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PG&E Outage Darkens Northern California Amid Wildfire Threat

121 points by Metacelsus 7y ago

creato 7y ago
Assigning significant blame to PGE for fires even when their equipment is at fault is stupid. The main factor in every big fire is hot, dry conditions. It doesn't really matter where the initial spark comes from, it's inevitable that big fires will happen in conditions like this. I think a reasonable way to handle this would be to assign liability for fires according to the cost of handling a typical fire, not the specific fire. It shouldn't matter whether effectively the same negligent act causes a small brush fire that causes no damage and goes out by itself or a monster wildfire. The difference between those two outcomes has nothing to do with the negligent actions and everything to do with the surrounding conditions.
- dbcurtis 7y ago
  Um... PG&E was way behind on brush clearing. They still are. Of course, there are people that don’t want PG&E to trim their trees, hopefully those folks have got religion now. The Santa Rosa fire was absolutely started by PG&E equipment and deferred brush clearing.
  - throwaway5752 7y ago
    Yes. Nobody, including the person you replied to, is disputing that. But we're scapegoating PG&E for global warming. CA is a tinderbox compared to 20 years ago. Utilities are always behind on brush clearing everywhere. It's only now it's creating megafires. It's not environmentalists either. It's the average summer being 3-4 degrees F hotter than average and increasing.
    - dbcurtis 7y ago
      No. I am not scapegoating PG&E for global warming. With proper line maintenance Santa Rosa would not have had 5 separate transformers start fires. The wind was bad enough that they probably would have also had to cut power to not spark any fires. Climate change is a thing, yes, but PG&E dodging necessary expenses is also a thing.
      - product50 7y ago
        Ok - so then suffer with power cuts. It is wrong to say that PG&E is a likely worse than any other US utility company. And playing safe than sorry is the natural outcome if we are going to blame them every fire.
        lubujackson 7y ago
        Ok, so then why not do routine maintenance? Why do you support PG&E ignoring maintenance while taking home profits for decades? Or are you a shill?
    - ncmncm 7y ago
      California just came out of many years of drought without those fires. The fires happened after an unusually wet year. It is negligence. Brush and tree clearance are not harder than 50 years ago. There was no sudden surge of trees and brush to cut. They just chose not to do it.
      - anjel 7y ago
        And that brush and tree maintenance is way cheaper than the cost of lost economic activity these intentional outages will generate. It's a liability waiver shakedown for sure.
      - throwaway5752 7y ago
        Didn't the preceding years of drought kill a bunch of trees, leaving standing fuel? Also, wasn't 2017 the hottest summer ever in California at the time, although I think 2018 broke that record, and I think it's on track to break the record again in 2019?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
breck 7y ago
Won’t the number of deaths from power outages outnumber the deaths from fires? Also, what if a fire still happens, and people don’t know because the power is out?
- cnst 7y ago
  > Also, what if a fire still happens, and people don’t know because the power is out? Good pount! If a tree falls in the forest, will it make any noise?
Reedx 7y ago
Doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. And there are second-order effects to consider: - Food waste from freezers and refrigerators - Candle use increasing risk of fires - Generators being purchased that will largely end up collecting dust or being returned - Loss of business at local stores/restaurants/bars/etc What else?
- dbcurtis 7y ago
  Gradma’s oxygen concentrator shutting down. Hopefully those folks preemptively went to urgent care just to hang out in the waiting room. EBT terminals shutting down — that caused a riot in New England a couple of years ago.
- gothroach 7y ago
  I spent eleven hours today hooking up large generators (up to 2MW) for businesses. I'm a controls/PLC guy so it's not what I normally do but this was an all-hands-on-deck situation. Two places had their fire alarms go off as soon as the power was restored (due to issues with fire pump controls too long to get into here) and they weren't able to disable the alarm in time to prevent a fire dispatch. Fire resources getting needlessly tied up plus a ton of hastily-connected generators seems like a recipe for a problem. Side note, I lost track of how many times I had to explain to people why their giant solar arrays wouldn't be able to power their facility when the grid is down.
  - mycall 7y ago
    > I had to explain to people why their giant solar arrays wouldn't be able to power their facility when the grid is down Is there an actual size of solar array that could power their facility?
    - ncmncm 7y ago
      Very few solar panel arrays provide power at night. Those that do have energy storage systems attached that were very expensive to add. When the purpose of the array is to save on expense of peak-usage power, storage is not essential and is often omitted. Even in the daytime, without grid access you need storage because the power produced does not rise and fall with your load. Turn on the microwave and the clothes dryer, and instantaneous load may exceed what the panels are producing right now. A cloud going by reduces generation, possibly below current load.
dbcurtis 7y ago
So I’m sitting here in 94087 waiting for the lights to go out, but still have electricity here. Depite PG&E’s robo-caller leaving me a warning twice a day. Anyway, my generator is ready to go so that the freezer doesn’t thaw. Otherwise so far it has been a non-event.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  Unless it's a quirk of power transmission, I'm surprised much of that area would be affected. I was thinking anything west of Foothill would be dicey.
  - dbcurtis 7y ago
    Apparently most of 94087 is good, but my little corner of it seems to share a feed with some of the Cupertino hill country. At least going by the outage maps I have seen.
    - dehrmann 7y ago
      Ahh. Yeah; all the maps I saw looked like hill country.
vaxman 7y ago
PG&E will be seized for this.
- intortus 7y ago
  We can only hope.
  - jacquesc 7y ago
    What in CA state government history makes you think they will do a better job managing the electrical grid?
