13 ms·

PG&E Sparked at Least 1,500 California Fires, Now Faces Collapse

140 points by laurex 8y ago

gerbal 8y ago
A preview of some of the economic toll of climate change
- sgc 8y ago
  PG&E has been obviously negligent to any casual observer for at least the last 40 years. But yes, there is more to come.
  - heyjudy 8y ago
    - Found negligent in the San Bruno gas pipeline explosion - Found negligent in the pollution in SoCal Hinkley groundwater pollution
- floatrock 8y ago
  You're getting downvoted b/c there is enough negligence and history involved that there are other more proximate reasons so the "climate change" line feels off-topic, but, you're not wrong. The bad maintenance on the transmission tower is what created the spark, but there's also the point that the area was such a dry tinderbox that one spark was able to ignite the tragedy. Resilient systems don't show such fragility. The fact that an unattended campfire, a hot muffler, or any other number of things (inadvertent or intentional) could have caused the same effect shows there's a systemic challenge here. We can grab whatever we legally can from this business malfeasance, but systemic challenges are much harder to deal with (and there's no one to easily blame)... The tinderbox is not going away, and whatever comes after PG&E is going to be operating in a far riskier business environment.
- DuskStar 8y ago
  "A preview of the dangers of trying to control the environment" would be a more accurate assessment of US wildfires, I'm afraid. After all, the biggest contributor to their size and deadliness is the absolutely wonderful idea the US Forest Service had back in the 30s to make sure every forest fire was put out by 10am the following morning. Put out all the fires -> fuel buildup -> fires so large you can't put them out. Climate change is a horrible thing, but blaming it for things it didn't cause is a fantastic way to validate right-wing fears. Not fears of climate change, but of irrelevant responses that give the government and their favored industries ever more power. These dangers might be massively overblown, but every time people do this it makes them a little more plausible, and a little easier to spread.
cwkoss 8y ago
Privatization of public services cannot work unless the private companies have liability for their actions. This is the necessary consequence of their negligence.
- eastbayjake 8y ago
  Perhaps just a little more complicated and nuanced than that: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-14/pg-amp-e-pays-the-cost-of-fires https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-14/pg-amp...
  - joe_the_user 8y ago
    PG&E has a long history of negligence and stripping whatever value remains from PG&E's shareholders is an eminently appropriate penalty. PG&E may indeed not be entirely responsible for the wild fires but it's responsible enough that this kind of penalty is warranted - ie, trimming trees around PG&E of course was something they knew they had to do and that they failed to do (just like their failure to maintain the pipe that exploded earlier). How California deals with fire risks and utility costs going forward is complex question. Naturally, it's made more complex by the influence large corporations wield. In this day and age, bankruptcy still offers the possibility of PG&E sidling rate-payers with its cost while maintaining shareholder value, despite this being exactly what bankruptcy is intended to avoid. Naturally, I'd like to see the state of California prevent this but I'm not holding my breath. IE, California theoretically could seize PG&E and run it as a public utility but it probably won't and thus little will change.
  - DannyBee 8y ago
    Sure. I wouldn't claim otherwise. However,there are some key things missing here: 1. Lot of states have strict liability of this form for utilities. 2. California is not entirely unique in the land mass of the united states (or the world) in the issues it faces here. It is only unique in that it has not done a good job overcoming them. All of these viewpoints seem to start from from a position that it's impossible for PG&E to succeed (due to global warming, legal climate, etc), and then ask "what do we do in that situation". But as mentioned, it's simply not impossible for PG&E to succeed, and also no evidence that it is particularly harder than it is in similarly situated areas.
tareqak 8y ago
Same story from the Associated Press: Utility seeks bankruptcy protection over California fires - https://apnews.com/5e70c4c99a044c4192d7ee52e38330f2 https://apnews.com/5e70c4c99a044c4192d7ee52e38330f2 .
smaili 8y ago
On a somewhat similar note, president Trump recently threatened to cut off funding for wildfires[0]. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/09/trump-threatens-to-cut-off-federal-funding-for-california-wildfire-relief.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/09/trump-threatens-to-cut-off-f...
- isoskeles 8y ago
  I think this is great news. Why would we want to give money to wildfires? They're pretty destructive, causing millions (billions?) of dollars in damage and killing innocent civilians. I do not think we should be giving money to wildfires. They can't even use the money anyway.
  - DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
    They'd burn right through it anyway.
