Was PG & E's Bay Area power outage really needed?
For many Northern Californians, the weather swept through the region in mid-last week was notable.
Bone-dry winds came down from the north and east, meandering over a landscape that had occurred from months without significant rain, increasing the risk of fires. But it had been a relatively mild fire season so far, and this was a relatively typical October windstorm.
Still, the winds allowed Pacific Gas and Electric to unleash an unprecedented willful blackout over large swathes of the state that disrupted millions of lives and, according to some estimates, cost billions of dollars in financial losses. And now, in the wake, a key question remains: Was all this disruption really necessary?
Schools, universities and businesses closed for several days. Food thawed and spoiled in freezers. Oxygen and CPAP machines for sleep apnea stopped working.
Local government officials rushed to find generators to operate traffic lights and key tunnels, and neighborhoods far from any fire hazard were plunged into darkness.
PG&E asked people to visit the site to find out if their lights would be on, but the site crashed quickly when millions did just that; the tool led people to its customer centers, but they were also overloaded.
The blackouts and confusion surrounding them led to a new round of criticism of California's biggest tool, led by Prime Minister Gavin Newsom, who called it halting the "unacceptable" result of PG & E's "greed and disloyalty," a feeling reflected by angry residents in darkened neighborhoods. When the week ended and PG&E worked to restore power, there was renewed talk of reining in or even breaking up the beleaguered tool, and troubled comparisons to undulating blackouts that helped cost a former governor, Prime Minister Gray Davis, his job.
At a news conference Thursday, PG&E CEO Bill Johnson apologized for the agency's poor communication, acknowledging that the tool was "not adequately prepared," but insisted that the dangerous weather forced its hand.
Still, when she charged her cellphone at a San Jose community home Thursday afternoon after PG&E cut power to her home in the Silver Creek area, Helen McArthur, like many over the Bay Area, was questionable.
"I don't think that's justified," McArthur said.
1[ads1]9659011] Was a major shutdown necessary?
As much as Newsom and others have criticized PG&E, they have also shown no willingness to embrace the election at the heart of last week's blackout: whether they will cut power or not when dangerous weather moves in.
Someone must own that choice. And hindsight is always 20/20.
After last week, officials want PG&E to be more careful about turning off power because of how disruptive the power outages can be.
But one does not have to look far for a counterexample: PG&E considered turning off the power near the city of Paradise early in the campfire tomorrow, and then decided – weather conditions did not guarantee it, said the tool – with disastrous results.
PG&E officials explain their public safety shutdown as "a choice between hardship or security."
"We chose security," Johnson said.
To Newsom and a number of PG&E critics, but it was a "false choice" and the company only arrived after an astonishing series of problems – many of which were in their own business.
It was PG&E that for years postponed maintenance of the infrastructure and hung to its goals to clear trees and other potential fuel from around power lines.
Give the shortcomings and threat of last week's weather, tools and fire science experts say that a power outage was justified. A better question, they say, is whether so many people needed to lose power.
"Under the circumstances, a shutdown of some kind was needed," said Michael Wara, director of the climate and energy policy program at Stanford University's Woods Institute of the Environment. "It is not clear whether the closure that PG&E was instituted was necessary."
PG&E was not the only tool that cut power during the week to reduce the risk of fire, but the blackouts were by far the most far-reaching. More than 700,000 PG&E customers throughout the Bay Area and Northern California lost power at one point.
As the winds spread south across the state, California California Edison cut off the flow to about 21,000 customers and gave 223,000 more advice that they could be affected per year. Friday. San Diego Gas and Electric cut power to around 200 customers, while 30,000 were told they could lose power.
Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science at UC Berkeley, said that Southern California's tools "have invested more in the ability to shut down much more strategic, smaller areas of the web," than PG&E has. They have also done more to bury their transmission lines, replace traction posts with more durable concrete posts, and improve weather monitoring to track dangerous winds.
After their wires triggered the deadly 2007 Witch Fire, San Diego Gas and Electric, they rewired the grid to cut power only to the areas at greatest risk and minimize the impact elsewhere.
PG & E's capabilities are far less refined: The tool first proactively turned off power last year, and the grid is older and covers a larger, more diverse area, with many communities connected to a larger power line.
Closing the line in one area can also affect many customers in areas of lower risk.
"PG&E is expanding its capabilities, but they are not where they need to be to isolate specific circuits," said Elizaveta Malashenko, deputy director of security policy at the California Public Utilities Commission. "They don't always have the ability to be surgical in that they shut off and end up closing larger sections of their lines."
And as an investor-owned company, critics say, PG&E also emphasizes the effect of its shareholder decision, trying to avoid adding to the billions of dollars of liability they already have by sparking another deadly and devastating fire.
That's part of the problem, according to Mark Toney, CEO of the Utility Reform Network.
"The shareholders, not the taxpayers or the taxpayers, must be responsible for paying the costs of these closures," Toney said. Otherwise, they act as "a" get out of jail free card "every time they have a problem they should have prevented."