    - ikiris 7y ago
      TVA and hundreds of others seem to do just fine
      - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
        What in CA government history makes you think they will do a better job managing the electrical grid? California government seems to be more dysfunctional than government in many other places. TVA may not be a valid data point.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  And then what? Clear space around transmission lines? Bury transmissions lines? Costs money. Keep the power going when it's risky? Fires. Raise rates for all customers, you'll get pretty angry people. Realistically, all you can do is raise rates for people in risky areas to cover the cost of either maintenance or fires. This is just the consequence of suing PG&E for fires.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - brianpgordon 7y ago
    PG&E paid $798 million in dividends in 2017 and $925 million in 2016.
jjeaff 7y ago
So their plan is just to completely turn off the power anytime there is a fire hazard? What if the hazard remains for weeks? This seems more like a stunt to convince the state to release them from some liability.
- hurrdurr2 7y ago
  I think you hit the nail on the head there. This is basically PG&E C suite folks blackmailing the state.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    I.e., "Look what you made us do!" The Santa Rosa fire started from five+ places where wires swung and arced and set surrounding branches on fire. They just sent a crew out to each one. If after the fifth incident, they had cut power for just a few hours, there would have been no conflagration. If they had cut back the branches so they did not surround the wires, as they are expected to do and used to do, there would have been no conflagration. This is PGE very clearly demanding that the state act to free them from their responsibilities. If the state does, PGE thould also be freed from any responsibility to return a profit to shareholders, or to pay salaries to existing executives.
- dbcurtis 7y ago
  It might be a stunt. I still think it is the right thing to do. PG&E has a huge amount of deferred brush clearing to work through. Even if the day after the Santa Rosa fire they had trippled the crew sizes and had been working non-stop they still would not have worked it all down. Those are just the facts on the ground. Cutting power is much better than starting fires.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    Almost all of the area cut did not have high winds. It was a stunt.
- pwarner 7y ago
  It's very possible there are politics at play here, but the NWS forecast sounds like something we won't get every year? Although we had it in 2017 in the North Bay and 2018 in Butte county, so maybe it is going to be common? https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=MTR&issuedby=MTR&product=AFD&format=CI&version=1&glossary=1 https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=MTR&issuedby=M...
dehrmann 7y ago
You can't have 99.99% reliable power, cheap power, transmission through tinerboxes, and hold the utility liable for fires. I expect parts of the Bay Area not in the hills to not lose power because if you can't clear brush around the high-voltage lines going to urban centers, you have no business being a utility.
- lubujackson 7y ago
  I'm surprised to see so much unconsidered support for PG&E here. It's not about holding the utility "liable for fires", it is holding them liable for gross negligence by failing to perform critical or routine maintenance. These aren't difficult or impossible problems. The Camp Fire was caused by a system that was significantly overdue for upgrading: https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-e-knew-for-years-its-lines-could-spark-wildfires-and-didnt-fix-them-11562768885 https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-e-knew-for-years-its-lines-c... Time and again, PG&E ignored maintenance requirements and funneled profits to execs and stockholders. The San Bruno pipeline explosion was also entirely preventable: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/How-PG-E-missed-chance-to-avert-San-Bruno-blast-6283494.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/How-PG-E-missed-chanc... What's more, PG&E falsified safety records as a matter of course: https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/15/us/pge-falsifying-records/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/15/us/pge-falsifying-records/ind... So PG&E showed tidy profits by ignoring their infrastructure and doing it so completely that their people on the street simply lied about maintaining things because no one cared... until stuff began to systematically began to blow up and burn down: https://www.abc10.com/article/news/investigations/the-history-of-pges-problems/103-b7badd6e-8eea-4ae3-a935-8628ba98b87e https://www.abc10.com/article/news/investigations/the-histor... The problem is one of accountability. PG&E execs roll from court case to court case but face no risk of personal jail time for decisions that have caused tens to hundreds of preventable deaths: https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-pge-criminal-20160810-snap-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-pge-c... So the courts get more and more frustrated, fining PG&E larger and larger amounts. But the utility never actually fix their known problems, they simply pass the bill back to their customers, declare bankruptcy and, at this point, turn off the power preemptively as some sort of power move to try to force government compliance.
DangitBobby 7y ago
> Meteorologists said the strong winds that were forecast in the hills and canyons on Wednesday resembled those that propelled deadly fires in the wine country of Napa and Sonoma Counties two years ago. The power company, which declared bankruptcy in January in the face of tens of billions of dollars in liabilities from past fires, said it was not taking chances this time. Makes sense.
- 14 7y ago
  Idk, a power company that can not safely power people year round does not make any sense to me. Obviously they want to shift that liability here but I would argue if you can't supply power year round then you have no business turning a profit and as others have said here if it wasn't for the fires they caused they were set to turn a profit. Perhaps that profit came at the expense of proper equipment maintenance? So no a business selling an essential service that makes its shareholders profits makes absolutely no sense when they had money they could of used to fix some of the lines.