    - dylan604 8y ago
      What would the burn rate be compared to other start ups, and how much runway would they be given before they pull the plug?
- devmunchies 8y ago
  How many times does California need help until it, as its own entity, fixes the problem? Hopefully this lights a fire under the regulators in Sacramento.
  - dylan604 8y ago
    How many times would Florida, Louisiana, etc need help until they fix the hurricane problem? There's definitely situations that people create that makes them much more susceptible to natural disasters, and I would go along with the "fix the problem" approach if this is the point you are making.
stefan_ 8y ago
Every year, they cause a fire or other natural disaster, then threaten bankruptcy, then get bailed out.
- burtonator 8y ago
  Capitalism for the poor. Socialism for the rich. If they continue to get bailed out I would prefer that we just have state run power or something more heavily regulated and monitored.
  - metildaa 8y ago
    Socialize the losses and privatize the gains, but only for those who are wealthy and in power. That is our current system in America, too big to fail.
Aloha 8y ago
Consider the following: "PG&E didn’t anticipate how quickly the drought would overtake heavily wooded areas north of San Francisco and outside Sacramento, said Stephen Tankersley, who oversaw PG&E’s vegetation-management program between 1999 and 2015. “It’s hard to believe that anybody would have predicted that it would have been like this,” said Mr. Tankersley, now a utilities consultant. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Conditions on the ground worsened dramatically and quickly, said PG&E spokeswoman Lynsey Paulo. She said the utility has reacted with speed and urgency. “We are very aware of the risk and we are doing everything we can to keep our customers and the communities we serve safe,” she said. “PG&E considers wildfire risk as a top-tier enterprise risk. It is evident in our actions.” The utility removed 451,000 more trees from 2016 through 2018 than it had originally forecast, she said, in an “amped up” effort to deal with massive tree mortality." ... "The task was complicated because some dangerous trees were on private land, forcing PG&E to negotiate with landowners, said Bob Fratini, a retired PG&E vegetation-management manager. Residents sometimes pressured crews, he said, to trim just enough to satisfy minimum requirements. “Utilities should be given the right to remove any tree that could cause an outage or a fire,” he said. California regulators recently gave utilities more latitude in this area, saying they could shut off power to homes or businesses that prevent tree crews from working. PG&E’s Ms. Paulo said that isn’t necessary very often. Sometimes, PG&E’s tree-clearing created new problems. After PG&E workers removed two trees in January 2015 southeast of Sacramento, a gray pine was exposed to wind and began leaning, according to a state investigation. On a 102-degree day in September, the pine hit a 12,000-volt line and electricity ignited it, dropping embers onto dry grass and sparking the Butte Fire, which burned 70,868 acres and 921 buildings. Two people died." These two blocks of text to me make it sound more like what you'd traditionally call an 'act of god', and not malfeasance (unlike San Bruno). While its unfortunate people died, and that there were great losses, you when you have people living in land that historically (over tens of thousands of years) had regular burn cycles, then humans came along and kept putting the fires out, I have less sympathy for those who take a loss - they should have known it was a risk of living there. Also, I work with power utilities, having to turn the power off in a windy situation is an unwinnable situation, you either get complaints to the PUC, or you get higher fire risk - both are expensive to an extent to deal with - and without a historical record of fires in that area, its not really rational to just turn the power off, to tens of thousands of customers, and its harder to justify to your customers on its face - just as they are being excoriated now a failure to exert enough caution, if they had exerted the caution and nothing had happened, they would have been excoriated for exerting too much caution, again - its an unwinnable situation.
Zhenya 8y ago
https://outline.com/5bxFLb https://outline.com/5bxFLb Whole article
mroche 8y ago
Is there any part of California that runs power underground rather than overhead cables? I understand it’s a significant cost and effort (sometimes infeasible) but at this point in time, just based on the past few years, I’m surprised not to have heard of any large scale pushes for underground power.
- magnetic 8y ago
  I live in San Jose, CA. The feed that comes to my house is underground. In my backyard, along the fence, are electric wires up in the air to feed my neighbors. So it's a mix...
- Diederich 8y ago
  Depends on the neighborhood. I've lived in both. Here's one location where all of the cables are underground: https://goo.gl/maps/BhEVwjPSitF2 https://goo.gl/maps/BhEVwjPSitF2
- iaabtpbtpnn 8y ago
  Nah, we just string the cables haphazardly wherever, through trees is just fine, because of course it's always sunny and nice in California. It seriously looks like third world infrastructure to someone from another part of the country, where weather events happen often enough that the utility has to give a shit.
