the bed until the second night. When we get tired of tuna packets and PB&J we can cook outdoors on the trusty old charcoal grill.
On the other hand, it seems criminal that all nursing homes don't have backup generators. Mom lives in a nursing home with very reliable electricity but one day when I visited the lights were dim and their generator was operating because a road construction crew had cut an underground line.
1
Regulations or not, it long past time that utilities in most locations be placed underground. It's also very long past the time that utility companies operate as 'public utilities', rather than profit making entities. If that had been the case, PG&E might not be facing $30 billion in litigation. Unfortunately, the make-profit-at-any-cost model that has consumed the US since ~1980, has broken down (predictably so), and it must be replaced. The people of this country also must rethink how taxes are levied, collected, and spent. Americans love to whine about being overtaxed but in truth we aren't really; the problem is that individual taxpayers receive very little benefit, direct or indirect, from taxes paid. That too must change. All Americans might consider the sources of the hate we seem to enjoy hurling at each other. it doesn't seem to come from within us but is promoted by certain media entities, the political parties, and individuals (i.e., Yrump) whose interests improve with increase levels of vituperation.
1
An old saying I use all the time comes to mind. "People don't plan to fail, they fail to plan"
1
Do you know what is supposed to happen to a business that fails at this scale? It's supposed to go out of business. No company should be able to survive by operating (or rather stopping operations) like this. What is propping up such a poorly run company? There has to be corruption involved somewhere and it needs to be removed.
2
PG&E has never enjoyed a good reputation. I remember decades ago they wanted to build an atomic reactor over an active earthquake fault line. Fortunately, public opinion stopped it.
1
@Molly K. Asa result of which they are still dependent on fossil fuel causing global warming and cannot afford to bury their power lines. The public can't stop modernization and then complain about obsolecense.
@Dan W, nuclear power is not “modernization”, its an environmental travesty.
this a failure of state regulations and enforcement, over power utilities, but also over water management, and building construction
As a result California lacks reliable water, reliable power, and reliably safe construction.
The state legislators have enacted cutting edge building laws, in the form of building codes, supposedly passed to protect the public, but provides no oversight over any of the 500 code enforcement agencies. Like PG&E they all ‘self-police.’
There are no state building code compliance audits, no oversight of utilities, and no state-wide water management legislation that includes enforcement.
California has turned into a third world state.
Perhaps someone can explain why one utility provides for so many and over such a large area. It seems they are overextended, over reached and under resourced. For my front range home I have Poudre Vally REA and for my Fraser/Winter Park home I have Mountain Parks Electric. We in Colorado have very bad storms and wind and never had to contend with wildfires started by an electric company's structure failing in wind. Why does one company control so much?
10
@Larimer lady Agreed! In Fort Collins the power lines are almost all underground, too. Some commenters are posting that burying power lines is expensive...but surely no more expensive than the billions of dollars in liability this CA utility now faces.
Profit G&E. Profit is what is wrong here. No wonder they caused wildfires, don't consider their clients and don't have adequate software. They must be taken over by California.
The recent shutdown was not done to protect the public from wildfires; it was done to protect the company from suits.
13
Anything connected to PG&E is a mess, as longtime customers know. But cities in Northern California are also to blame for doing virtually nothing during the shutdown. And our governor complains, but did little else.
Rich people have generators; what about everyone else? That’s a lot of fresh food to toss. And poor people — yes, there are poor people in the ultra-wealthy Bay Area and other places in the state — are disproportionally affected. Before the utility shuts off power in the future, municipalities must set up shelters where regular citizens can power up supplies and get food.
7
Maybe don’t start collecting profits to distribute to executives and shareholders until investments necessary to supply the contracted services are made.
17
Amid Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s bankruptcy and wildfire safety woes, the utility’s incoming chief executive officer Bill Johnson will receive an annual base salary of $2.5 million for a three-year contract, the company said. alignment makes $50 an hour or as much as $120,000 a year
5
I spent two days getting texts messages from PG&E that my electricity was going out. Since I have no way to charge my phone without electricity and it is the only source of information in a blackout, I hurriedly ordered what I thought was the right battery charger from Amazon which arrived the next day .....it was way off.....$32 down the drain. I quickly ordered another one that was guaranteed to work....did not ....more money down the drain. Now that things have calmed down....I will go to a store to by one....but the outside light is horrible and can't read with the flashlights so I will spend money on better lighting equipment.....now people are saying we should have all the latest equipment to watch Netflix on all kinds of devices....... since we should expect no electricity for a week or more.....don't want to eat just sandwiches......so I will spend money on cooked food brought in......my point of all this rambling....this is costing Californians a lot of money and the poor and elderly are particularly burdened......they are reminded that if they depend on electricity for health.....up to them to buy expensive equipment if they want to live. And forget PG&E....had a 12 hour blackout due to equipment problems in August.....in the past these would have been fixed within 2 hours....they couldn't even get the right info to us about what was going on for 6 hours....and then they only promised wake-up calls for the next morning.
12
As I live in the East Bay, I feel I can comment - ppl here do not need constant ‘connectivity’ unless you are in a state of fragile health, need meds refrigerated or depend on electronic med devices. Someone should ‘invent’/ creare a small, battery- powered cooler, just for meds. And ppl who need to stay cool, go to a library, or nearby hospital/clinic. If you cannot walk/drive/take public transport, maybe paratransit could help. Others, just deal- it isn’t the end of the world if you cannot watch Netflix.
1
We need to start putting all electric transmission lines under ground — and not only in California. Winds will only intensify as our planet heats up.
12
PGE should be shut down, replaced by a consortium that can mitigate and clean up PGE’s mess. The customers are taking it in the underwear while the utility makes payroll and then some while in bankruptcy. This blanket power shutdown without warning disallowed any prep by their customers and it probably killed some of them.
9
It's always a bad idea to have investor-owned public utilities. They're more concerned about shareholders' returns than creating a safe infrastructure for the public. PG&E could have invested into making its line safe but they chose otherwise. Electricity in Sacramento wasn't turned off because that city has a publicly-owned electrical utility, SMUD. It's time for the State of California to take over PG&E.
850
@LiquidLight
AMEN!
27
@LiquidLight
As a 50-year Californian, I agree! How about a referendum?
28
@LiquidLight I lived in Sacto. SMUD’s service are is not particularly at risk for wildfires. It’s sure nice to be in the Central Valley away from serious wildfire risk.
The only large Central Valley fire I recall in recent years was in Redding, caused by sparks when a trailer lost a when and the axle dragged along the road. And then driven by high winds into fire-prone hills 25 or more miles west of the Valley.
13
As much as I care about PGE’s foibles in CA, our democracy is burning to the ground. None of these stories deserve top billing.
3
When I moved to Cal. it was still a Golden State, now its a 3rd world State. Far too many people from around the world move there looking for a dream...but don't contribute anything. Glad to have gotten out. Lived in the Bay Area, Oakland-Alameda, then Pasadena...It was all good then. Now glad I left. Adios, adios, adios....California!
11
In this particular subject you think that the problem is not contributing foreigners instead of a for profit company that doesn’t improve its infrastructure... interesting takeaway from the story, says a lot about you.
1
Bill Johnson makes $2.5 million a year base pay and was also given $6.5 million in signing bonuses/equity awards this summer.
Not a good start, Bill.
https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/04/16/new-pge-ceo-salary-double-geisha-williams.html
10
Let’s see: two stories leading the news on this site on this topic, both saying the blackouts included the “outskirts of Silicon Valley.” San Jose is not the outskirts, it’s in Silicon Valley, as in ground zero. Just because the MSM based in NY makes decisions i.e., not editing reporters’ stories correctly, doesn’t mean this fake news is true. Come on NYtimes, you have an obligation to attempt to not phone it in or assume the definition of Silicon Valley is now simply your favorite unicorn of the day.
5
Pge sucks. The warsaw pact has better utilities.
4
Gee ...maybe they lost power , or something .
Idiotic move how dare you cause such chaos just because you can. Management should be held accountable. Outrageous!
5
Reflecting on all this, trying to evaluate and separate exaggeration out, it seems one thing emerges in some of the more thoughtful comments. I hope others noticed them too, there were at least two here in the higher "picks".
Smaller utilities have done better, where local people have banded together to solve problems.
That's the kind of "socialism" that works, folks!
Fact is, local resources can be more efficiently used when there is some human scale and human consequences factored in.
6
@Susan Anderson: Enjoyed your comment, Susan. However, as a customer of a "rural electric cooperative" I'd like to add a bit to the conversation: ironically about 4 a.m. this morning we had yet another power outage--don't know how long it lasted--power back on by 7:30 a.m. On average we (the coop serves several 1,000s of rural families) have outages about five times/year--some lasting more than six hours, one for two days--I would say averaging 2 hours overall. Although the coop itself is run by a local board, it gets its power from a much larger consortium of electric providers coming from out of the state of New Mexico--a large energy company serving several energy cooperatives. If something on the "grid" in or out of state goes wrong, we have an outage. In other words, even though people think of "cooperatives" as independent or local, the reality is that it's the huge providers of electricity (large corporate money-making companies) who own the rights to utility distribution to small coops. Nothing is unconnected (pun intended) in electrical utilities from huge, profit-driven concerns anymore. As far as I can tell, living off-grid is the only way to be free of that influence.
1
@Cate
Thanks! I was particularly thinking of this comment, which I had just located. Difficult but not impossible, and "it takes a village to raise a child" kind of stuff. Thanks for adding your story. The forces arranged against positive action are enormous!
PA Fox Island 3h ago https://nyti.ms/2B7VNDu#permid=103064568
"We are served by a small, mutual electric company in a largely rural area outside of Seattle. When we began having frequent power failures during wind, snow and ice storms, our utility took stock of the situation and set a goal to be in the top 10% of reliability nationally. Within ten years we made it. This is is an area where power lines cross dense forests. It takes determination and a willingness to objectively analyze the issues, and be willing to spend the money to fix them. We now have reliable power when neighboring communities served by large, for profit companies do not. When we do have one of the rare power outages, they are brief and we have text messaging that pinpoints outages by individual service. By the way, we have one of the lowest electricity rates in the country."
1
I suspect prior PG&E management was derelict in carrying out the utility's responsibility to keep the areas around its transmission lines clear in rural areas. That said, we probably just got a loud and clear argument in favor of decentralizing more of the grid.
Newer buildings should be encouraged, through tax breaks and whatever other incentives can be dreamed up, to generate at least some of their own power via solar and wind. Electrical storage should be part of newer buildings' construction, too. Rural areas where infrastructure is, alas, most likely to be compromised in emergencies (wildfires, earthquakes, etc.) can't be solely dependent on power delivered from hundreds of miles away.