  - edoo 7y ago
    That is to be expected with a government supported monopoly. Buckle up.
cmurf 7y ago
1. State takes it over, destroys the shareholders (they've mismanaged the company, so I'm not terribly sympathetic to them) 2. State releases them from their liabilities, gets nothing but debt and lawsuits out of the deal, effectively insures the shareholders bad management. 3. State refuses to release them from liability, shareholders take a haircut or perhaps worst case are destroyed, and state is caught holding a large amount of the liability anyway in the ensuing bankruptcy. The state should not be blackmailed. Option 1 has the least moral hazard and there's an option for the state to spin it off as a private company later, and California citizens profit.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  IANAL, but ISTM you'd need to suffer through a bit of #3 before judges would let you try #1...
  - kelnos 7y ago
    Didn't we already do that, a year ago?
- gimmeThaBeet 7y ago
  The problem with 1 and 3 that isn't accounted for is that then you have go on dealing with your other utilities acting like you didn't just eat their neighbor's heart on national television. When utilities bring their rate cases to the CPUC, they're factoring in the liabilities they face. If now you're one fire away from the State of California ruining you, their going to argue they need higher return on investment, higher rates, higher revenues to accommodate infrastructure, and they're going to be right. Policy people aren't going to swallow that sitting down because it's political poison, they burn the state down so you grant them rate increases. No matter whose hands their in, most of the risk is going to be borne by the ratepayers. Public or private, short of redesigning the entire grid, that risk doesn't go away.
  - jdashg 7y ago
    Other utilities being terrified is a feature, if it prevents the reckless disregard for public good we've seen at PG&E. Private utilities live by the grace of the public, for the service of the public. Fail the public, get replaced. The state is blessed with the ability to push water uphill via the taxbase coffers, if no reasonable rate is viable.
PureParadigm 7y ago
At UC Berkeley all classes were cancelled today (Wednesday) because PG&E said campus would lose power. Buildings, libraries, computing services all shut down... but power stayed on all day. I'm sure the administration is very upset that all this happened for no reason.
- cameldrv 7y ago
  Not very long ago, people would have just improvised solutions to not having power. For classrooms with windows, do a lecture without PowerPoint. For those without, maybe set up some battery powered lighting, open the doors, or just hold the lecture on the lawn. I am very dismayed with the recent tendency in America for administrators of institutions to just give up when the slightest obstacle is put in their path.
  - yborg 7y ago
    It's driven by liability concerns. Somebody falls down the stairs because the lights were off and sues the University.
  - zenexer 7y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if there are disability concerns. Elevators that don't work, no electricity for medical devices, etc.
  - PureParadigm 7y ago
    Yes, there's definitely some truth in what you're saying -- UC Berkeley managed back in 1868 presumably without power, but it's also much bigger and has different facilities now. It's not as simple as just telling 40,000+ students to improvise. Many buildings, especially those with deep basements (like Soda Hall) may have ventilation problems without power. With the number of students here, holding lecture on the lawn or even rearranging to rooms with windows would be complete chaos, assuming that's even possible. To top it all off, elevators might also not function and cause issues for people in wheelchairs, etc. The current news now is classes will be held unless the power actually does go out.
cameldrv 7y ago
The Camp fire was legally PG&E's fault, and you can blame them for not maintaining their equipment and starting a fire, but you can't blame them for the magnitude of the fire. The Camp fire was so huge because: a) Large parts of California have fire as part of their natural ecological lifecycle. In most of the U.S., downfall wood rots, but in most of California, it's too dry so it just sits there building up until it catches on fire. b) People like to live near or in the woods, like they can in other states, so they lobby the government to suppress fires. Suppressing fires causes more buildup of downfall wood. If fires are always suppressed, the energy will simply keep building up until it can support a fire so fast and so extreme that it cannot be contained by Cal Fire. c) We're experiencing some changes in the climate, and we just got out of a huge drought that killed off a very large number of trees in California. There will always be ignition sources, whether it's a camp fire, a cigarette, power lines, an arsonist, a truck with a hot catalytic converter parked over dry grass, or lightning, large amounts of combustible material laying on the ground will eventually burn. If we just say the problem is poorly maintained power lines and fix all of them, or turn off the power for weeks every year, nothing will change. The fuel will still be there and eventually something will light it on fire. I highly recommend this lecture by Stephen Pyne that goes into all of this and has some extremely interesting information about the history of fire suppression in the U.S., and how the Native Americans learned how to effectively manage fire in California over centuries. http://longnow.org/seminars/02016/feb/09/fire-slow-fire-fast-fire-deep/ http://longnow.org/seminars/02016/feb/09/fire-slow-fire-fast...
- eutropia 7y ago
  I was so amazed when I learned that many Western coniferous trees adapted to drop their lower limbs as they grow and only keep the trunk free of extra kindling near the ground, so they can survive brush fires easily. That's one of the reasons that visibility is so nice out west in the woods! Not as many branches close to the ground where you're walking.
- product50 7y ago
  While PG&E is definitely at fault here, I feel California deserves this type of treatment. With the extremely stringent regulations which place PG&E at risk for massive fines/penalty for wildfires even if they take all possible precautions, this is the logical outcome of a company trying to stay afloat.