  - dahdum 8y ago
    PG&E can’t afford to do that without raising capital. CPUC won’t approve rate hikes to finance that capital. Legislators pass no new laws or regulations. Then when it goes awry CPUC and legislators stand far back and decry PG&E for negligence.
    - bleriot 8y ago
      They could afford to pay out a regular dividend, illegally skipped safety measures on pipelines, and “an independent audit from the State of California issued a report stating that PG&E had illegally diverted over $100 million from a fund used for safety operations, and instead used it for executive compensation and bonuses”. Ratepayers and taxpayers should never have to pay for deliberate executive negligence. https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-pge-safety-investigation-20181214-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-pge-safety-investigat...
joering2 8y ago
$10,000 bet not a single Exec will go to jail.
amluto 8y ago
To what extent could PG&E mitigate these problems with improved safely devices? There are various devices that can try to minimize arcing when there is a fault, for example Petersen coils. [0] California already has a distinct advantage here compared to the rest of the country. In the other 49 states (to the best of my knowledge), it's legal for the utilities to use a conductor that is grounded at multiple locations as a neutral. This type of arrangement induces nasty currents through the ground (which is, I think, why it's illegal in CA -- those currents can apparently be quite harmful to livestock that are being milked with metallic equipment, not to mention hazardous to people in swimming pools and such). But it also means that, if another phase shorts to ground, then there is necessarily a large amount of fault current available. In CA, the distribution wires can't legally have any intentional current flowing between themselves and ground, which means circuits that detect residual current will work. [0] https://www.modernpowersystems.com/features/featurenew-roles-for-the-recloser-in-the-modern-mv-network-4928052/ https://www.modernpowersystems.com/features/featurenew-roles...
- cududa 8y ago
  Maintaining the equipments integrity and trimming trees seems like a good start
  - lisper 8y ago
    They do. I'm a PH&E customer living in a woodsy area, and they trim our trees regularly.
- lutorm 8y ago
  The US uses overhead wires everywhere, because it's cheaper to install than underground wires. But then you're subject to damage from trees, wind, icing, etc. Everyone pays in worse uptime, and apparently also in fire risk.
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    No, not everywhere. Most of NYC uses underground wires. My neighborhood in Colorado near Boulder built in the 60s uses underground wires as well.
cbhl 8y ago
Is municipal red tape at all a factor in PG&E's under-maintenance of its lines and equipment? I feel like CEQA lawsuits and municipal planning codes and committees are given as reasons why we don't have denser housing and more fiber-to-the-home and dedicated bus lanes in the bay area (the Van Ness CEQA report took something like six years to do). Do the engineers for AT&T and Comcast and PG&E find similar frustrations with the process here?
- mistrial9 8y ago
  nice try -- cost-cutting by using sub-contractors to do legally mandated maintenance up and down northern California was well-documented. In addition, PG&E was found guilty of of obfuscating and avoiding legally required maintenance records for gas pipelines in the San Bruno case. Utterly unacceptable and sadly predictable.
  - anonuser123456 8y ago
    "cost-cutting by using sub-contractors to do legally mandated maintenance up and down northern California was well-documented." Contractors are licensed by the state to operate in their respective trade. Making the claim that contractors do sub par work is just as much an indictment of the state for licensing them in the first place.
rgbrenner 8y ago
In 2017, PG&E was fined for a fire in 2015. In 2017, they were implicated in 17 wildfires that killed dozens. All on her watch. The CEO does nothing to address the risk. Now she resigns, and: PG&E is planning to award her a perhaps less-than-golden parachute that could range from $2.36 million to $4.46 million, depending on how her departure is categorized Step 1: devastate the company you're in charge of. Step 2: collect millions. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-14/pg-e-s-former-ceo-to-walk-away-with-millions-after-wildfires https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-14/pg-e-s-fo...
- bleriot 8y ago
  Par for the course for a company that “illegally diverted over $100 million from a fund used for safety operations, and instead used it for executive compensation and bonuses” according to the state.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Any chance California is going to claw that money back and execs face criminal charges?
    - lisper 8y ago
      I'll give long odds against.
    - gamblor956 8y ago
      Small chance for the former, but essentially no chance for the latter.
    - Ar-Curunir 8y ago
      This is a neoliberal capitalist country we're talking about. There's no chance of either happening.