An expensive proposal? Probably. Less expensive than thousands of families and businesses having to throw out spoiled perishables? Maybe. Worth it to keep oxygen machines running? I'd say so.
Climate change mitigation and adaptation will be expensive but that's the price we must pay for shortsighted policies (hello, Mr. Reagan and his spiritual successors) and inattention to long-term maintenance.
6
Excellent points, thank you!
1
In 2018 PG&E donated over $200,000 to the campaign of Gov. Newsom. Wealthy powerful lobbyists and a corrupt CPUC make sure PG&E stays in business matter what. Also all the money PG&E spends on falsifying its image by expensive ad campaigns after each horrendous fire or explosion.
Add to that the fact they have routinely deleted documents and lied in court repeatedly.
The innocent people who have died because of PG&E profit over human life business model needs to be made etched in Americans minds as the true victims in all of this. Not to mention elderly, the sick, businesses etc who have suffered.
26
And for this its executives get incomes 20 times what a lineman is paid?
6
Spending our vacation i California this year I was fortunelatly enough to discuss US network infrastructure with a Califorrnian Contractor in SF after surprisingly observing that you keep most of your network overground. My big question is why dont you build your infrastructure underground. His reply was that there was a jungle of regulations that made this difficult. Look to Europe; where it is getting harder and harder to see overhead power distribution/ supply. Buried solutions have no bushfire hazard, the expected lifetime is higher and there are limited possibilities for terrorist acts.
7
They would need to spend money to do that and the shareholders wouldn’t like that. Where is the oversight?
3
Those who invest in companies that are badly run or dishonest should lose their investments. These investors would then stop spending so much time and money monitoring earnings estimates and other financial factors, and instead develop ways to assess company competence and honesty. Firms that give financial and investment advice would have to learn to assess competence and honesty, or find sources of reliable competence and honesty assessments. The numbers they now concern themselves with would become minor parts of their new concerns, and the way they now operate would be seen as absurd exercises in mutual enrichment.
2
Articles in the media have partly captured the disruption and the mess caused by PGE’s shutoff - primarily caused by its inability/ unwillingness to maintain its power lines. But they and our politicians seem to have accepted the premise that they are necessary. It would be useful for the media to probe whether there are alternative solutions to this problem since such shut offs are more typical of a third world country than of a first world economy. Just the economic cost of this one event has been estimated as 2 billion besides the other problems ( eg UC Berkeley was shut down) and we are promised more such events.
For example, solutions such as better maintenance of power lines ( what does that mean), under grounding cables in vulnerable areas ( while expensive each shutdown also has a cost) and the encouragement using subsidies of large scale deployment of residential solar + batteries ( also for businesses).
While shut offs may still be necessary, they should be minimized.
2
There is a mobile mapping company that PG&E has contracted with that is currently driving throughout the service areas (and has been for months) using 3D Lidar to identify hazards to the power lines within 4 and 12 ft. I am surprised no articles are discussing this.
4
Side note: traffic roundabouts work just fine during power outages.
4
"Last year, a Northern California man in PG&E’s electrical service territory ended up having his electricity cut off during a 42-hour period due to fire risks in his area. The man’s Powerwall 2 battery was able to keep the lights on for the entire duration of the outage. By the time PG&E resumed service almost two days later, the Powerwall 2 battery still had 9% charge remaining."
Maybe Elon Musk should take over the running of PG&E.
4
Those of us living in the Bay Area, were inundated a year ago by a steady and persistent drumbeat from the SF Chronicle lambasting PG&E for not, as San Diego Gas and Electric had begun doing: shutting off the electricity when high winds were forecast. The message was clear at the time–PG&E needed to shut off the power.
It is exceedingly hypocritical, now that the Chronicle has succeeded in pressuring PG&E to do exactly that, to then criticize them for doing precisely what they had regularly and forcefully pressured them to do a year ago. But they are.
Certainly the shutdown was not implemented well. Yet given the disastrous results from last year’s fires, one cannot imagine PG&E doing anything else. It is much easier, naturally, to find fault from the sidelines. Yet in fairness it must be said that PG&E clearly laid out the exact issues that played out this year as reasons for not taking the step a year ago.
Since PG&E is an investor owned public utility rather than one run by the government, they have predictably been pilloried for allegedly putting profits before public safety. Perhaps they have. Nonetheless, despite the costs associated with shutting the power off, as well as PG&E’s ham-handed implementation of it, shutting the power off was a reasonable decision. As Governor Gavin Newsom observed two days ago, it will take some time to harden the system to prevent wind damage, which means future shutdowns are likely. We’re all going to have to deal with it for now.
5
You give the media, particularly the SF Chronicle, way too much credit. These are not the power brokers that got us into this situation. It’s cities, counties and the state itself.
1
I live in Northern California. One of PG&E’s biggest problems (apart from inept management) is that the state enables it.
The company has never had to face the consequences of its negligence. The San Bruno gas explosion (and others), the fires... PG&E has consistently put profits over basic safety requirements. And the state government enables negligence by to allowing PG&E to pass settlement costs onto its victims by increasing rates.
Not to mention that the CEO presiding over PG&E in 2018 made $11 million in 2017, presumably for her excellent leadership.
I live in a city that generates its own power. We don’t have the constant power losses that I remember from my days living elsewhere. Our electricity is cheaper and comes from mostly clean sources. Windy days aren’t a threat to our safety. And somehow, our power lines don’t spark either (the cause of the fire in Paradise).
PG&E really needs to be broken up or taken over or...something needs to change. The current model simply doesn’t work.
872
@Valerie
There's no way for me to know for sure, but when a state government consistently supports and compensates a private company despite gross incompetence, it's usually because people are being bribed in the state government to turn a blind eye and pony up. In America we call these bribes "Campaign Contributions" by "Donors". Follow the money....
90
Okay, my bad. She made $8.6 million in 2017 and got a $2.6 million resignation bonus (oops, “severance pay”) when she left in disgrace.
I actually think that’s worse.
71
@Valerie
Except that the state has made it very clear that PG&E is liable for fires started due to power line it owns falling.
PG&E is under liability pressure to the tune of 30+ billion dollars as a result of fire related death and property damage... and the state has made no efforts to shield PG&E in any way here.
Further.. a court this week granted plaintifs seeking compensation from PG&E for fire damage and death permission to submit their own proposal for reorganization of PG&E through it's bankruptcy procedings.
As for executive compensation angst... there are far worse companies out there having a far worse impact on the public that are drawing much larger compensation and who have voting control strangleholds over their corporation and are under absolutely ZERO regulatory oversight by federal or state governments. Cough Cough... FACEBOOK, just to name one.
38
What does this say about our collective capacity to handle the upheaval that the climate crisis will create? A day or two without electrical power will be seen as a walk in the park when we finally get serious about the issue.
7
So not only is PG&E cheap, and unwilling to spend the money needed to keep its system safe, but it’s inept as well. That is not a combination that inspires confidence.
3
PG&E customer here, 3x Fire evacuee here. California just has to bury the power lines. A nightmare utility works project, but better than battling these monster blazes and these ridiculous power outages that will leave people even more flat-footed when fires occur due to equipment sparks, lightning or improperly extinguished campfires (reasons other than power equip failure).
376
@Scs
Have any plans been proposed to bury the the high voltage lines that carry power over long distances?
8
Even with underground cables there would need to be above ground junction boxes to provide termination and isolation points throughout the circuit. These points aid in trouble shooting cable as well.
I’m not sure the people in favor of putting everything underground fully understand the magnitude of work associated with that or the effect it would have on the landscape/forest areas.
35
@Scs
A better approach would be to run a lot more redundancy in its transmission grids.. such that turning off some, can be mitigated by re-routing and less impact to customers.
This is however very expensive.. though not as expensive as putting these lines underground (there are more then 18,000 miles of high voltage transmission lines in the PG&E network.. which in turn feeds more then 120,000 miles of local distribution lines (many of which are already underground). It is extremely expensive to take a tower line in the remote mountains of California and try to bury it.... because it is similar to having to blow a tunnel out of granite for a rail line or a water distribution conduit.
26
Would like to see more comparisons here. Edison shut off in So. Cal. What did DWP (*publicly owned*) do in L.A.? There are more models to compare, and more data to mine to help us all who live on the edge of wildfire... and earthquake ... and, and, and.
2
One word: Decentralization. Jeez.
Okay, two.
2
Reminder that the P G & E "scandal" of 2000 was orchestrated by Bush crony Ken Lay at Enron, and was part of a two prong strategy to extort Californians and scapegoat Grey Davis, leading to the worst episode in California history - the governorship of the Nanny-nator
Sometimes it makes sense to dig a little deeper into an issue before getting out the pitchforks ....
4
What kind of engineering, technological, management and business 'genius' is behind P G & E?
3
So instead of maintaining their lines properly, they shut down service as a preventative measure and they can’t even get that right?
I smell a bigly rate increase coming....
3
$0, are the ratepayer$ Sufficiently $oftened-up for that inevitable increa$e?
Time will tell - but they/CPUC need to claw back all tho$e bonu$e$ paid in lieu of $afety infra$tructure fir$t.
Abysmally poor service, corporate governance and regulatory oversight, across many decades of mismanagement.
3
Please consider coming to our state for a new, uncomplicated, safe and affordable lifestyle. We need people of all persuasions and creeds and colors to visit and see what Iowa has to offer. We have jobs of all types that go unfilled. Des Moines has grown as a center of the arts as well. We are only hours away from Kansas City, Minneapolis and Chicago. You just need a basement for an occasional tornado and a snow shovel for the predictable winter. Did I say great schools? I wish you all well. https://livability.com/topics/make-your-move/why-everyone-is-moving-back-to-iowa-and-you-might-want-to-join-them
3
This is irresponsible and incomplete reporting. In Southern California, there is currently a raging widlfire with 100,000 people evacuated and major property damage. In Northern California during the last two years, there have been terribly destructive and deadly wildfires. Why is the NYTimes joining the chorus of those criticizing PGE for doing the right thing? As far as I am concerned, as there is no wildfire in PGE service area, it appears this went great.
148
@Sean
PG&E is applying a tourniquet because they have been paying dividends and inflated executive salaries rather than undergrounding the utility lines.
This is a classic public risk (power shutoff, fire and bankruptcy) for private enrichment.
I don't think the NY Times is being nearly critical enough.
99
@Sean I agree they did the right thing. California needs to limit development in areas subject to forest fires. But PGE needs to fireproof its infrastructure as well, it's the price of climate change.
25
@Sean I agree completely; PG&E tried to do the right thing, and succeeded at the most important aspect--no fires. Sure, they need to get the communications right next time--the website should certainly not be going down during sensitive times like these--but the Camp Fire alone last year literally gutted a town and killed almost 100 people, and fire seasons are only getting worse here. We're all just going to have to make some sacrifices during fire season.