aaron695 7y ago
Lucky we spend so much time worrying about cyber hackers taking out the power grid. Perhaps leaving mostly flights of fantasy and analysing real issues is what we need to concentrate on. People WILL die because of this. The only question is around how many, and perhaps how many this might save given we are, where we are. Without trying to put a estimated number of deaths caused, we won't get anywhere.
gnicholas 7y ago
The communications around this outage have been a complete mess. PG&E claimed the outage was being driven by high temperatures, low humidity, and high winds. My town, near Redwood City, was supposed to lose power today at noon. This was perplexing to us because it was not hot (75 degrees), dry (40+ percent humidity), or windy (6 mph). But everyone has been running around preparing for the outage that we were assured would come. They’ve now pushed back the outage to midnight, but I have no idea whether that will actually happen. And of course, their website has been down pretty much the entire day, and the phone lines are clogged. At the very least, they should have made sure the website could handle the load. They’ve been talking about the possibility of this shutdown for months, so there’s no excuse for the website being completely unprepared.
- cnst 7y ago
  The fact that all these corporations with billion-dollar budgets cannot make their websites work I'll never understand. California population is 40 million folks. It's trivial to have a single dedicated webserver handle 10k requests per second as a starting point. That means that it'll take 4000 seconds to handle everyone's requests in aggregate, should they be made at the very same time — that's just a little over an hour. Of course, folks won't make requests at exactly same time, and we aren't limited to a single server, either, and each server is actually capable of handling way more than 10k req/sec in the first place, after some optimisation. E.g., for 50 bucks a month, anyone can easily run a service where, on average, every single resident of California can get info from a webpage about the current status once every hour without any delay. Simple round-robin DNS, and for 500 bucks per month, we can handle 10 requests per hour from every single resident. Etc. (Keep in mind that a brief search indicates a single server is actually capable of handling 500k req/sec, not just 10k, so, I'm being very conservative here with the 10k number.) Yet all these companies spends millions of dollars on their IT infrastructure and teams, procure all sorts of external CDNs, and yet cannot make their website perform to these most basic specs. Why? Alas, that's because they gotta have all those fancy graphics, the tracking for user experience, and all the dynamically-generated and uncacheable webpages that costs millions of dollars to maintain and which can't withstand these most basic loads.
- kelnos 7y ago
baron816 7y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla got a lot of orders for panels and batteries this week.
- makomk 7y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised either, but it might not help people all that much. I don't think Tesla's current Powerwall can charge from solar when the grid's down due to the AC link between the solar inverter and the Powerwall only working when connected to the grid.
abstractbarista 7y ago
The fact that anywhere in the USA has planned blackouts is absolutely unacceptable. Build the infrastructure in a manner which is impervious to high winds. Glad I don't live in CA, because it sounds like the electricity is more expensive yet less reliable. I guess this happens because they are legally at fault for causing fires. I'm not sure that's sane, unless they can be proven to be grossly negligent, like if they allowed lines to sag right above the ground.
- iamhamm 7y ago
  I’d recommend Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow. I no longer believe the impervious system is possible. I do think PG&E needs to be forced to invest more in the infrastructure, but, at the end of the day, these accidents will still happen imo.
35787 7y ago
The problem isn’t pge, it’s the weather. How does anyone expect pge to never allow a single failure? They used to happen all the time and it didn’t matter because California wasn’t a fucking tinder box. The problem isn’t pge it’s the tinderbox. Take away pge and you will still have fires as was demonstrated today in Moraga where 50 acres burned where there was no power. Take away the tinderbox and you won’t have fires. Everyone hating on pge is nothing short of a mass hallucination.
- rrss 7y ago
  This would make a lot more sense if the failures of PG&E infrastructure that caused previous fires were not because of negligence. It's one thing to criticize the utility for a rare failure when they engaged in reasonable maintenance and quite another when the failure was due to poor maintenance hidden behind falsified records.
  - 35787 7y ago
    The point is that the fires aren’t caused by their negligence. They would have happened anyway as you just admitted. But the uproar is blaming them for fires. It’s incorrect.
- plorkyeran 7y ago
  PG&E literally falsified maintenance records. They are not innocent victims who did what they could to prevent fires.
josephdviviano 7y ago
For those looking for their motivations, here it is (recall PG&E filed chapter 11 to navigate liability payments): "Second, any catastrophic wildfires caused by PG&E this year could upend the bankruptcy proceedings. That is because both bondholders’ and shareholders’ reorganization plans allow investors to back out if PG&E even appears to cause any catastrophic wildfires. Specifically, both groups’ plans give investors the chance to withdraw their financing offers if unexplained fires in PG&E’s service area damage more than 500 buildings—unless its power lines were “de-energized” or turned off, or regulators clear it of responsibility. That may help explain the wide scope of this week’s precautionary power outages." The management has their backs up against the wall and the interest groups involved don't care at all whether you have power, they just want to extract value from this company. https://www.barrons.com/articles/pg-e-stock-slumps-after-judge-rules-bondholders-can-propose-bankruptcy-plan-51570711538 https://www.barrons.com/articles/pg-e-stock-slumps-after-jud...
yodon 7y ago
The SF Chronicle has an updating map of outage locations[0] [0]https://projects.sfchronicle.com/trackers/power-outages/ https://projects.sfchronicle.com/trackers/power-outages/