    - masonic 8y ago
      back?. The party just gave them a huge bailout bill last session.
taf2 8y ago
I wonder if the cost of providing energy with so much liability will force California to solar e.g. individual homes and businesses providing their own power?
- jedberg 8y ago
  That's actually part of the problem. Profits have been going down for years because their most profitable consumers (rich people with big houses) have been going solar. They don't adequately separate the cost of infrastructure from the cost of energy, so they've had less for infra. Also we just passed a law to make this even worse by requiring solar on new homes.
DoubleCribble 8y ago
Ohhh, will Julia Roberts be in the movie adaptation of this latest PG&E debacle?[0] She was so good in the last one. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Brockovich_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Brockovich_(film)
- astrodust 8y ago
  One of the few times where Erin Brockovich 2: Electric Boogaloo would be entirely on-point.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  A tweet from the real Erin Brockovich was the top Google Tweet result for [pg&e] this morning: https://twitter.com/ErinBrockovich/status/1084830379759075330 https://twitter.com/ErinBrockovich/status/108483037975907533...
lordnacho 8y ago
How are Californians going to be better off? When they go out of business, some other entity will pick up the equipment and staff. Probably a lot of institutional memory will carry over.
- zamfi 8y ago
  Bankruptcy doesn't necessarily mean they "go out of business". Someone will keep electricity flowing in northern California...
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  Well, for one, they can maybe be hopeful that money set aside for keeping down the fire risk by trimming trees near power lines/stations wouldn't be diverted to executive bonuses, as PG&E did.
- astrodust 8y ago
  They don't murder the employees when the company goes bankrupt, you know.
  - lordnacho 8y ago
    Which is the whole point of my remark. Why do people think it's going to help them to have essentially the same co running their power again?
cameldrv 8y ago
I don't like PG&E, but if you have a gas leak in your house, and a guy walks down the street in front smoking a cigarette and everything blows up, does the smoker buy you a new house? The natural environment in parts of California has reached an inherently unstable state, with no logging, no prescribed burns, extensive suppression, global warming, draught, and limited brush clearing.
- jhayward 8y ago
  This is a fatally flawed analogy. A more apt analogy would be one involving a professional engineer designing a system that creates uncontained electrical arcs for use in an environment known to be explosive.
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  I don't like PG&E, but if you have a gas leak in your house, and a guy walks down the street in front smoking a cigarette and everything blows up, does the smoker buy you a new house? "Most ironic analogy ever"? You know PG&E is a gas company? Not only that, PG&E has killed people with gas line leaks? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion
  - Aloha 8y ago
    this is a whataboutit response, and doesnt really engage with the users comment.
    - joe_the_user 8y ago
      The users' comment was about multiple liability but his example strongly implied the gas leaker and not the smoker should take the blames. PG&E is only partly for all of the terrible things that have happened under their watch but liable enough that they deserve harsh penalties. I think it is telling when someone groping for a defense by analogy can't help but stumble onto an analogy that says the opposite of what's intended. It can be symptom that one's overall argument is quite thin.
crushcrashcrush 8y ago
Why is something as vital as ENERGY managed by a private company with profit motives? Not trying to be NATIONALIZE EVERYTHING or whatever, but we decided its worthwhile for water... why not power?
- zaroth 8y ago
  And that whole water thing always works out flawlessly, too?
- 4thaccount 8y ago
  Energy used to be fully regulated for a long time. All in all, they did a good job while getting a guaranteed return. Deregulation didn't really deregulate everything (the industry is still super regulated), but it brought in competition and more market based mechanisms. Stoft's power system economics textbook covers this subject pretty well. Deregulation helps incentivize innovation, but it isn't a slam dunk. We have a different system now that is definitely better in some ways and worse off in others. I doubt wildfire safety would have been radically different prior to deregulation.
- pixl97 8y ago
  Ok, let's turn this situation around. The most dangerous fires occur at the Urban Wildland Interface(UWI). Instead of spending countless billions in an attempt to reduce the likelihood of a power line fire, in a place that historically has fires, we nationalize not building houses there? The number of wildland fires will increase. The number of people living in the UWI will increase. The number of people losing all their shit in wildland fires, therefore, will increase. It seems like subsiding this bad behavior is the first thing to stop.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