27
We are in more uncharted territory here by way of climate change that has been denied for far too long. It will take time for appropriate solutions to be found. Weather predictions will never be spot-on though, so people need to have understanding and empathy (they don't want to KILL people!) and cut the utilities some slack.
As a native Californian that is now living on the East Coast and therefore subject to other types of weather disasters, my advice to Californian's who own their own homes...start looking at whole house generators so you can at least cook, use your bathroom and have a few live outlets. It's an investment that will be well worth it. I'd still move back to Redwood City in a heartbeat (and bring my generator) if I could afford it.
1
It's time to start questioning if PG&E is just too big to be properly managed. The land area covered is enormous with some very wild terrain.
The number of employees is too large to effectively manage in a way that weeds out the incompetent. Current HR strategy favors a seniority system over a merit based system for employee advancement
There are financial and other benefits from a breakup that could clear current liabilities.
Instead of PG&E being "too big to fail" it is "to big to not fail".
2
Here in Seattle, 26 power poles collapsed, one on an occupied car, during 50 mph wind gusts, not exactly a hurricane. Several poles had been inspected three years prior and found to be rotting due to beetle infestation but no repairs were performed or scheduled.
Public utilities like PG&E are too often lax about certain kinds of known hazards, like vegetation around power lines, until tragedy strikes.
Utilities are targeted by schemes like the infamous Enron and JP Morgan bidding fraud and maintenance manipulation schemes to increase electricity prices to ratepayers. Ironically, it was the effort to introduce competitive bidding into the regulated utility business that was easily scammed by professionals.
Utilities have created and hidden enormous pollution, as described in the movie "Erin Bronkovich" about PG&E contaminating groundwater and concealing it from ill residents.
The internal culture of power utilities has to change. Maybe the bankruptcy of PG&E will be a catalyst. But likely a new generation of leadership is needed.
2
"... Ms. Malashenko called in information technology specialists from the state to help restore PG&E’s systems."
That's an oversimplification. You can't just "call in" specialists to work on someone else's systems. At a minimum they would need access to the systems, and, more importantly, they would need to understand those systems.
The Times should provide more detail:
How many specialists?
From what state agency?
How were they paid?
What happens if they make a mistake?
3
There are lots of solutions, but they all cost a lot of money. Investors want a decent return and will put their money someplace else if they do not get it, so energy users have to pay higher rates to get the energy they want. Californians do themselves no favor energy-wise by spreading out to remote places, requiring the buildout of expensive infrastructure that is not easy to repair or replace.
2
PG&E has a contract with a mobile mapping company to identify hazards with 4 and 12 ft using 3D lidar.
1
As a Northern CA resident I have heard and read a lot empty rhetoric this past few days from our state officials - from our Governor on down to the head of the PUC. Saying that PG&E’s dismal handling of this week’s intentional blackout is “unacceptable” is not enough. What are they really going to do to make PG&E improve? And while all of us are criticizing PG&E why hasn’t there been a similar scrutiny of the state PUC’s commissioners and staff of the past decade who have never heard of a PG&E rate hike they didn’t like. Oh, wait, they were appointed by a Democratic Party Governor and legislators -just like our present Governor and legislators. Never mind.
2
PG&E is bankrupt - being kept alive by the California Legislature. This terrible situation clearly displays what damage investor for-profit utilities can wreak on their “trustIng” customers.
From the outset this strategy seemed more like litigation prevention then it did fire prevention.
I think PG&E would better serve their customers if they invested in more crews to identify overgrowth around their power lines and take action to clean up those locations.
Mother nature and fires can be unpredictable though so perhaps the governor should also review a balance of PG&E's responsibility and protection from being sued in to bankruptcy.
As to PG&E's recent operational failure they should consider the medical profession's motto of first do no harm. That kind of cluster should result in some heads rolling.
2
PG&E has a recent contract with a mobile mapping company that drives all over the state using 3D lidar to identify 4 and 12 ft hazards.
"something no United States utility had done in recent memory" refering to shutting off power due to wind and fire conditions.
THIS IS NOT TRUE... and needs to be corrected.
SDG&E in southern California actually developed, and applied, the model of powering down transmission lines that were subject to extreme wind in conjunction extreme fire hazard... YEARS AGO.
PG&E resisted the approach for years, but finally relented once the state made it clear that liability for damages rests with the power company that owns the power lines, not the state, or local governments.
Southern California Edison ALSO shut down power to close to 150,000 customers this week too.. for the same reason.. as the weather hazards rolled southward.
We have enough over the top emotional nonsense over this week as it is.. can we please not compound it with misleading or wrong journalism????
4
ANY public utitlty with profit making in its operational structure will inadequately resource the performance of its public obligations.
This economic principle follows from the dynamics of supply and demand and is as predictable as the relationship between force, mass, and acceleration.
As long as we continue to indulge in the delusion of profit making as a desirable outcome for basic human requirements, the decline of our utilities, educational infrastructure, and medical care will continue apace.
"Free market" true believers will never accept this and as long as we keep electing them to public office, these outcomes should not surprise anyone.
12
As one who was in the foothills without power for five days I can tell you this was a big screwup. In a county with only 90,000 people we had two stores open and one gas station. The lines were two hours long. Screw you PG&E.
3
I really do not understand how cutting off power to an area will improve chances of fire prevention. When power is cut, people resort to conventional fossil fuel sources to light up their home and cooking. Haven't we heard of camp fires started by ignorant folks creating havoc ? Not to mention the inconvenience it causes to law enforcement in trying to prevent planned crimes.
May be power distribution companies didn't really have any plan for disaster management. People are paying the price for their incompetence.
There were warnings many weeks in advance that some areas would be blacked out. If people didn't prepare for it the onus is on them. Since I live in an area where wildfires will never happen, I didn't/don't have to worry about a blackout. People who want to live out in the hills with "nature" all around them will have to pay the price for their indulgence with either fire or blackouts. Why is it always someone else's fault?
2
@Bonnie Balanda Its PGE's fault because they should have been updating and upgrading their equipment years ago, instead of giving billions in dividends to their shareholders. They have way too much power in CA, should be broken up. We should have nonprofit utility company like they do in the Sacramento area.
4
And we owe all of it to ongoing bribery at every level welcome to the "new" big problem which of course cannot be solved.... because our politicians one and all are only in the biz of bribery.
1
There are generations of corrupt planners, politicians, developers, government officials, their lawyers and legions more across the board responsible for the way California has been overbuilt in the wild lands.
At day's end, what we are seeing is one immutable truth: nature will overrun it all eventually. Be it by fire, flood, earthquake or drought, the reckless disaster-in-waiting that comprises large parts of both Socal and Nocal will only get worse.
In the Napa fire, a guy I worked with for 11 years and whose house was in the middle of a development that you'd never believe could burn in a wildfire and everything he and his wife owned incinerated to ash powder. This included a grand piano whose outline was burnt into the ground right under where it used to stand.
Many years ago, I was on the Santa Barbara fire as a college wildlands firefighter. The traumatized original incident commander on that blaze said this to me in the months after that fire burnt all the way down to the beach, even igniting trimmed green lawns:
"When people drive along I-5 and look around, they see houses, stores, communities with schools and hospitals, parks and other places. Do you know what I see now? A continuous carpet of fuel waiting to burn. Nothing burns hotter than a house."
1
The solution to all of these problems is simple: underground cables. This is easy in California, where there is no frost, which increases the costs in the Nordic countries, where all lines are in the ground.
Or: you can pay me now to bury your cables, or you can pay me later reimburse the costs of fires.
1
@Tapio Pento what happens when we have earthquakes? Will they be able to fix the busted lines then? It's just not monetarily possible to bury the lines, either.
2
@Tapio Pento
Earthquakes
After living in California for 35 years, all with PG&E, I retired to Provence in southern France.
This area in Provence has periodic high winds called the Mistral that last from one to three days at a time. The velocity of the winds exceeds any levels experienced in California.
The electric company has for many years attached the high tension wires so securely that they rarely come loose in high winds. In seventeen years we have never lost our electricity.
This, compared to the numerous times I lost electricity in California in San Francisco, Marin County, and Thousand Oaks.
If P G& E was decently managed in the last fifty years these kinds of tragic fires would not have occurred along with the inconvenience of outages.
Both France and Germany intend to bury all electrical wires underground in coming years to insure additional safety from fires.
39
@Michael Kittle As I posted in a separate comment, PGE towers average 68 years old and some were built before 1910. We can only imagine the wear and tear they have been through, and the vast improvement in materials used to make them in over 100 years.
7
I'd like to see PG&E converted to a California-owned utility. Then perhaps it could be made to concentrate on maintaining its equipment properly to reduce the chances of weather-related wildfires.
Example: we live in a severe wildfire danger area in Portola Valley. If a windblown branch were to fall on power lines running through our neighborhood, we'd have a fire. Why?
Because even given the obvious need, PG&E did not use insulated wire on our distribution poles. This "tree wire" simply has plastic insulation around the conductor, making it very unlikely that a falling branch will contact the enclosed wire.
But, hey, tree wire costs a little bit more than bare, uninsulated wire. So they didn't use it. This is analogous to an electrician wiring your house with bare wire, which is a little cheaper than insulated wire. It's all good so long as conditions are perfect.
I'm sure a state-run PG&E could find executive talent in the $500K - $750K/year compensation range who would be perfectly capable of running the show. Redirect the currently excessive salaries and shareholder returns towards safe, reliable operation of what is arguably the most important utility we have.
14
The insulated type of conductor with a neoprene exterior that you’re talking about is used on non-tension type applications. Conductors that are spanned long distances generally have a steel core for strength with an aluminum outer layer. The size of these conductors grow with the increasing ampacity of the load being served. These types of conductors generally do not have insulation around them, since the larger the load the more heat (corona) the conductor will be subjected to. Insulating them be disastrous.
The only place I’ve seen this type of conductor at full tension with insulation on it is in the jungle areas of Puerto Rico where the vegetation requires the construction of lines to encroach the minimum approach distance of the wires, so they must be insulated to protect against the difference of potential of the other conductors in the circuit. Most power lines carry three phase conductors and one neutral conductor.
The metaphor you used of bare wires in a house is not accurate since the reason residential wiring is insulated is so manufacturers can combine wires at differences of potential into the same cable.
Underground cable would be much more reliable and pose less of a fire hazard as long as Californians would accept the fact that the state would look like oil companies tore up the countryside to put in thousands of pipelines, and even then I’m not sure it would be possible to put underground cables in mountain passes due to the make up of the rock.
3
PG&E has a recent contract with a mobile mapping company that drives all over the state using 3D lidar to identify 4 and 12 ft hazards.
2
@Salomon
Understood about large high voltage transmission lines spanning long distances.