121 points by Metacelsus 7y ago

Assigning significant blame to PGE for fires even when their equipment is at fault is stupid. The main factor in every big fire is hot, dry conditions. It doesn't really matter where the initial spark comes from, it's inevitable that big fires will happen in conditions like this. I think a reasonable way to handle this would be to assign liability for fires according to the cost of handling a typical fire, not the specific fire. It shouldn't matter whether effectively the same negligent act causes a small brush fire that causes no damage and goes out by itself or a monster wildfire. The difference between those two outcomes has nothing to do with the negligent actions and everything to do with the surrounding conditions.

dbcurtis 7y ago
Um... PG&E was way behind on brush clearing. They still are. Of course, there are people that don’t want PG&E to trim their trees, hopefully those folks have got religion now. The Santa Rosa fire was absolutely started by PG&E equipment and deferred brush clearing.
- throwaway5752 7y ago
  Yes. Nobody, including the person you replied to, is disputing that. But we're scapegoating PG&E for global warming. CA is a tinderbox compared to 20 years ago. Utilities are always behind on brush clearing everywhere. It's only now it's creating megafires. It's not environmentalists either. It's the average summer being 3-4 degrees F hotter than average and increasing.
  - dbcurtis 7y ago
    No. I am not scapegoating PG&E for global warming. With proper line maintenance Santa Rosa would not have had 5 separate transformers start fires. The wind was bad enough that they probably would have also had to cut power to not spark any fires. Climate change is a thing, yes, but PG&E dodging necessary expenses is also a thing.
    - product50 7y ago
      Ok - so then suffer with power cuts. It is wrong to say that PG&E is a likely worse than any other US utility company. And playing safe than sorry is the natural outcome if we are going to blame them every fire.
      - lubujackson 7y ago
        Ok, so then why not do routine maintenance? Why do you support PG&E ignoring maintenance while taking home profits for decades? Or are you a shill?
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    California just came out of many years of drought without those fires. The fires happened after an unusually wet year. It is negligence. Brush and tree clearance are not harder than 50 years ago. There was no sudden surge of trees and brush to cut. They just chose not to do it.
    - anjel 7y ago
      And that brush and tree maintenance is way cheaper than the cost of lost economic activity these intentional outages will generate. It's a liability waiver shakedown for sure.
    - throwaway5752 7y ago
      Didn't the preceding years of drought kill a bunch of trees, leaving standing fuel? Also, wasn't 2017 the hottest summer ever in California at the time, although I think 2018 broke that record, and I think it's on track to break the record again in 2019?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

breck 7y ago

Won’t the number of deaths from power outages outnumber the deaths from fires? Also, what if a fire still happens, and people don’t know because the power is out?

cnst 7y ago
> Also, what if a fire still happens, and people don’t know because the power is out? Good pount! If a tree falls in the forest, will it make any noise?

Reedx 7y ago

Doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. And there are second-order effects to consider: - Food waste from freezers and refrigerators - Candle use increasing risk of fires - Generators being purchased that will largely end up collecting dust or being returned - Loss of business at local stores/restaurants/bars/etc What else?

dbcurtis 7y ago
Gradma’s oxygen concentrator shutting down. Hopefully those folks preemptively went to urgent care just to hang out in the waiting room. EBT terminals shutting down — that caused a riot in New England a couple of years ago.
gothroach 7y ago
I spent eleven hours today hooking up large generators (up to 2MW) for businesses. I'm a controls/PLC guy so it's not what I normally do but this was an all-hands-on-deck situation. Two places had their fire alarms go off as soon as the power was restored (due to issues with fire pump controls too long to get into here) and they weren't able to disable the alarm in time to prevent a fire dispatch. Fire resources getting needlessly tied up plus a ton of hastily-connected generators seems like a recipe for a problem. Side note, I lost track of how many times I had to explain to people why their giant solar arrays wouldn't be able to power their facility when the grid is down.
- mycall 7y ago
  > I had to explain to people why their giant solar arrays wouldn't be able to power their facility when the grid is down Is there an actual size of solar array that could power their facility?
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    Very few solar panel arrays provide power at night. Those that do have energy storage systems attached that were very expensive to add. When the purpose of the array is to save on expense of peak-usage power, storage is not essential and is often omitted. Even in the daytime, without grid access you need storage because the power produced does not rise and fall with your load. Turn on the microwave and the clothes dryer, and instantaneous load may exceed what the panels are producing right now. A cloud going by reduces generation, possibly below current load.

dbcurtis 7y ago

So I’m sitting here in 94087 waiting for the lights to go out, but still have electricity here. Depite PG&E’s robo-caller leaving me a warning twice a day. Anyway, my generator is ready to go so that the freezer doesn’t thaw. Otherwise so far it has been a non-event.

dehrmann 7y ago
Unless it's a quirk of power transmission, I'm surprised much of that area would be affected. I was thinking anything west of Foothill would be dicey.
- dbcurtis 7y ago
  Apparently most of 94087 is good, but my little corner of it seems to share a feed with some of the Cupertino hill country. At least going by the outage maps I have seen.
  - dehrmann 7y ago
    Ahh. Yeah; all the maps I saw looked like hill country.