140 points by laurex 8y ago

gerbal 8y ago

A preview of some of the economic toll of climate change

sgc 8y ago
PG&E has been obviously negligent to any casual observer for at least the last 40 years. But yes, there is more to come.
- heyjudy 8y ago
  - Found negligent in the San Bruno gas pipeline explosion - Found negligent in the pollution in SoCal Hinkley groundwater pollution
floatrock 8y ago
You're getting downvoted b/c there is enough negligence and history involved that there are other more proximate reasons so the "climate change" line feels off-topic, but, you're not wrong. The bad maintenance on the transmission tower is what created the spark, but there's also the point that the area was such a dry tinderbox that one spark was able to ignite the tragedy. Resilient systems don't show such fragility. The fact that an unattended campfire, a hot muffler, or any other number of things (inadvertent or intentional) could have caused the same effect shows there's a systemic challenge here. We can grab whatever we legally can from this business malfeasance, but systemic challenges are much harder to deal with (and there's no one to easily blame)... The tinderbox is not going away, and whatever comes after PG&E is going to be operating in a far riskier business environment.
DuskStar 8y ago
"A preview of the dangers of trying to control the environment" would be a more accurate assessment of US wildfires, I'm afraid. After all, the biggest contributor to their size and deadliness is the absolutely wonderful idea the US Forest Service had back in the 30s to make sure every forest fire was put out by 10am the following morning. Put out all the fires -> fuel buildup -> fires so large you can't put them out. Climate change is a horrible thing, but blaming it for things it didn't cause is a fantastic way to validate right-wing fears. Not fears of climate change, but of irrelevant responses that give the government and their favored industries ever more power. These dangers might be massively overblown, but every time people do this it makes them a little more plausible, and a little easier to spread.

cwkoss 8y ago

Privatization of public services cannot work unless the private companies have liability for their actions. This is the necessary consequence of their negligence.

eastbayjake 8y ago
Perhaps just a little more complicated and nuanced than that: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-14/pg-amp-e-pays-the-cost-of-fires https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-14/pg-amp...
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  PG&E has a long history of negligence and stripping whatever value remains from PG&E's shareholders is an eminently appropriate penalty. PG&E may indeed not be entirely responsible for the wild fires but it's responsible enough that this kind of penalty is warranted - ie, trimming trees around PG&E of course was something they knew they had to do and that they failed to do (just like their failure to maintain the pipe that exploded earlier). How California deals with fire risks and utility costs going forward is complex question. Naturally, it's made more complex by the influence large corporations wield. In this day and age, bankruptcy still offers the possibility of PG&E sidling rate-payers with its cost while maintaining shareholder value, despite this being exactly what bankruptcy is intended to avoid. Naturally, I'd like to see the state of California prevent this but I'm not holding my breath. IE, California theoretically could seize PG&E and run it as a public utility but it probably won't and thus little will change.
- DannyBee 8y ago
  Sure. I wouldn't claim otherwise. However,there are some key things missing here: 1. Lot of states have strict liability of this form for utilities. 2. California is not entirely unique in the land mass of the united states (or the world) in the issues it faces here. It is only unique in that it has not done a good job overcoming them. All of these viewpoints seem to start from from a position that it's impossible for PG&E to succeed (due to global warming, legal climate, etc), and then ask "what do we do in that situation". But as mentioned, it's simply not impossible for PG&E to succeed, and also no evidence that it is particularly harder than it is in similarly situated areas.

tareqak 8y ago

Same story from the Associated Press: Utility seeks bankruptcy protection over California fires - https://apnews.com/5e70c4c99a044c4192d7ee52e38330f2 https://apnews.com/5e70c4c99a044c4192d7ee52e38330f2 .

smaili 8y ago

On a somewhat similar note, president Trump recently threatened to cut off funding for wildfires[0]. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/09/trump-threatens-to-cut-off-federal-funding-for-california-wildfire-relief.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/09/trump-threatens-to-cut-off-f...