But in neighborhoods like mine, we have 4kV & 12kV distribution lines with short runs between poles. No corona losses and self-heating to speak of. These could be strung with insulated tree wire and are not. The surrounding trees project over the lines and would fall across the uninsulated lines if they detached. And this after PG&E came through our neighborhood on a trimming program 3 months ago.
Undergrounding is probably the most effective way of dealing with HV transmission lines, for reasons such as you suggest. Really costly, but effective. Meantime, we have many thousands of miles of distribution (neighborhood) lines that need simple stuff like insulated conductors. Most of PG&E's grid seems to me an ongoing exhibit of the aphorism "penny-wise, pound foolish".
1
In your reporting, please do not refer to what happened as a "rolling blackout." That term should only be used to describe a situation in which blackouts are due to insufficient power supplies and so areas are blacked out and restored on a rolling basis so no one particular area is affected more than any other.
This was not due to insufficient power, but to weather forecasts over a wide area. In my opinion, way TOO wide an area, as areas were turned off that did NOT have predictions of high winds. If PG&E is going to do this kind of thing in the future, they need to rethink their whole distribution system so smaller areas can be targeted.
2
This fiasco reminds me of the film "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," with PG&E in California manipulating energy costs and laughing about "Granny" when she gets her bill.
3
@tinhorse
Actually the particular reference was made regarding an Enron play against Southern California Edison and the reference was to a "granny" located in Rancho Cucamonga.
The exact play was that Enron created a fake decline in energy demand thus lowering costs. Enron then bought energy from SoCal Edison at a low price and sold it back to SoCal Edison at more than double the price paid.
Wouldn't hurt to have 10 million fewer people living here. Hello open borders crowd?
4
PG&E: Damned if they do; damned if they don't. I live in a city which owns its electric utility. I work in a small city which has PG&E electricity. My power was on at home; most of the lines are underground anyway. But when I drove to work yesterday some of the traffic lights were still out and there were no temporary stop signs or police directing traffic. Drivers crossed the intersections very carefully. When I reached work there was water all over the break room from a defrosted refrigerator. Fortunately the manager had the foresight to move all vaccines to a clinic that had city power so none were lost. That's thousands of dollars in potential vaccine loss just from our little clinics (located in two rural areas). There's got to be a better way to keep power on in areas not at direct risk from wildfire. Unfortunately our area in far Northern California is at extreme risk so people may gripe and be inconvenienced but they understand wildfire consequences.
116
@Old Hominid Of course wildfires are dangerous, but PG&E with its sledgehammer approach to killing flies probably cost the people of the state more in resources and probably some lives than makes sense or is humane. PG&E first needs to make sure all of its grid is safe from hazards such as wind and trees or limbs falling or electrical short circuits. It can do this with good management and regular inspections. The State needs to have its own inspectors as well to make sure PG&E is complying. Then it needs to install technology that automates checking the grid so that this same equipment can isolate a problem and shut down a small section of the grid to protect the remainder and without shutting down manually large sections of the grid.
13
PG&E has a recent contract with a mobile mapping company that drives all over the state using 3D lidar to identify 4 and 12 ft hazards.
2
@Old Hominid An excellent argument for distributed power generation with solar cells and batteries, which could power vital functions like emergency lights and refrigerators.
14
This is what a shareholder-driven business gets you: short term thinking with long term catastrophe. Time to put the public good back into the public’s hands. The state should take over PG&E.
11
By Tuesday evening, all our local news was reporting that blackouts on an unprecedented scale would consume the bay area. Station meteorologists predicted winds of biblical scale. Home Depots and Costcos sold out of batteries, flashlights, candles, and generators. Gas stations ran out of gas. No one know exactly what neighborhoods would black out or when until Thursday, when the five pm news said they'd start at midnight. NextDoor was blowing up with people desperate for information. PGE's lame website had been down already for twelve hours.
And during all of this, PGE fat cats (around sixty of them) were attending a wine-tasting in THE WINE COUNTRY which the company had fairly obliterated exactly two years ago with poorly-maintained lines. Talk about end of empire stuff. Nero would be proud.
Called on the carpet for this insult added to injury yesterday at a press conference, the PGE representative called the wine party "ill-timed and "insensitive." I'll say.
656
@Michelle Lamb Discher PG&E sounds like another company that could care less about it's customers, BOEING. They didn't bother to make airplanes that could fly.
28
In Sonoma, no power 12 am Wed - 12 am Fri. In Oroville, my parents are still without power. But we all experienced the same complete disconnect between PG&E's dire (proprietary?) predictions, and reality:
Early Thursday am, the worst of it -- 24 hours after the blackout began, btw -- was (as predicted) not atypical of the winds we get all summer in the afternoons, since forever: 11-14mph, gusts 10-20.
"Winds reached as high as 77." That is so misleading. Gusts like that, common in high remote areas, don't warrant a massive, economically damaging, premeditated power failure that *directly caused* deaths.
Temps were cool and below average all week. Huge areas and 100,000s of people were never facing a 'severe weather event.' PG&E never communicated, to enable actual planning ahead, its unwavering intention to shut down, no matter what, for 72-hours, regardless of real conditions.
This wasn't climate change, excessive temperatures, or unusual winds. If PG&E can't service its customers during NORMAL seasonal weather, it's incompetent and should be taken over. (But since San Bruno, we know better: it's actually criminally negligent in its obligation to spend our money as designated -- on maintenance, not high living.)
At best, this was CYOA. It also looks like a retaliatory snit fit -- thinly veiled as a ‘safety’ measure – against its California customers who are sick of being killed by malfeasance, then, for the pleasure, forced to pay off PG&E's fines.
31
@molerat6
Contact ALL your elected local and government officials and tell them it is time to buy out PG&E, break it into well coordinated logical units...
A true public utility.
But we have to demand and work for it'
14
The short sightedness of PG&E and the state is astounding. Aftger the last series of fires one would think a plan for the following year would be in place. The state should put stringent controls in place. Emergency generators should be placed where useful. Shutting off power is better than forest fire but this should have been planned out in the past. Looks like the society in senile incapable of learning from past mistakes.
3
PG&E is a huge monopoly and needs to be broken up. I am SO glad I do not live in Northern California. So Cal is bad enough, with Edison Co., a bit of a copycat of PG&E, but a little better. I bought a whole house generator as my salute to the Edison Company. It works well when it needs to. Otherwise, a big box sits in my backyard, waiting for the signal to start.
2
Perhaps the utility Pacific Gas & Electric would have fared better had it listened to "Are Your Ready" by the short-lived (1969-1971) blues-rock band, Pacific Gas & Electric.
We know that the former had heard of the latter because one forced the other to change its name to PG&E. Then the utility itself became PG&E and secured the website pge.com, apparently without the band's permission. Someone should sue.
1
"A WSJ investigation based in part on PG&E documents obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act found that the utility told the U.S. Forest Service in 2017 and 2018 that 49 towers on the nearly century-old Caribou-Palermo line (responsible for the deadly Camp Fire which killed 85) needed to be replaced "due to age." Another 57 towers needed extensive upgrades.
A presentation prepared by PG&E in 2017 estimated that the average age of its 50,000 transmission towers was 68 years old. The oldest towers in the network were 108 years old at the time, meaning they were built before 1910. The age estimate excluded 7,000 towers for which no date of construction could be determined."
https://www.kqed.org/news/11760156/report-pge-knew-about-extensive-power-line-problems-but-delayed-repairs-for-years
10
It would appear since they are calling in government help that nationalization is the answer, a la TVA.
3
What does this say about the future of electric cars?
3
Is this article the beginning of a low-key propaganda campaign to put California utilities under State control?
Forgive my cynicism, but I sense a pattern.
1
When is P.G.& E. ever going to get their act together? Whether it's killing people with gas explosions and fires from downed power lines to just flipping the wrong switch (power outage 12/09/1998). I can remember even in the early 2000s power would just go out in S.F. because they were not maintaining their power plants.
After the horrifying gas explosions and deaths in San Bruno & Sacramento they promised to fix these problems and here we are still waiting. They did manage to stick us all with so-called "smart meters" as the biggest program to roll-out with no obvious benefit to the customer. All of this incompetence has not stopped them from collecting fat paychecks and passing the cost of their incompetence to the customers.
ENOUGH!!!!
8
First off let's get some things straight- PG&E turned off power we're told on local news due to incoming wind storms we were going to get. THERE WAS NO WIND in this area---- at all- none. PG&E is directly responsible for the deaths of 85 innocent people in the town of Paradise in the Camp Fire last year. PG&E is also responsible for the Napa Fires of 2017, which include the Tubb Fire that killed 22 people. In Pollock Pines a 67 year old man died this week because PG&E turned off his power and disabled his home oxygen. Who can count?
PG&E's take on their responsibilities for these deaths and the billions of dollars these fires have cost was to file for Bankruptcy in January of this year. On yeah, and let's not forget that they raised our utility rates this year!!
PG&E sent me emails asking for surveys to be filled out earlier this year asking if I was prepared for an emergency if there was no power. I'm guessing when those surveys were ignored, PG&E pulled the trigger and cut the power this week to see. And now all those who weren't ready, now are if we lose power again. Meanwhile under the guise of doomsday weather PG&E cuts power, saves itself a ton of money not supplying power and scrambles to fix it's decades-old decrepit infrastructures that created the deathly fires in 2018 and 2017.
Here's my question PG&E- where's our rate-cuts from you cutting our power? And who pays the piper for the deaths you're caused? And the billions you've cost your customers?
2
You must go to the source for the power companies’ problems; the State of California. I worked for Southern California Edison (SCE) and the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), as a Power Dispatchers of the Western Power Grid, covering the whole west coast; Washington, Oregon, California, Montana, Idaho and Nevada.
California has done what it could to take over the power industries. The most visible was when it forced PG&E and SCE to lower power rates when oil prices went down but would not let them increase rates when oil prices went up; thereby busting the power companies in order to take control. Then blaming them for not affording to maintain power lines and stopping them killing brush from under the power lines. California’s power is now controlled from a dispatch center in Folsom, just north of Sacramento called California ISO. Look it up.
Power lines have to ‘spark’ when they go down in order to operate the mechanisms the deenergize lines in trouble. By blaming the power companies for all the fires, they can go for their deep pockets. Well now it’s come home to roost. If you’re going to automatically blame them for fires when it’s windy, you can’t blame them for deenergizing these same power lines.
88
@Jerry Sturdivant
They were given money to make the gas lines safe and did not use it for that. The top executives at P.G.&.E. still collected year-end bonuses. Can't they say hey, we don't get that bonus this year because there are pressing concerns? I think I have the right to blame them, especially after the deaths in Sacramento and San Bruno after their unsafe gas lines exploded
27
@Jerry Sturdivant Lets face it..the CA government is going to blame anything but themselves. It's a tired excuse of a government. Anyways a tip of the hat from a SCE retiree now in Saint George Utah.