A troubled history of a state
The tolerance for closures may have been higher had they not been borne out by a tool whose attempts to supply electricity and gas over a vast and varied landscape have seemed to fluctuate from a scandal to another.
The shutdowns aroused many people's memories of the emerging blackouts of the early 2000s as the state tried to deregulate its electricity markets in a stifled bid to promote cleaner and cheaper electricity. This effort turned into a multi-billion dollar failure and led to PG & E's first bankruptcy.
Next came the fallout from the fatal San Bruno explosion in 2010 as federal investigators say was the result of the deadly combination of PG & E's faulty record keeping and poor maintenance. The tool was convicted of criminal offenses and is still under federal probation.
Meanwhile, PG&E equipment has continued to fire fires, especially several fires that swept the North Bay Wine Country and nearby regions in 2017 and Camp Fire, killing 86 people and all but burning down the city of Paradise.
A federal judge has mandated to force PG&E to improve the security of its gas and electricity systems, and the state government has passed a law to oblige PG&E to take steps to prevent fires.
But Loretta Lynch, a former president of the California Public Utilities Commission, said the regulator has rubber-stamped PG & E's plans. Lynch said she thinks the commission, the California agency responsible for overseeing PG&E, must share the blame for the power cuts.
"Instead of being a watchdog, PUC acts as PG & E's lapdog," Lynch said.
Severin Borenstein, director of the Energy Institute at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, said the commission is underfunded and "does not actually have a ground operation anywhere near the scale needed to regulate directly."
"We" We largely rely on the tools to do what's right with certainty, and in some cases it's clearly not worked out, "he said.
But forces beyond the control of PG&E or its regulators have also been at work and will pose greater challenges in the future.
California's dry season is longer and a crippling drought has left tens of millions of dead trees in the state's forests. Transfer and utility lines have caused fires for 100 years, "Borenstein said." But they're starting to fire bigger fires now. "
Newsom speaks tough
It may not be far from Newsom's mind that the last California governor who met massive blackouts in the state were recalled by voters in the middle of his second term.
While Davis was also hampered by other issues, such as a budget crisis, his experience shows how disruption The death of a service as basic as electricity can be politically deadly.
To be sure, the crisis Davis faced and the power outages this week are drastically different. The blackouts in the early 2000s were caused, at least in part, by backlash from energy companies such as Enron, not by the risk of wildfires.
Davis nevertheless acknowledges that blackouts can be detrimental to the popularity of an elected leader.
"There is no doubt that they did not help," the former governor said in an interview. "People don't like blackout, even though they are cautious, and they have the right to be upset."
Like lawmakers and local officials across the state, Newsom has taken a tough line at PG&E. [19659002] Newsom said at a news conference on Thursday night that he would "push very hard to make sure PG&E fulfills all its obligations they make privately, and all the obligations they publish, to turn on the lights as quickly as possible. "
Newsom has power to reshape the Public Utilities Commission: He has already appointed two of the five members, including new president Marybel Batjer.
These commissioners could more aggressively push PG&E to make improvements, launching investigations into how the company handled last week's power outages.
The governor could also issue an executive order requiring the PUC to take new regulatory measures, for example, by forcing PG&E to speed up its plan to curb fires. Newsom's first state budget includes $ 75 million that can be distributed to local governments to help with the cost of shutting down electricity.
Davis tried to show that he was at the top of the problem, but that wasn't enough – his approval ratings tumbled and finally he was revoked in October 2003. It remains to be seen how Newsom will be sentenced if sweeping terminations continue.
"Optically, he must show that he is on top of this, and not just shout at PG&E like everyone else," said Steven Maviglio, a Democratic strategist in Sacramento and Davis' former press secretary. "You have to show action. "
Expect more shutdowns
The list of potential fixes for the problems facing PG&E – and California – is long and varied.
The most ambitious plans require breaking the utility or restructuring of the electrical system into" microwaves. "At the community level.
In the short term, experts say PG&E needs to focus on hardening its existing infrastructure by working through wood backlogs and maintenance and obtaining southern California tools to use comprehensive" sectioning "of the web to more precisely
In the Bay Area, former PUC Commissioner Catherine Sandoval said PG & E's efforts should be particularly focused on areas where the region's two pography creates vicious wind tunnels, such as along the hills of Mount Saint Helena in the counties of Napa and Sonoma, and between Mount Diablo and Sunol Ridge.
"We cannot have major outbreaks year after year, w Regards PG&E moving at a slow pace," Sandoval said. "We need to find a happy medium where we have both reliability and security."
In a region where customers already pay some of the highest utility bills in the country, none of these solutions will be cheap. And all of them will take at least several years to come true, with hot, dry winds continuing to sweep across Northern California at the end of the dry season. In other words, the conditions that created last week's blackout will not change soon.
"This is going to be a regular part of the fall," Wara said.
Sure, as PG&E worked to restore power at the end of last week, National Meteorologist Drew Peterson, traced the early warning signs of another round of the windy, dry weather the Bay Area had just experienced.
"It's that time of year," Peterson said.