isoskeles 8y ago
I think this is great news. Why would we want to give money to wildfires? They're pretty destructive, causing millions (billions?) of dollars in damage and killing innocent civilians. I do not think we should be giving money to wildfires. They can't even use the money anyway.
- DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
  They'd burn right through it anyway.
  - dylan604 8y ago
    What would the burn rate be compared to other start ups, and how much runway would they be given before they pull the plug?
devmunchies 8y ago
How many times does California need help until it, as its own entity, fixes the problem? Hopefully this lights a fire under the regulators in Sacramento.
- dylan604 8y ago
  How many times would Florida, Louisiana, etc need help until they fix the hurricane problem? There's definitely situations that people create that makes them much more susceptible to natural disasters, and I would go along with the "fix the problem" approach if this is the point you are making.

stefan_ 8y ago

Every year, they cause a fire or other natural disaster, then threaten bankruptcy, then get bailed out.

burtonator 8y ago
Capitalism for the poor. Socialism for the rich. If they continue to get bailed out I would prefer that we just have state run power or something more heavily regulated and monitored.
- metildaa 8y ago
  Socialize the losses and privatize the gains, but only for those who are wealthy and in power. That is our current system in America, too big to fail.

Aloha 8y ago

Consider the following: "PG&E didn’t anticipate how quickly the drought would overtake heavily wooded areas north of San Francisco and outside Sacramento, said Stephen Tankersley, who oversaw PG&E’s vegetation-management program between 1999 and 2015. “It’s hard to believe that anybody would have predicted that it would have been like this,” said Mr. Tankersley, now a utilities consultant. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Conditions on the ground worsened dramatically and quickly, said PG&E spokeswoman Lynsey Paulo. She said the utility has reacted with speed and urgency. “We are very aware of the risk and we are doing everything we can to keep our customers and the communities we serve safe,” she said. “PG&E considers wildfire risk as a top-tier enterprise risk. It is evident in our actions.” The utility removed 451,000 more trees from 2016 through 2018 than it had originally forecast, she said, in an “amped up” effort to deal with massive tree mortality." ... "The task was complicated because some dangerous trees were on private land, forcing PG&E to negotiate with landowners, said Bob Fratini, a retired PG&E vegetation-management manager. Residents sometimes pressured crews, he said, to trim just enough to satisfy minimum requirements. “Utilities should be given the right to remove any tree that could cause an outage or a fire,” he said. California regulators recently gave utilities more latitude in this area, saying they could shut off power to homes or businesses that prevent tree crews from working. PG&E’s Ms. Paulo said that isn’t necessary very often. Sometimes, PG&E’s tree-clearing created new problems. After PG&E workers removed two trees in January 2015 southeast of Sacramento, a gray pine was exposed to wind and began leaning, according to a state investigation. On a 102-degree day in September, the pine hit a 12,000-volt line and electricity ignited it, dropping embers onto dry grass and sparking the Butte Fire, which burned 70,868 acres and 921 buildings. Two people died." These two blocks of text to me make it sound more like what you'd traditionally call an 'act of god', and not malfeasance (unlike San Bruno). While its unfortunate people died, and that there were great losses, you when you have people living in land that historically (over tens of thousands of years) had regular burn cycles, then humans came along and kept putting the fires out, I have less sympathy for those who take a loss - they should have known it was a risk of living there. Also, I work with power utilities, having to turn the power off in a windy situation is an unwinnable situation, you either get complaints to the PUC, or you get higher fire risk - both are expensive to an extent to deal with - and without a historical record of fires in that area, its not really rational to just turn the power off, to tens of thousands of customers, and its harder to justify to your customers on its face - just as they are being excoriated now a failure to exert enough caution, if they had exerted the caution and nothing had happened, they would have been excoriated for exerting too much caution, again - its an unwinnable situation.

Zhenya 8y ago

https://outline.com/5bxFLb https://outline.com/5bxFLb Whole article

mroche 8y ago

Is there any part of California that runs power underground rather than overhead cables? I understand it’s a significant cost and effort (sometimes infeasible) but at this point in time, just based on the past few years, I’m surprised not to have heard of any large scale pushes for underground power.