vaxman 7y ago

PG&E will be seized for this.

intortus 7y ago
We can only hope.
- jacquesc 7y ago
  What in CA state government history makes you think they will do a better job managing the electrical grid?
  - ikiris 7y ago
    TVA and hundreds of others seem to do just fine
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      What in CA government history makes you think they will do a better job managing the electrical grid? California government seems to be more dysfunctional than government in many other places. TVA may not be a valid data point.
dehrmann 7y ago
And then what? Clear space around transmission lines? Bury transmissions lines? Costs money. Keep the power going when it's risky? Fires. Raise rates for all customers, you'll get pretty angry people. Realistically, all you can do is raise rates for people in risky areas to cover the cost of either maintenance or fires. This is just the consequence of suing PG&E for fires.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- brianpgordon 7y ago
  PG&E paid $798 million in dividends in 2017 and $925 million in 2016.

jjeaff 7y ago

So their plan is just to completely turn off the power anytime there is a fire hazard? What if the hazard remains for weeks? This seems more like a stunt to convince the state to release them from some liability.

hurrdurr2 7y ago
I think you hit the nail on the head there. This is basically PG&E C suite folks blackmailing the state.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  I.e., "Look what you made us do!" The Santa Rosa fire started from five+ places where wires swung and arced and set surrounding branches on fire. They just sent a crew out to each one. If after the fifth incident, they had cut power for just a few hours, there would have been no conflagration. If they had cut back the branches so they did not surround the wires, as they are expected to do and used to do, there would have been no conflagration. This is PGE very clearly demanding that the state act to free them from their responsibilities. If the state does, PGE thould also be freed from any responsibility to return a profit to shareholders, or to pay salaries to existing executives.
dbcurtis 7y ago
It might be a stunt. I still think it is the right thing to do. PG&E has a huge amount of deferred brush clearing to work through. Even if the day after the Santa Rosa fire they had trippled the crew sizes and had been working non-stop they still would not have worked it all down. Those are just the facts on the ground. Cutting power is much better than starting fires.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  Almost all of the area cut did not have high winds. It was a stunt.
pwarner 7y ago
It's very possible there are politics at play here, but the NWS forecast sounds like something we won't get every year? Although we had it in 2017 in the North Bay and 2018 in Butte county, so maybe it is going to be common? https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=MTR&issuedby=MTR&product=AFD&format=CI&version=1&glossary=1 https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=MTR&issuedby=M...

dehrmann 7y ago

You can't have 99.99% reliable power, cheap power, transmission through tinerboxes, and hold the utility liable for fires. I expect parts of the Bay Area not in the hills to not lose power because if you can't clear brush around the high-voltage lines going to urban centers, you have no business being a utility.

lubujackson 7y ago
I'm surprised to see so much unconsidered support for PG&E here. It's not about holding the utility "liable for fires", it is holding them liable for gross negligence by failing to perform critical or routine maintenance. These aren't difficult or impossible problems. The Camp Fire was caused by a system that was significantly overdue for upgrading: https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-e-knew-for-years-its-lines-could-spark-wildfires-and-didnt-fix-them-11562768885 https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-e-knew-for-years-its-lines-c... Time and again, PG&E ignored maintenance requirements and funneled profits to execs and stockholders. The San Bruno pipeline explosion was also entirely preventable: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/How-PG-E-missed-chance-to-avert-San-Bruno-blast-6283494.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/How-PG-E-missed-chanc... What's more, PG&E falsified safety records as a matter of course: https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/15/us/pge-falsifying-records/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/15/us/pge-falsifying-records/ind... So PG&E showed tidy profits by ignoring their infrastructure and doing it so completely that their people on the street simply lied about maintaining things because no one cared... until stuff began to systematically began to blow up and burn down: https://www.abc10.com/article/news/investigations/the-history-of-pges-problems/103-b7badd6e-8eea-4ae3-a935-8628ba98b87e https://www.abc10.com/article/news/investigations/the-histor... The problem is one of accountability. PG&E execs roll from court case to court case but face no risk of personal jail time for decisions that have caused tens to hundreds of preventable deaths: https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-pge-criminal-20160810-snap-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-pge-c... So the courts get more and more frustrated, fining PG&E larger and larger amounts. But the utility never actually fix their known problems, they simply pass the bill back to their customers, declare bankruptcy and, at this point, turn off the power preemptively as some sort of power move to try to force government compliance.

DangitBobby 7y ago

> Meteorologists said the strong winds that were forecast in the hills and canyons on Wednesday resembled those that propelled deadly fires in the wine country of Napa and Sonoma Counties two years ago. The power company, which declared bankruptcy in January in the face of tens of billions of dollars in liabilities from past fires, said it was not taking chances this time. Makes sense.