7
@Jerry Sturdivant
Thank you for your input. Folks could provide more in terms of solutions to ever changing issues of climate and potential tech glitches, While that may sound simplistic, solutions to these problems appear paramount rather than continuous remarks from the complaint department.
Let's hear more solutions.
4
If I understand the problem correctly, power had to be discontinued to prevent high winds from bringing trees and other vegetation into contact with the utility's power lines. If this is indeed the issue, the utility company should have been using every resource available to clear the power lines, including hiring every available contractor in the country, and even requesting help from the National Guard. Instead, the focus was on what should have been an emergency only response to an unanticipated event. Why was line clearing, an essential act of maintenance, not initially followed and not accelerated when the expectation of potential disaster was certain?
3
17 out of the last 21 large fires in PG&E territory were caused by PG&E equipment. Even those not directly suffering damage where forced to breath nasty horrid smoke for a couple of weeks - smoke drifting from 100 miles away. Incredible nightmare. So glad that we have avoided it so far this year.
Obviously outage was better than fire, and fire would have been close to a certainty. So it was worth it averaged over all those affected. That's judgement is completely independent of the years of neglect and mismanagement by PG&E which is a separate issue.
6
The foreseeable “solution” is for Californians to buy candles and gasoline generators. How many additional fires will that cause?
4
This is the perfect example of why all utilities -- including internet -- should be non-profit, public and heavily regulated.
32
The fact that PG&E thinks that they can use bankruptcy to get out of this mess that THEY created baffles me. Using this as an excuse to weasel out of previous contracts made to alternative energy providers is maddening. They (senior management, stockholders, bondholders, and their insurance) need to jointly share the pain without falling back on bankruptcy protection. Passing this off onto the government (taxpayers) and consumers would be wrong.
2
@Paul kafalenos
PGE isn't using the bankruptcy to get out of any alternative energy contracts (PPAs).
After last year’s disastrous Camp Fire, and with Paradise, CA a cinder - why weren’t plans put in place THEN, and tested, for just such another event? That is, PG&E had plenty of lead time to fix this, make public announcements, hold town hall meetings. As for the wind, I lived in Nor Cal for 18 years and these winds happened like clockwork, along with the resulting devastation.
Their lack of planning and the resulting disaster strikes me as criminal negligence.
24
As a life-long Northern California resident, I think it is long past time that PG&E be taken over by the State of California. It is, after all, a public utility, and clearly the history of PG&E is dismal, in that it is more interested in protecting its profits than the people it serves.
37
My husband and I run a small children's theatre company in the East Bay. Our little youth productions are more organized. The lack of communication and miscommunication along with astonishing unprofessionalism from PG and E were jaw-droppingly astounding, and not really very surprising.
6
Easy to dunk on PG & E here ( isn't that what the comment sections are for - dunking on people ), but let's just say that they actually saved 20 lives and 500 homes this week - would that be a failure ?
And yes I get that had they done things "right" (whatever that means - I'm sure nobody on these boards actually runs a utility but think they know how to run one ) in the past it may not have have come to this, but I'm just talking about this week
4
Quebec's national hero Rene Levesque nationalized all of our electrical utilities under one Crown Corporation called Hydro Quebec. Hydro Quebec is attempting to wean us off fossil fuels within the decade.
I don't know what to say except the health and welfare of our society is dependant on the welfare of our electrical infrastructure which thankfully not dependant on the profits of shareholders. It is 2019 and just like health education and welfare we are reliant on our democracy to protect from the greed and selfishness of the private sector.
The private sector in Quebec is vigorous and healthy because our citizens realize that some aspects of our lives can not be entrusted to those whose only interest is wealth and power.
Reagan destroyed America by selling out public interest to those least concerned with public welfare.
If corrupting the nation hadn't seemed more lucrative than corrupting California, Reagan might have succeeded in turning California into Mississippi. Some still remember Reagan's attack on California's best in the world state college and university system.
41
@Montreal Moe President and governor Reagan is also a national hero to Americans and while we're at it ,Socialism doesn't work in the US.We are not Nationalizing anything and the Crown only exists here in fantasy.In addition California has not a fraction of the hydro power in Quebec.The wind energy is not even a fraction of the requirement for cities that have populations larger than the entire country of Canada.That is why the US exists on natural gas and the pipelines of crude that comes from ,Canada.Thank you.
@Alan Einstoss
Reagan ripped the solar panels off the White house. California's climate and tidal resources could have made California cities energy neutral years ago. It ain't socialism; it is common sense.
Our private sector is generating more jobs than we can fill.
When you learn what technology is available maybe you can tell me about about technology.
The only thing your neoliberalism feeds is class division and disparity of outcome.
Reagan cost you your soul and is costing you your country. I don't know whether to laugh or cry when each new layer of corruption is torn away just to expose another layer of corruption. Where is Jeffrey Epstein when you need his face to open every day's news.
Kakistocracy dates from the 17th century and defines a society run by its incompetents and its most corrupt.
Reagan sold cigarettes to children after the health hazards were known and Reagan knew enough not to smoke. That Reagan is a hero to many is the American tragedy.
3
@Montreal Moe You might want to look at the auto emissions map in NYT a few days ago--California's emissions have gone down since 2000 , but all the rest of the country's have gone up. We are trying many things.
1
And the irony: during the shutdown, a fire occurred on San Bruno Mtn near Brisbane. Had PG&E shut the power down there? Nope!
In my community near Palo Alto, the winds were barely a breeze. Nevertheless, we got treated to a day of shutdown.
6
@Mary Pray, how large a fire and was it in a location that could trigger a disaster? I lived near there. It couldn’t.
The Bay Bridge connecting the east bay to SF cost $6.4 billion dollars. It was supposed to cost ONE billion.
I don't understand how people think that the same government who ran up a $5.4 billion dollar overrun on a ONE billion dollar bridge can operate an energy company efficiently.
BTW, the energy crisis was essentially created by deregulation and the Public Utilities Commission forcing utilities to buy on the "open market" which took that opportunity to then raise rates from $30/megawatt hour to over $300. Sempra was allowed to raise rates, causing usage to plummet, but then the state intervened to freeze rates, usage went up and crisis ensued. A much worse scenario happened for PGE that would require about several hundred words, but keep in mind again it was govt that created a 4,400% overrun on an infrastructure project.
1
As a former native Californian (1950s-1980s), I recall seeing "housing developments" being built on just about every available space in both northern and southern California during those years.
Enormous crowds of them sprawling all over the state, built in areas where once only wildlife inhabited a landscape of tree and brush coverage. This was a disaster waiting to happen.
I remember thinking when seeing those tens-of-thousands of houses visible from the freeway, on top of, and up and down so many steep hillsides (great views were part of the sale pitch for buyers) was the worry about what would happen to those homes when fires (an inevitability) broke out.
Of course it's too late now but one of the reasons people's lives are disrupted by P.G. and E.'s power outages is the location of houses where there shouldn't have been any built to begin with. Housing in California needed a revolution in planning for the future--an opportunity that was passed up because of the power of maintaining the status-quo of the real estate industry. It was just too much of a risk to change the way things had always been: unlimited growth.
The owners of those homes are not to be blamed for wanting a lovely place to live. It's the greed and political graft of developers and politicians whose decisions to "develop" outlying areas which are impossible to protect from fire that eventually causes decisions for huge blackouts by P.G. and E. affecting both urban and suburban consumers of electricity.
10
Frankly, I think we need to bring back the fire lookout tower.
If Paradise, CA had had someone in a fire tower keeping watch over the nearby canyons, an evacuation alert could have gone out much more rapidly and lives could have been saved.
We once had thousands of fire lookout towers in the 1960's and 1970's. As high tech communication took over, many of the towers were taken down or abandoned.
But having a pair of human eyes and ears on a ridge or mountain is very useful during fire season. A person's senses are cheaper and more effective than anything computerized.
If PG&E were smart, they would use some of their profits to hire their own employees to live in back country fire towers and spot fires.
This could be a win-win: employment for folk who like to live in the wilderness and peace of mind for the rest of us during fire season.
3
@Heather We do have a lot of towers up here. They now are monitored remotely using cameras. What they really need is a fleet of high tech drones and maybe even a stationary satellite that is dedicated to fire stuff. They knew about the fire pretty quick but the warning systems failed because all the power was out very quickly. Even the land lines died - not a normal thing. What they need is Solar powered, with battery backup, big and loud air raid sirens. Right now they are putting special sirens in all the county sheriffs cars but that won't be anywhere near 100%. Also the evacuation routes couldn't handle the traffic load. They also need a much larger fire response team that is ready to go 24 hours a day. All this will cost billions statewide but the debris cleanup alone in Paradise cost 3 billion dollars. They need to go very high tech and very big on prevention. warning, and fire control. In the long run it will be better and cheaper.
3
And, PG&E’s $30 billion in liabilities? A significant portion of that will be funded through a monthly charge to utility customers. The rest will be paid by the state i.e. the taxpayer. This is why the utility continues its neglectful and errant ways. It’s never held accountable.
19
You only have to look at 1998, and the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) setting fixed rates to find the culprit. PG&E could not maintain it's electrical infrastructure with the rates. Time goes on, they file bankruptcy, State jumps in and they can't keep up either, they're beginning to lose their shirt too.
Solution, the CPUC needs to set realistic rates so the utility can function properly and maintain the grid and plants. Keep the rates artificially low and CA will continue to suffer the consequences.
7
This particular experience should be taken as a call to action. We are NOT ready to deal with an ever increasing series of climate catastrophes. And, as usual, the response is to lay blame... when it should be to lay plans on how to do better. This is particularly acute in the face of what science is telling us is becoming inevitable should we chose to do nothing.
And doing nothing is the apparently leadership default condition for our species. There is no room for self dealing and corruption anymore, but only the common people seem to recognize that as an imperative fact.
7
Really?
You mean private investors were not incentivized to invest in long-term advancements in power generation?
So we still run power from 100-year old hyrdoelectric dams across highly flammable wires through dry brushy chaparral instead of reserarching and investing in locally generated power such as solar?
SMDH.
15
This is the classic example of why public utilities need to be public.
Instead of siphoning off profits and management fees etc., all of that could have been invested back into the basic infrastructure. They know there's another fire season coming and the best they can do is shut off the power?
I think Californians should sue PG&E. Not for burning down parts of the state last year but for negligence, for refusing to provide power and to protect them into the future.
9
@avrds Siphoning off GUARANTEED profits, management fees, and in the case of PG&E $11 million dollars in recent bonuses to upper management.