magnetic 8y ago
I live in San Jose, CA. The feed that comes to my house is underground. In my backyard, along the fence, are electric wires up in the air to feed my neighbors. So it's a mix...
Diederich 8y ago
Depends on the neighborhood. I've lived in both. Here's one location where all of the cables are underground: https://goo.gl/maps/BhEVwjPSitF2 https://goo.gl/maps/BhEVwjPSitF2
iaabtpbtpnn 8y ago
Nah, we just string the cables haphazardly wherever, through trees is just fine, because of course it's always sunny and nice in California. It seriously looks like third world infrastructure to someone from another part of the country, where weather events happen often enough that the utility has to give a shit.
- dahdum 8y ago
  PG&E can’t afford to do that without raising capital. CPUC won’t approve rate hikes to finance that capital. Legislators pass no new laws or regulations. Then when it goes awry CPUC and legislators stand far back and decry PG&E for negligence.
  - bleriot 8y ago
    They could afford to pay out a regular dividend, illegally skipped safety measures on pipelines, and “an independent audit from the State of California issued a report stating that PG&E had illegally diverted over $100 million from a fund used for safety operations, and instead used it for executive compensation and bonuses”. Ratepayers and taxpayers should never have to pay for deliberate executive negligence. https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-pge-safety-investigation-20181214-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-pge-safety-investigat...

joering2 8y ago

$10,000 bet not a single Exec will go to jail.

amluto 8y ago

To what extent could PG&E mitigate these problems with improved safely devices? There are various devices that can try to minimize arcing when there is a fault, for example Petersen coils. [0] California already has a distinct advantage here compared to the rest of the country. In the other 49 states (to the best of my knowledge), it's legal for the utilities to use a conductor that is grounded at multiple locations as a neutral. This type of arrangement induces nasty currents through the ground (which is, I think, why it's illegal in CA -- those currents can apparently be quite harmful to livestock that are being milked with metallic equipment, not to mention hazardous to people in swimming pools and such). But it also means that, if another phase shorts to ground, then there is necessarily a large amount of fault current available. In CA, the distribution wires can't legally have any intentional current flowing between themselves and ground, which means circuits that detect residual current will work. [0] https://www.modernpowersystems.com/features/featurenew-roles-for-the-recloser-in-the-modern-mv-network-4928052/ https://www.modernpowersystems.com/features/featurenew-roles...

cududa 8y ago
Maintaining the equipments integrity and trimming trees seems like a good start
- lisper 8y ago
  They do. I'm a PH&E customer living in a woodsy area, and they trim our trees regularly.
lutorm 8y ago
The US uses overhead wires everywhere, because it's cheaper to install than underground wires. But then you're subject to damage from trees, wind, icing, etc. Everyone pays in worse uptime, and apparently also in fire risk.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  No, not everywhere. Most of NYC uses underground wires. My neighborhood in Colorado near Boulder built in the 60s uses underground wires as well.

cbhl 8y ago

Is municipal red tape at all a factor in PG&E's under-maintenance of its lines and equipment? I feel like CEQA lawsuits and municipal planning codes and committees are given as reasons why we don't have denser housing and more fiber-to-the-home and dedicated bus lanes in the bay area (the Van Ness CEQA report took something like six years to do). Do the engineers for AT&T and Comcast and PG&E find similar frustrations with the process here?

mistrial9 8y ago
nice try -- cost-cutting by using sub-contractors to do legally mandated maintenance up and down northern California was well-documented. In addition, PG&E was found guilty of of obfuscating and avoiding legally required maintenance records for gas pipelines in the San Bruno case. Utterly unacceptable and sadly predictable.
- anonuser123456 8y ago
  "cost-cutting by using sub-contractors to do legally mandated maintenance up and down northern California was well-documented." Contractors are licensed by the state to operate in their respective trade. Making the claim that contractors do sub par work is just as much an indictment of the state for licensing them in the first place.

rgbrenner 8y ago

In 2017, PG&E was fined for a fire in 2015. In 2017, they were implicated in 17 wildfires that killed dozens. All on her watch. The CEO does nothing to address the risk. Now she resigns, and: PG&E is planning to award her a perhaps less-than-golden parachute that could range from $2.36 million to $4.46 million, depending on how her departure is categorized Step 1: devastate the company you're in charge of. Step 2: collect millions. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-14/pg-e-s-former-ceo-to-walk-away-with-millions-after-wildfires https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-14/pg-e-s-fo...

bleriot 8y ago
Par for the course for a company that “illegally diverted over $100 million from a fund used for safety operations, and instead used it for executive compensation and bonuses” according to the state.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Any chance California is going to claw that money back and execs face criminal charges?
  - lisper 8y ago
    I'll give long odds against.
  - gamblor956 8y ago
    Small chance for the former, but essentially no chance for the latter.
  - Ar-Curunir 8y ago
    This is a neoliberal capitalist country we're talking about. There's no chance of either happening.
  - masonic 8y ago
    back?. The party just gave them a huge bailout bill last session.

taf2 8y ago

I wonder if the cost of providing energy with so much liability will force California to solar e.g. individual homes and businesses providing their own power?

jedberg 8y ago
That's actually part of the problem. Profits have been going down for years because their most profitable consumers (rich people with big houses) have been going solar. They don't adequately separate the cost of infrastructure from the cost of energy, so they've had less for infra. Also we just passed a law to make this even worse by requiring solar on new homes.