14 7y ago
Idk, a power company that can not safely power people year round does not make any sense to me. Obviously they want to shift that liability here but I would argue if you can't supply power year round then you have no business turning a profit and as others have said here if it wasn't for the fires they caused they were set to turn a profit. Perhaps that profit came at the expense of proper equipment maintenance? So no a business selling an essential service that makes its shareholders profits makes absolutely no sense when they had money they could of used to fix some of the lines.
- edoo 7y ago
  That is to be expected with a government supported monopoly. Buckle up.

cmurf 7y ago

1. State takes it over, destroys the shareholders (they've mismanaged the company, so I'm not terribly sympathetic to them) 2. State releases them from their liabilities, gets nothing but debt and lawsuits out of the deal, effectively insures the shareholders bad management. 3. State refuses to release them from liability, shareholders take a haircut or perhaps worst case are destroyed, and state is caught holding a large amount of the liability anyway in the ensuing bankruptcy. The state should not be blackmailed. Option 1 has the least moral hazard and there's an option for the state to spin it off as a private company later, and California citizens profit.

jessaustin 7y ago
IANAL, but ISTM you'd need to suffer through a bit of #3 before judges would let you try #1...
- kelnos 7y ago
  Didn't we already do that, a year ago?
gimmeThaBeet 7y ago
The problem with 1 and 3 that isn't accounted for is that then you have go on dealing with your other utilities acting like you didn't just eat their neighbor's heart on national television. When utilities bring their rate cases to the CPUC, they're factoring in the liabilities they face. If now you're one fire away from the State of California ruining you, their going to argue they need higher return on investment, higher rates, higher revenues to accommodate infrastructure, and they're going to be right. Policy people aren't going to swallow that sitting down because it's political poison, they burn the state down so you grant them rate increases. No matter whose hands their in, most of the risk is going to be borne by the ratepayers. Public or private, short of redesigning the entire grid, that risk doesn't go away.
- jdashg 7y ago
  Other utilities being terrified is a feature, if it prevents the reckless disregard for public good we've seen at PG&E. Private utilities live by the grace of the public, for the service of the public. Fail the public, get replaced. The state is blessed with the ability to push water uphill via the taxbase coffers, if no reasonable rate is viable.

PureParadigm 7y ago

At UC Berkeley all classes were cancelled today (Wednesday) because PG&E said campus would lose power. Buildings, libraries, computing services all shut down... but power stayed on all day. I'm sure the administration is very upset that all this happened for no reason.

cameldrv 7y ago
Not very long ago, people would have just improvised solutions to not having power. For classrooms with windows, do a lecture without PowerPoint. For those without, maybe set up some battery powered lighting, open the doors, or just hold the lecture on the lawn. I am very dismayed with the recent tendency in America for administrators of institutions to just give up when the slightest obstacle is put in their path.
- yborg 7y ago
  It's driven by liability concerns. Somebody falls down the stairs because the lights were off and sues the University.
- zenexer 7y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if there are disability concerns. Elevators that don't work, no electricity for medical devices, etc.
- PureParadigm 7y ago
  Yes, there's definitely some truth in what you're saying -- UC Berkeley managed back in 1868 presumably without power, but it's also much bigger and has different facilities now. It's not as simple as just telling 40,000+ students to improvise. Many buildings, especially those with deep basements (like Soda Hall) may have ventilation problems without power. With the number of students here, holding lecture on the lawn or even rearranging to rooms with windows would be complete chaos, assuming that's even possible. To top it all off, elevators might also not function and cause issues for people in wheelchairs, etc. The current news now is classes will be held unless the power actually does go out.

cameldrv 7y ago

The Camp fire was legally PG&E's fault, and you can blame them for not maintaining their equipment and starting a fire, but you can't blame them for the magnitude of the fire. The Camp fire was so huge because: a) Large parts of California have fire as part of their natural ecological lifecycle. In most of the U.S., downfall wood rots, but in most of California, it's too dry so it just sits there building up until it catches on fire. b) People like to live near or in the woods, like they can in other states, so they lobby the government to suppress fires. Suppressing fires causes more buildup of downfall wood. If fires are always suppressed, the energy will simply keep building up until it can support a fire so fast and so extreme that it cannot be contained by Cal Fire. c) We're experiencing some changes in the climate, and we just got out of a huge drought that killed off a very large number of trees in California. There will always be ignition sources, whether it's a camp fire, a cigarette, power lines, an arsonist, a truck with a hot catalytic converter parked over dry grass, or lightning, large amounts of combustible material laying on the ground will eventually burn. If we just say the problem is poorly maintained power lines and fix all of them, or turn off the power for weeks every year, nothing will change. The fuel will still be there and eventually something will light it on fire. I highly recommend this lecture by Stephen Pyne that goes into all of this and has some extremely interesting information about the history of fire suppression in the U.S., and how the Native Americans learned how to effectively manage fire in California over centuries. http://longnow.org/seminars/02016/feb/09/fire-slow-fire-fast-fire-deep/ http://longnow.org/seminars/02016/feb/09/fire-slow-fire-fast...

eutropia 7y ago
I was so amazed when I learned that many Western coniferous trees adapted to drop their lower limbs as they grow and only keep the trunk free of extra kindling near the ground, so they can survive brush fires easily. That's one of the reasons that visibility is so nice out west in the woods! Not as many branches close to the ground where you're walking.
product50 7y ago
While PG&E is definitely at fault here, I feel California deserves this type of treatment. With the extremely stringent regulations which place PG&E at risk for massive fines/penalty for wildfires even if they take all possible precautions, this is the logical outcome of a company trying to stay afloat.