1
@Observor
I just heard from elderly family members who had been without power and water for four days. And one of them has been sick. People are going to die with this policy -- and not just because of the fires.
3
PG&E regulators should force PGE to liquidate all of its assets to reputable, well managed utility companies. PGE is a disaster and there should be no ability to allow PGE to survive as an independent company.
6
I'm troubled by the degree to which people do not accept the necessity of these kinds of measures. Yes we need to take care of the sick and the vulnerable. But we also need to adapt to reality. Perhaps we are lucky that there is not a wildfire consuming most of the Sierra Nevada right now. Perhaps we are lucky that we have some time to adapt with solar and generators. Perhaps we should put our feelings about this to good work in the legislature to support the spread of solar and generators in rural areas. we are not entitled to our modern conveniences. We have them because conditions are sufficient to support us having them. Global warming means that conditions are changing. It is possible that in the future conditions will be insufficient for us to have these modern conveniences unless we work very seriously together to address the problems.
10
It isn’t the measures we Californians have a problem with, but rather the extremely poor way it was carried out. And the fact that it was only necessary because of an aging infrastructure that is decades behind.
45
@Stephen No plan survives first contact with the enemy. You expect this to be trouble-free the first time around?
(San Diego’s utility is MUCH smaller and not comparable, BTW.)
1
Wouldn’t it make sense to actually bite the bullet and put utility cables underground? People keep saying it costs too much but then we have billion dollar losses when fires and other disasters happen. Maybe this could be one of those infrastructure plans to keep surfacing in congress. Wishful thinking I guess
29
@S - The cost to have under-grounded the most vulnerable high risk areas would already have paid for itself, yes.
4
@S underground in the foothills. Nice idea but I’d love to see the EIR on that one.
The Camp Fire started when a transmission tower, literally 100 years old, had a wire come loose which ignited brush on the ground.
That tower had been scheduled for replacement for years, but because of corporate greed and mismanagement it wasn’t. There’s a book out now which tells the whole story in nauseating detail.
Tip of the iceberg folks.
People should go to jail.
267
@winthropo muchacho Ignited brush on the ground underneath a tower may well be the cause of the fire in the San Fernando Valley (So Cal) that's happening right now. People have reported seeing a small brush fire at the base of a tower.
9
@winthropo muchacho
Oh, wow. Name of the book?
2
@winthropo muchacho Is the book “paradise” by doug keister?
Electricity is *not* a property of the wall outlet.
And every dime you pay for it is *not* profit in the wallet of some fat cat.
If your friendly neighborhood PSC denies the rates needed to upgrade the system for a few decades, and bad things happen .... where is the surprise?
3
@John R. Sitting in Atlanta you have no knowledge of the truth. PG&E executives diverted millions meant for safety measures to their own bonuses. They had done so when the gas explosion killed residents over 10 years ago and continued to do so through the fatal fires caused by their faulty electrical lines of the past 2 years. Just before PG&E entered bankruptcy when it became clear that the fire damages would be in the billions $, it’s CEO “retired” with a multi million $ severance. During this entire time a complicit state PUC has regularly approved rate increases that PG&E requested, but has never required PG&E to actually expend funds on safety and repairs.
6
@John R. - PG&E weren't denied the rate increases. All work they do is submitted for approval and they can raise rates accordingly. When replacing equipment near the tower that started the camp fire the omitted the tower on the grounds that it was most likely to fail during a rain event - run to failure.
2
Why does this state with a high budget surplus and a booming high tech sector have an electrical grid that functions at a 3-world level? PG&E is a private company with a government-granted monopoly. What could possibly go wrong?
16
A lot of time and effort went into developing plans for this situation. This included the California Public Utilities Commission oversight. It is extremely disappoing that the result were this poor.
To be fair, there are a lot of challenges that face Pacific Gas and Electric, including the size of the service territory and the nature of the transmission and distribution system. Back to the drawing board.
6
And don’t forget about shareholders and executives. They must be paid at the expense of infrastructure.
4
@Stephen
Management and ownership has to be held accountable.
1
Between PG&E and corrupt Washington politics, one gets the sense that the USA is a 3rd world country.
42
And yet, a quick Google search will show that the CEO, William D. Johnson, made $6.8M last year.
52
@Jack He didn't work for PG&E last year. I agree that PG&E CEOs make too much.
1
@Jack Which proves....
A canary in a coal mine
14
If GOOGLE, also known as Alphabet Inc. located in Mountain View ,California can send my computer ads tailored to my shopping habits, why can”t there be a solution to where in California, electric lines are dangerous and need to be shut down.Climate threats are here to stay and all tech ingenuity is going to have to be put to work.This May not be in their business plan but Apple,Google and Facebook , all located in California,need to lend their tech expertise to the problem.Ask Californians whether they would choose reliable electricity or another cute App for their phone.
11
@JANET MICHAEL Interestingly, Google has tried to be a utility and failed miserably with Google Fiber, where they tried to bury the entire fiber optic system of Louis KY 2 inches underground, and were real surprised that didn't work. So they quit. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/google-fiber-exits-louisville-after-shoddy-installs-left-exposed-wires-in-roads/
Excellence in one field does not equate to excellence in another. However, one should demand excellence from those who have monopolies and hold people's lives and livelihoods in their hands. PG&E gets away with some truly heinous activity- from poisoning entire towns to burning down others.
This isn't a choice between 'apps' and electricity. This is about the continued feasibility of widely distributed power delivery.
2
Now this the way a major news story should be handle. After headlines declaring hundreds of thousands of people on the west coast had lost power, their plight was graphically brought home to us by a photo of a darkened donut shop with a caption saying people there had donuts but no coffee. The horror!
7
These bozos have been failing for more than 40 years. Incompetent and lazy...my neighbor was a PGE worker/slacker.
Don't put the burden of providing safe power on your customers...make the shareholders pay for burying the power lines. That is the only solution.
23
Especially frustrating were the canned, simplistic explanations offered by PGE; "the customer's safety is our primary concern", repeated over and over, when what we wanted was accurate information about specific concerns.
If you're expecting wind gusts Thursday evening why was my electricity cut off Wednesday morning? Time enough for a whole refrigerator of food to go bad.
Why is my power on when a block away it's off? Are we all on different transmission lines? Explain the "grid". Try. We're not idiots.
You warned for days that it would take at least 24 to 48 hours to turn the power back on, possibly as long as 5 days, yet within hours of the wind dying down large areas had power. You announced you'd be examining every inch of line before turning the power back on, and you couldn't do that in the dark, so if one didn't have power by sunset, they'd have to wait until mid-morning the next day. Yet I personally know people who's power came on at 10 pm. Were you lying, or did you just skip over the "examining every inch" part?
The whole episode was a fiasco. PGE's credibility was low to begin with, but this could have been a case study on how NOT to manage a planned outage.
131
@ET when So Cal Edison did this the other month they purposefully took their website down for planned maintenance. They announced it would be out days in advance. Wake up people—this whole thing is not about fire safety but about the private utilities trying to hold everyone hostage so the Governor and the state legislature give them the exemption of liability they have been seeking. It’s a negotiating tactic.
Too many parties obviously!
1
From Nevada County. I kept expecting the winds to pick up. Hah. In my sailing days I wouldn't bothered talking out my saild. This was PG&E wreaking vengence for being blamed for last year's fire. "Oh, you want safe, we'll give you safe!"
38
Why don't you mention that a man died when his oxygen was shut off?
24
PG&E is notorious for not taking responsibility for maintenance.
23
@Jane
Maybe it's a problem with all monopolized power companies. In NC, Duke Power wants the people to pay for its mismanagement of coal ash pits (that of course, threaten water supplies for thousands).
5
@Jane People say Virginia's Assembly is in Dominion's pockets. Also, the utility makes it very difficult and expensive for residences to install solar.
@Chris Hill Yes, coal ash stored along the rivers, so floods push it all into the water; DanRiver is an example.
California state should assess which rural schools would do best by going off the grid and using solar and/or wind electricity. This would avoid the unnecessary school closures and would create power oases in communities that may suffer future black outs. After that, other public buildings could go off the grid. We have an abundance of sun, and in many places sufficient wind to power a school.
6
This was an unmitigated mess. Power was off at my home within Santa Cruz city limits for 36 hours, but we had no wind or high temperatures. There was no reason to turn off power here. PG&E decision making was absurdly flawed.
209
@Steven Swartzendruber
Yes, me too. My power was off (just east of Berkeley) for 23 hours and for most of the time, there was absolutely no wind at all. Not a breeze in the sky. Not a leaf moving. Thursday afternoon, there was a little bit of breeze but nothing that was in the slightest bit unusual. And then before they could turn the power back on, PG&E had to inspect the lines by running helicopters over them, wasting more of their ratepayers' money. "Absurdly flawed" is right!
4
@Steven Swartzendruber:
I believe the transmission lines feeding Santa Cruz run through windy areas. If you would allow a generation plant to be built nearby, you would have power around the clock.
16
@Steven Swartzendruber Do you have a power plant in your town? If not, it doesn't matter what the weather is where you are. Lot's of NIMBYs have closed old power plants near population centers, which means those areas cannot be isolated for power generation.
2
PG&E’s forced power outages have resulted in food spoilage and medical device failure for thousands who don’t have the means to just go out and replace what went bad. The company’s financial woes, bankruptcy declaration or not, are just beginning. And as we watch, Southern California burns. It’s unconscionable.
22
PG&E has clearly neglected infrastructure upgrades in all portions of the business - both on the grid and in their control centers - for far too long. They should be taken over by the state and the executives for the last 10-20 years should be subject to salary clawbacks for breach of public trust.
23
@DHL No, money for maintenance was NOT diverted by "the state" for renewable energy mandates. Green energy generations occurs outside PG&E (often on residential rooftops) and then is directed to PG&E lines for transmission. We PAY for those transmission lines separately, on top of the green energy generation.
4
I think its Karma for us California’s who try to blame and sue everyone. If you want to bankrupt a company that provides power to everyone because hot weather and high winds caused a fire, they will just turn off our power.
So they turned off the power and guess what? Fires still happened. They will continue to happen because high winds, hot weather, human encroachment and mismanagement of the land all cause fires. With or without power.
10
Sadly, due to the tort litigation environment, the factual, fundamental cause of wildfires in California and the west in general will never be addressed. My sister-in-law is Native American. The Northern California Native Americans used to fight fire with fire: controlled burns in late winter/early spring.
The fire suppression paradigm on the part of the US Forest Service Smokey the Bear campaign, and California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (of which it is neither) prefer a pound of cure: a multi-million dollar for profit fire fighting "industry" in lies of an ounce of prevention: controlled burns in the late winter/early spring, which gets us back to the tort litigation environment.