DoubleCribble 8y ago

Ohhh, will Julia Roberts be in the movie adaptation of this latest PG&E debacle?[0] She was so good in the last one. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Brockovich_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Brockovich_(film)

astrodust 8y ago
One of the few times where Erin Brockovich 2: Electric Boogaloo would be entirely on-point.
nostrademons 8y ago
A tweet from the real Erin Brockovich was the top Google Tweet result for [pg&e] this morning: https://twitter.com/ErinBrockovich/status/1084830379759075330 https://twitter.com/ErinBrockovich/status/108483037975907533...

lordnacho 8y ago

How are Californians going to be better off? When they go out of business, some other entity will pick up the equipment and staff. Probably a lot of institutional memory will carry over.

zamfi 8y ago
Bankruptcy doesn't necessarily mean they "go out of business". Someone will keep electricity flowing in northern California...
InclinedPlane 8y ago
Well, for one, they can maybe be hopeful that money set aside for keeping down the fire risk by trimming trees near power lines/stations wouldn't be diverted to executive bonuses, as PG&E did.
astrodust 8y ago
They don't murder the employees when the company goes bankrupt, you know.
- lordnacho 8y ago
  Which is the whole point of my remark. Why do people think it's going to help them to have essentially the same co running their power again?

cameldrv 8y ago

I don't like PG&E, but if you have a gas leak in your house, and a guy walks down the street in front smoking a cigarette and everything blows up, does the smoker buy you a new house? The natural environment in parts of California has reached an inherently unstable state, with no logging, no prescribed burns, extensive suppression, global warming, draught, and limited brush clearing.

jhayward 8y ago
This is a fatally flawed analogy. A more apt analogy would be one involving a professional engineer designing a system that creates uncontained electrical arcs for use in an environment known to be explosive.
joe_the_user 8y ago
I don't like PG&E, but if you have a gas leak in your house, and a guy walks down the street in front smoking a cigarette and everything blows up, does the smoker buy you a new house? "Most ironic analogy ever"? You know PG&E is a gas company? Not only that, PG&E has killed people with gas line leaks? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion
- Aloha 8y ago
  this is a whataboutit response, and doesnt really engage with the users comment.
  - joe_the_user 8y ago
    The users' comment was about multiple liability but his example strongly implied the gas leaker and not the smoker should take the blames. PG&E is only partly for all of the terrible things that have happened under their watch but liable enough that they deserve harsh penalties. I think it is telling when someone groping for a defense by analogy can't help but stumble onto an analogy that says the opposite of what's intended. It can be symptom that one's overall argument is quite thin.

crushcrashcrush 8y ago

Why is something as vital as ENERGY managed by a private company with profit motives? Not trying to be NATIONALIZE EVERYTHING or whatever, but we decided its worthwhile for water... why not power?

zaroth 8y ago
And that whole water thing always works out flawlessly, too?
4thaccount 8y ago
Energy used to be fully regulated for a long time. All in all, they did a good job while getting a guaranteed return. Deregulation didn't really deregulate everything (the industry is still super regulated), but it brought in competition and more market based mechanisms. Stoft's power system economics textbook covers this subject pretty well. Deregulation helps incentivize innovation, but it isn't a slam dunk. We have a different system now that is definitely better in some ways and worse off in others. I doubt wildfire safety would have been radically different prior to deregulation.
pixl97 8y ago
Ok, let's turn this situation around. The most dangerous fires occur at the Urban Wildland Interface(UWI). Instead of spending countless billions in an attempt to reduce the likelihood of a power line fire, in a place that historically has fires, we nationalize not building houses there? The number of wildland fires will increase. The number of people living in the UWI will increase. The number of people losing all their shit in wildland fires, therefore, will increase. It seems like subsiding this bad behavior is the first thing to stop.

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