aaron695 7y ago

Lucky we spend so much time worrying about cyber hackers taking out the power grid. Perhaps leaving mostly flights of fantasy and analysing real issues is what we need to concentrate on. People WILL die because of this. The only question is around how many, and perhaps how many this might save given we are, where we are. Without trying to put a estimated number of deaths caused, we won't get anywhere.

gnicholas 7y ago

The communications around this outage have been a complete mess. PG&E claimed the outage was being driven by high temperatures, low humidity, and high winds. My town, near Redwood City, was supposed to lose power today at noon. This was perplexing to us because it was not hot (75 degrees), dry (40+ percent humidity), or windy (6 mph). But everyone has been running around preparing for the outage that we were assured would come. They’ve now pushed back the outage to midnight, but I have no idea whether that will actually happen. And of course, their website has been down pretty much the entire day, and the phone lines are clogged. At the very least, they should have made sure the website could handle the load. They’ve been talking about the possibility of this shutdown for months, so there’s no excuse for the website being completely unprepared.

cnst 7y ago
The fact that all these corporations with billion-dollar budgets cannot make their websites work I'll never understand. California population is 40 million folks. It's trivial to have a single dedicated webserver handle 10k requests per second as a starting point. That means that it'll take 4000 seconds to handle everyone's requests in aggregate, should they be made at the very same time — that's just a little over an hour. Of course, folks won't make requests at exactly same time, and we aren't limited to a single server, either, and each server is actually capable of handling way more than 10k req/sec in the first place, after some optimisation. E.g., for 50 bucks a month, anyone can easily run a service where, on average, every single resident of California can get info from a webpage about the current status once every hour without any delay. Simple round-robin DNS, and for 500 bucks per month, we can handle 10 requests per hour from every single resident. Etc. (Keep in mind that a brief search indicates a single server is actually capable of handling 500k req/sec, not just 10k, so, I'm being very conservative here with the 10k number.) Yet all these companies spends millions of dollars on their IT infrastructure and teams, procure all sorts of external CDNs, and yet cannot make their website perform to these most basic specs. Why? Alas, that's because they gotta have all those fancy graphics, the tracking for user experience, and all the dynamically-generated and uncacheable webpages that costs millions of dollars to maintain and which can't withstand these most basic loads.
kelnos 7y ago

baron816 7y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla got a lot of orders for panels and batteries this week.

makomk 7y ago
I wouldn't be surprised either, but it might not help people all that much. I don't think Tesla's current Powerwall can charge from solar when the grid's down due to the AC link between the solar inverter and the Powerwall only working when connected to the grid.

abstractbarista 7y ago

The fact that anywhere in the USA has planned blackouts is absolutely unacceptable. Build the infrastructure in a manner which is impervious to high winds. Glad I don't live in CA, because it sounds like the electricity is more expensive yet less reliable. I guess this happens because they are legally at fault for causing fires. I'm not sure that's sane, unless they can be proven to be grossly negligent, like if they allowed lines to sag right above the ground.

iamhamm 7y ago
I’d recommend Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow. I no longer believe the impervious system is possible. I do think PG&E needs to be forced to invest more in the infrastructure, but, at the end of the day, these accidents will still happen imo.

35787 7y ago

The problem isn’t pge, it’s the weather. How does anyone expect pge to never allow a single failure? They used to happen all the time and it didn’t matter because California wasn’t a fucking tinder box. The problem isn’t pge it’s the tinderbox. Take away pge and you will still have fires as was demonstrated today in Moraga where 50 acres burned where there was no power. Take away the tinderbox and you won’t have fires. Everyone hating on pge is nothing short of a mass hallucination.

rrss 7y ago
This would make a lot more sense if the failures of PG&E infrastructure that caused previous fires were not because of negligence. It's one thing to criticize the utility for a rare failure when they engaged in reasonable maintenance and quite another when the failure was due to poor maintenance hidden behind falsified records.
- 35787 7y ago
  The point is that the fires aren’t caused by their negligence. They would have happened anyway as you just admitted. But the uproar is blaming them for fires. It’s incorrect.
plorkyeran 7y ago
PG&E literally falsified maintenance records. They are not innocent victims who did what they could to prevent fires.

josephdviviano 7y ago

For those looking for their motivations, here it is (recall PG&E filed chapter 11 to navigate liability payments): "Second, any catastrophic wildfires caused by PG&E this year could upend the bankruptcy proceedings. That is because both bondholders’ and shareholders’ reorganization plans allow investors to back out if PG&E even appears to cause any catastrophic wildfires. Specifically, both groups’ plans give investors the chance to withdraw their financing offers if unexplained fires in PG&E’s service area damage more than 500 buildings—unless its power lines were “de-energized” or turned off, or regulators clear it of responsibility. That may help explain the wide scope of this week’s precautionary power outages." The management has their backs up against the wall and the interest groups involved don't care at all whether you have power, they just want to extract value from this company. https://www.barrons.com/articles/pg-e-stock-slumps-after-judge-rules-bondholders-can-propose-bankruptcy-plan-51570711538 https://www.barrons.com/articles/pg-e-stock-slumps-after-jud...

yodon 7y ago

The SF Chronicle has an updating map of outage locations[0] [0]https://projects.sfchronicle.com/trackers/power-outages/ https://projects.sfchronicle.com/trackers/power-outages/