Federal and state agencies have virtual statutory immunity from being held accountable for their negligence and incompetence. Pacific Gas and Electric, a public utility has no such protections. So PG&E is the easy mark. Deadly destructive wildfires will continue until we adopt the wisdom of the Native Americans.
12
Wildfires are not the only problem. When I lived in Sonoma County 10 + years ago, there was a powerful rainstorm. Power went out...for over a week. PG&E gave no information , anywhere. Their recorded message by phone never changed. It was as though the entire company shuttered things up and went home.
When power was restored, here’s how PG&E sought to mollify its customers: a form letter that blamed Mother Nature.
34
"This did not go well..." I'll say. I lived through the devastating Tubb's fire, and grieved for the people of Paradise during the Camp fire, even more deadly than ours a year before. So I get a preempted power failure. But this was a categorical mess. PG&E per usual will defend itself. Yet their defense is moot and irrelative to the fact that they should have never turned off our power for as long as 2 1/2 days. Now maybe there were threatening winds at Mt. St. Helena. However, nothing here in Sonoma Country other than what is usual. And what will we get for this? Our bills will sky rocket this winter when we need heat..all to help the "bankrupted" Pacific Gas and Electric Company and its share holders. Finally, I have lived in Northern California all my long life. And I am here to say that our state PUC needs to be scrutinized also.
71
I suggest two simple corrections to the following paragraph: Pacific Gas & Electric, the giant utility whose power lines and transformers have been blamed for a series of disastrous wildfires in recent years, was determined to prevent another one.
It should have read: Pacific Gas & Electric, the giant utility whose POORLY MAINTAINED power lines and transformers have been blamed for a series of disastrous wildfires in recent years, was determined to prevent another SUCCESSFUL LAWSUIT.
Whoever thought it would be a good idea to create profit-driven power companies without adequate & competent regulation? Raw Capitalism: the gift that keeps on giving!
262
@Jim Mamer,
PG&E is hardly the spawn of "Raw Capitalism" that you claim. It is a public utility, tightly regulated by the state, with rates, profits, and operations set by a state board. I am a lifelong Californian and it has been tragic to watch this state devolve from the preeminent middle class paradise to a decrepit, drooling hulk of it's former self. Previous generations of Californians invested in the future for the benefit of their grandchildren. Today we spend to finance our own current consumption and blame our bad outcomes on others. The greatest good that can come from our evolving plight here in California is to serve as a warning to the rest of the nation. Gotta go now, the store just called to let me know my portable generator just came in.
9
@DHL
PGE is poorly regulated. The judge who heard the court case against PGE for the San Bruno gas explosion case is monitoring PGE. In spite of this PGE informed him in October that they have only met 1/3 of their own tree trimming targets for the year ( and their targets are low to start with).
The Camp Fire was caused by a 100 yr old PGE tower which should have been replaced a while back according to their own criteria.
The bankruptcy judge disallowed bonus payments to pge executives to incentivize them. The judge said they shouldn’t need bonus payments to do their job.
Does this look like a heavily regulated company? In theory the PUC regulates PGE but all they seem to do is to allow rate increases so that PGEs mistakes are paid for by ratepayers ( socialize losses, privatize profits).
7
@A. Raymond,
It looks EXACTLY like a heavily regulated company. Because it is.
2
We are served by a small, mutual electric company in a largely rural area outside of Seattle. When we began having frequent power failures during wind, snow and ice storms, our utility took stock of the situation and set a goal to be in the top 10% of reliability nationally. Within ten years we made it. This is is an area where power lines cross dense forests. It takes determination and a willingness to objectively analyze the issues, and be willing to spend the money to fix them. We now have reliable power when neighboring communities served by large, for profit companies do not. When we do have one of the rare power outages, they are brief and we have text messaging that pinpoints outages by individual service. By the way, we have one of the lowest electricity rates in the country.
95
@PA
I can't help but comment about the cost of having one of the lowest electricity rates in your country. Our publicly owned utility is weaning us off fossil fuels and reducing our use of electricity even as selling electricity is its source of revenue. Our electrical utility serves we the people and is our pride and joy.
Reagan was a bigger and better liar than Trump. Trump's damage is repairable because it is so overt. Reagan destroyed your soul.
8
@PA As a customer of SnoPUD in Tulalip I hear you. Public ownership of utilities is just common sense. There is no place for profit in vital services. Now let's fix healthcare too.
12
@nethead
My electric utility is a Crown Corporation and it is a monopoly and it is good, my Healthcare is government run and we live longer healthier lives than Americans, my bank is part of our government run full service financial, insurance, and investment corporation but it must compete with the private sector and it is good.
we have a center right government but it is sane and somethings are just too important to trust only to the private sector.
9
This is just absurd. If power lines are causing fires, bury them.
We all accept that blackouts will occur occasionally in extreme conditions. My own town was blacked out for an hour or two last week as a safety precaution after a utility crew damaged a gas main.
But there is no excuse for regular blackouts where we have the technological means to prevent them.
14
@Josh Hill
You may easily bury the power lines in some areas of the state.
You cannot possibly bury them in the wild terrain and mountainous areas. And keep in mind that earthquakes can wreak havoc with underground utilities that are not properly prepared. And PG&E is the least prepared company in the universe.
This company needs to be organized for all areas in every contingency. Oops. It's PG&E. Unready as ever.
5
@Josh Hill Undergrounding of electrical lines is only economically feasible in dense urban areas. I am a civil engineer who has worked on development issues in small cities. I know the costs associated with such a utopia.
9
Could the utility, in lieu of burying lines where it’s not feasible, instead encase them and lay them on the ground? Anything would be better than the current situation.
1
Yes, PG&E bumbled this situation and it has a history of management issues, but people need to realize that CA law holds utilities liable for fires even when there is no negligence on the part of the utility. While this may make sense, the law leaves utilities few options short of shutting off power to the lines that could cause fires. Most of CA has little to no rain during the summer and fall, so dry brush, dead trees from years of drought, strong winds and live electrical wires provides a perfect recipe for disaster whether the utility is public owned or privately held.
9
@ScottMan And to continue your accurate and valid point, PG&E is exposed to tort liability whereas the incompetent inept State and Federal governmental agencies who are responsible for eliminating wildfire potential, the US Forest Service and Cal FIRE, are protected by statutory immunity. That immunity prevents our public agencies who are supposed to serve us by our taxes, to evolve. Darwin would be shaking his head in dismay.
2
Re the article’s statement that climate change is causing more fires: that might be true but that’s not the problem in this case. There have always been “dry and windy” times, usually at this time of year. Nothing new about this. What’s new is that PG&E has failed to maintain the infrastructure. Let’s be very clear that what’s causing fires is not the weather, it’s PG&E being privatized and failing in its duties.
57
@Kattiekhiba Au contraire. It is not the electrical lines that are the problem. It is the understory fuels that are allowed to build up to levels that result in these deadly, destructive fires. The Oakland Hills fire in 1991 was just a harbinger of disasters to eventually happen. Your region is vulnerable. One of the most vulnerable regions is Marin County up West Blithedale Avenue where narrow streets, dense development, and a large fuel supply is a disaster just waiting to happen.
5
You are wrong. Things have changed. The hotter summers are providing more fuel in the fire season. The rains are starting later. The Fire season is longer and more intense.
9
@Kattiekhiba ,
PG&E has been a private, for-profit company since it was founded over 100 years ago:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Company
It is, however, tightly regulated by the state which must approve rate changes. Californians want a free lunch; delivering power in California is a daunting task that nobody else faces: a huge, power-hungry customer base spread all over an enormous landscape. If we want a better PG&E we're going to have to pay for it. Or else call in the US Navy and have them deliver power to us from their fleet:
http://www.sfmuseum.org/1906/navops.html
4
The technology exists to put fast, resettable breakers on every power line pole. This would largely eliminate the danger of power line caused fires.
This is personal for me. I live in rural California and the last power line caused fire that forced me out of my home had helicopters dropping fire retardant 70 yards from my front porch.
23
The CEO’s salary at PG&E in 2018-19, including stock: $9 million:
https://www1.salary.com/PGandE-CORP-Executive-Salaries.html
34
@Diane 8.5 million of which should have gone to fixing the problem. Then there' the VP's...... how much can we strip from them? People making fortunes while their companies fail is a severe problem in the US.
9
PG&E: Poor Governance and Execution.
29
PGE needs to be taken over by the state and the profit motive eliminated from its activities. Before you sneer about bureaucratic incompetence, consider that the genius of the private sector and magic of the marketplace have brought us to the present crisis.
81
@JoeFF I urge you to look into the experience of the Long Island Power Authority in suburban NYC, a state agency that took over from an investor-owned utility, with the fake promise of "eliminating the profit motive" and became a dumping ground for extremely well-paid patronage jobs for cronies of a political hack named Richard Kessel who headed the agency.
Rates skyrocketed, and blackouts became frequent, because a political appointee-run state agency is actually LESS accountable vs a for-profit utility regulated by the state. Things got so bad that an investor-owned utility was brought back in to set things right.
Despite his sorry record, political hack Kessel got ANOTHER state agency appointment, head of NY Power Authority, where he continued the sleazoid activities with a vengeance, was investigated, and allowed to resign without even a slap on the wrist.
And, guess what, the guys reward is heading STILL ANOTHER public agency, head of the Nassau County (Long Island) industrial development authority.
7
This does not bode well for the eventual "big one" earthquake.
An aside, as a shareholder of now worthless PG&E stock, I think there is a lesson in here somewhere for the oversight role of shareholders and board members. Is anyone trying to get a clawback on salary paid to the prior CEO who let the company deteriorate over the years to its present level?
254
@MB California
I am reminded of how woefully Los Angeles was prepared for the 1992 riots. They did an analysis and fixed a lot of problems. This resulted in L.A. in being able to respond better to the 01/07/1994 earthquake. Hope the same thing happens here
12
@MB California
PG&E's former CEO, Geisha Williams received about $4.5 million in severance despite the utility's bankruptcy. She had served as PG&E CEO for less than two years with a salary of $8,597,220 for 2017.
The CA Public Utilities Commission tasked with regulating CA's utilities should be "hung" along with Ms Williams, Gov Jerry Brown... and, Kamala Harris who as CA attorney general was real easy on PG&E, and whose boyfriend Willie Brown was a lobbyist for PG&E.
PG&E, famous for not easily traceable contributions to PACs, and equally famous for throwing money at any possibly helpful political sort, including most all CA legislators, had bought Gov Jerry Brown and the CPUC.
It was well known and accepted that PG&E was not investing in safety.
Informative article w/links:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/09/while-pge-played-cat-and-mouse-game-with-california-regulators-where-was-kamala.html
PG&E customers who complain about being manipulated, and worse, by PG&E, would be wise to contact all their elected officials and urge them to use PG&E' felonious behavior and bankruptcy as leverage to buy out PG&E, making it a public utility like the better run SMUD.
26
@MB California Not to be snarky, but shall we claw back your dividends? PG&E has been diverting revenue to executives and shareholders for decades at the expense of maintenance.
Sorry for your investment losses, but the state should just ask the bankruptcy court to order this dangerously incompetent corporation sold to the taxpayers.
26
It should now be clear that PG&E cannot run its business. It has been obvious for a long time that California would be vulnerable to wildfires. Why didn’t PG&E develop appropriate contingency plans before this time?
32
Just wait till most cars and other vehicles are powered by electricity. So much more power will need to be generated reliably. Ack!
5
@fme time to order more solar panals and turbines. There's plenty of real estate out there to pave with these two generators.
4
Really, really glad this is all a H O A X and that the Orange Monarch has essentially tossed California off the island.
This is the tip of the melting iceberg. We will continue to see more frequent extreme events the rest of this century. Rebuilding Mother Nature's wrath will keep people employed, but isn't there a better way to adapt to climate change?
Best to "tool-in" rather than "retool." Many communities are trying to incorporate climate change in planning. You don't need to convince the insurance companies because they pay for damages. They can raise rates for areas that just rebuild with no changes. So it goes. Just wait until 2050 when things really go off the charts....
3
Increase electricity rates by a factor of 20 and use the billions thus generated to bury the entire distribution network. It would be one of the largest, most expensive civil engineering projects in American history. Or, maybe people shouldn't live in dying forests during climate change so move them out. There are lots of options.
8
An older guy who depended on oxygen is said to have died 12 minutes after they cut the power in his community. I'm not sure how this company runs, but don't they have to alert people with medical conditions who depend on electricity before they cut large swaths of power for any reason? Especially for people on respirators or who take medicines through electric inhalation therapty matchines and such? Never mind the food loss because of refrigeration issues. They just say "sorry for the inconvienience?" How does THAT work? How they excuted this initiative was not planned well, unless you are talking about their bottom line and insurance/liability issues related to fires and sparks caused by their equipment. If I were a Californian I'd be spitting mad. And maybe even looking to solar panels or wind energy in my neck of the woods.
24
@Maridee
I live in Northern California, subscribe online to the New York Times, and watch cable news. I no longer get a local paper and I do not watch local news. I would not have known that a shutdown might happen in my area the next day except for an email I received from my office suggesting that we shut off our work computers. Perhaps for me a solution would be to subscribe to a local newspaper and make a point of watching local news, however, I'm not sure that that would solve the problem for everyone as we're living in a time when everyone is getting information from different sources and some may not be getting any at all. So when there is a possible emergency, how we make sure that everyone is alerted needs to be addressed.
9
@Maridee Please explain how solar panels are going to work after dark. Household battery systems aren't practical yet due to high prices - R&D hasn't been recouped yet.
Not mentioned in this article is the fact that many rural residents have water delivery systems that depend upon electric service. When the power goes out they have no water to mitigate fire danger. An example of the effectiveness of a property owner saving her house in an extreme fire situation was the Big Sur fire about 5 years ago. The fire consumed a vast area the Big Sur mountains and wiped out a community of ranch type estates (I use the word estates not to convey wealth so much as size as my friend [who lost everything] who lived there had 20 acres or so but he was not wealthy). His neighbor with a similar sized property had cleared and installed sprinklers with a backup water delivery system and saved her property & house.
16
@Tom C If you live in big Sur and own 20 acres you are my friend , wealthy.
3
@Tom C
We have this problem - no power-no water. No toilets - had to construct an outdoors outhouse and use chamber pots at night. Big stock pots full of water for drinking kept fresh at all times. No water for a huge garden that grows much of our food and medicine - We had pre-filled 3 stock tanks with water and watered our large herb and veg. garden by hand (maintained all summer) - took 4.5 hours per day to water and a backache to boot. Bought a marine battery to run the C-PAP. Now we are looking at using our solar panels which have been connected to PG&E, to operate independently. I no longer trust this utility. We will move to be independent of them because we can. But all of this back-up takes cash resources which we are lucky to have. Many do not. We as a community need to put our heads together and decide how to manage this huge problem. Shareholders and mega-pay CEOs are getting in our way (not to mention climate change deniers and the oil and gas industry). How much did this power outage cost us? Yes, these mega-outages can not be the new normal. We can do better.
5
@fme Whether owning 20 acres at Big Sur makes you wealthy depends on what else you own. There are many people in this country who are land-rich but cash-poor.
5
Living here in California, it is hard to say which electrical monopoly - Pacific Gas & Electric in NorCal, Southern California Edison in SoCal - is more inept or more incompetent.
Neither PG&E nor SCE have efficient, productive labor forces. Both monopolies' management structures are filled with men and women who have retired on-the-job and not informed their respective companies.
Being monopolies, they know they don't have to do quality work, because their is no competition. Their ridiculously high salaries and huge benefit packages come at the cost of not repairing pipelines or transmission lines, until after the systems fail. Their maintenance programs are practically non-existent and woefully underfunded.
Through their massive lobbying of our State legislators in Sacramento, these utility dinosaurs are allowed to continue their subpar service, year after year. PG&E and SCE have no workplace pride.
50
@Joe Miksis
SCE does not do natural gas so it's a little like comparing oranges to tangerines but do agree otherwise
5
I hope someone will do a study to try to figure out how many people died because of this blackout. Whether it is people on respirators, people killed at intersections where the lights were out, people eating spoiled food due to interrupted refrigeration, or any number of other possible scenarios. Then there is the tremendous loss in economic productivity.
It may well turn out that the cost of the blackout is surprisingly high, erasing the supposed benefit of turning off the electricity to avoid a destructive fire.
A better approach would be to focus on making the existing electric infrastructure more wind resistant so as to avoid sparking a fire.
5
@Dan Frazier more wind resistant? How? It's the trees that break in the wind and nock the wires to the ground. How do you make trees " more wind resistant"?
1
@Dan Frazier
I works at a major hospital. We have spent the last two days asking all patients if they have been adversely affected by the power outages. So I can tell you some data is being collected. If you're curious I would say about a third said their power had been cut but only a few said it was a real problem. It did affect mass transit
1
@fme Put the wires underground.
PG&E has a history of not being prepared for things. Of course, being prepared for things would cost money and reduce short term profits and executive bonuses based on the profits.
104
This piece entirely misses one of the biggest parts of the story: PG&E had no need to turn off power except for a few isolated mountain tops, because the high winds never materialized. The vast majority of the places cut off for three days never had winds over 15-20 mph--much less than the 35 mph which PG&E had previously said would require a shut-off. Further, most areas had their power cut at 1am on Wednesday, while at that time the National Weather Service was not forecasting the high winds to begin until 15 hours later.
At best PG&E panicked, jumped the gun, and badly overreacted, quite apart from being unable to deal with the operational consequences of the shut-off. Meanwhile many darker, more conspiratorial theories abound about while they would be so eager to subject vast swaths of California to this hardship over a "weather emergency" that never was.
61
@Wile_E
We had high winds here and I am going to have to clean up some downed tree branches that are in the yard. Ironically we did not have our power cut, missing it by 2 1/2 blocks
7
@Wile_E
My experience and thoughts exactly...including the idea that "they' were taking advantage of this weather event to make some point - about being sued for fires? ... but then the wind never materialized in most of the areas with power cuts. A ridiculous grand standing.
10
I think it was a ploy to get us to absolve them of liability for future fires.
2
Ah, the wild fires happen every year, how is it that the utility still has no coherent plan? Is a Trump running the utility?
53
Are they burying new lines and have a program to bury the most vulnerable of the old? Of course, not only does the inconvenience and risks to individuals from planned outages greatly reduce the standard of living, but the cost to commerce must be astounding.
8
The state of California needs to look in the mirror. Its Public Utilities Commission has been in bed with PG&E for decades and did absolutely nothing to keep the company from spending infrastructure money on bonuses and dividends. The company learned literally nothing from the San Bruno fire when it took 45 minutes to figure out where to turn off the gas line to the neighborhood. They are unready to deliver safe power to anybody.
The company should be broken up so that regions can concentrate on the kind of service needed in rural areas or in cities and suburbs. The gas company should be separate from the electric company. They need to spend every possible moment figuring out what infrastructure they have and how to make it foolproof. Manual shut-offs should be a thing of the past. Trimming shrubbery and trees should be done regularly, not when the wind is about to start blowing.
This company endangers not only its victim-customers, it endangers its own workers. I lived near San Francisco for 26 years and am very glad I am not there to suffer with my friends or pay extra for PG&E's ineptitude.
No rate hikes for 10 years. Prison terms and fines for both CPUC and PG&E management mistakes.
202
Going w/o electricity is a big hassle but I still believe it is a better alternative than huge fires which burn down your house!
10
@Dolly Patterson
Seems it would be better to fix the problems that might cause fires than to shut off customers' power arbitrarily.
25
Utilities are traditionally regulated precisely because they hold monopoly power. Without regulation they will naturally cheat the customers to benefit their owners, just like the private Medicaid insurance companies in Florida.
66
It's time for a public buyout of PG&E. They take our bailout money, raise our rates to cover liability damages, and yet they still rely on the state in an adverse weather situation like this. Our electrical infrastructure, like water and road, is too important to leave to a for profit company.
304
@Jan
The state cannot run this utility with any integrity. They have enabled PG&E for decades. It needs to be broken up so that the smaller entities can serve their areas properly.
7
@Honey
The point of monopolies in utilities is that you cannot realistically have multiple water/gas/electrical infrastructures overlaying one another. Can you imagine different water pipes, different roads and multiple train routes representing private companies in competition? Impossible.
1
Though sadly the next steps would come into play...
1) Taxpayers would spend a fortune in tax increases and bond issues to fund vast infrastructure upgrades.
2) We’d read, over the next decade, about cost overruns, rigged contracts and second careers to all the politicians involved.
3) As the improvements came into effect, the brilliant idea from the Republican quarter would be that private industry could do so much better and the newly refurbished gem would be sold for pennies on the dollar.
Rinse - wash - repeat.....
5
They were ALLOWED to become this incompetent.
132
I read this bankrupt company is still giving out bonuses Make sure the brains who thought it up and approved the idea get their bonuses. Snark.
44
@Karen
They TRIED to do mega-bonuses recently but the bankruptcy judge put a stop to it. The company has learned nothing at all.
25
@Honey
I like that judge. She has been ON them!
3
@FerCry'nTears
The judge is a man.
1
Welcome to the apocalypse: climate change + no planning + human incompetence = disaster.
241
@ZoProf Not to mention politically motivated climate change denial and 30 years of lies and deception all for $$$$$.
14
@ ZoProf - you can add failing infrastructure to that list.
5
You left out greed.
5