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It's absolutely crazy reading about these events happening in a first world country in the richest state in that country. Something has gone seriously wrong whe

It's absolutely crazy reading about these events happening in a first world country in the richest state in that country. Something has gone seriously wrong when we're seeing near-daily stories about power outages in the tech capital of the world. Combined with all the other issues plaguing CA right now, I can't see why companies still base themselves there. Eventually the "all the tech people are there" argument won't be strong enough and competing markets like NYC, Seattle, and Austin will win out.

dredmorbius 7y ago
In many parts of the world, power is unreliable due to a lack of resources -- fuel, capital, labour, distribution, maintenance. Power cuts occur, either scheduled or unscheduled, due to an inability to meet demand. The case in California is different. The fundamental resources are present: there is fuel (or, in many cases, hydroelectric, geothermal, nuclear, wind, or solar power) for generation. Distribution systems exist. There is no shortage of local labour. Systems aren't going offline due to direct failures of maintenance. Rather: the outages are prompted by a consequence risk. Given the extreme fire danger throughout the state, the least source of ignition creates a fire hazard, and electrical transmission and distribution equipment is a high risk for such ignition. Previous major wildfires have been sparked by: mower blades, rims of flat tires sparking on pavement, catalytic converters parked over dry grass, sparks from a hammer. And electrical equipment. There's a case to be made that PG&E have neglected maintenance activies not related directly to continued operation of their plant, but to risk mitigation, and I'm not going to argue one way or the other. But the fundamental problem California's electric utilities face is not that of most of the world, where means are insufficient, but that consequence is too great to ignore. I'm coming to see this generally as a late-stage dynamic in many technological areas, one in which the unintended consequences (sometimes unanticipated, often not) simply rise to a level of major significance. You might think of these generally as hygiene factors (the phrase I've been using). Past examples would include: - Basic personal and public hygiene factors for maintaining public health in cities. - Pollution control laws affecting solid, liquid, and gas emissions of activities and plants. - Environmental contamination as with lead, asbestos, pesticides, tobacco, sulfur dioxide ("acid rain"), and CO2. - Individual psychological and widespread sociological negative impacts of information overload, media saturation and manipulation, and computer systems overexposure. - Running extensive high-capacity electrical distribution systems through increasingly fire-prone landscapes. Or put another way: this is increasingly our future.
- PeterStuer 7y ago
  You could argue that the lack of resources also plays in California, not because of a fundamental shortfall, but due to all the resources being sucked out of the system by extreme capitalism.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Howso? Resources devoted to firefighting have increased by any possible measure.
- throw0101a 7y ago
  > Previous major wildfires have been sparked by: mower blades, rims of flat tires sparking on pavement, catalytic converters parked over dry grass, sparks from a hammer. And electrical equipment. A citation: * https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-29/how-do-wildfires-start https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-29/how-do-w... Another one: > Fear of insects. A rancher tried to plug a wasp’s nest in the ground by jamming a stake into the ground. That unleashed a spark that began burning waist-high grass. He tried to smother the flames by tossing a trampoline on it, but that just worsened the flames. It caused the start of the largest of two fires that merged to become California’s largest wildfire on record, the Mendocino Complex fire, which burned more than 450,000 acres in four Northern California counties — Colusa, Lake, Mendocino and Glenn. The above was Mendocino: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendocino_Complex_Fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendocino_Complex_Fire
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Thanks. I should have supplied cites, wasn't feeling up to it. About three weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21218868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21218868 Citing: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/us/california-wildfires-human-causes-arson.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/us/california-wildfires-h...
- jerf 7y ago
  "Previous major wildfires have been sparked by: mower blades, rims of flat tires sparking on pavement, catalytic converters parked over dry grass, sparks from a hammer. And electrical equipment." Honestly, at that point, you have a fire, it's just not burning yet. The idea that we can prevent fires from happening by preventing all sources of ignition in hundreds and hundreds of square miles is completely absurd. Even though Man is responsible for a lot of ignition, he's not responsible for all of them. Even if you completely removed civilization, it's still going to be a fire. I don't have a solution, or any good news here. Best thing I can think of at this point is spending a shit ton of money and creating some very large fire breaks around cities and then burning on purpose, but California probably can't do that either. By the time the eminent domain lawsuits and counterlawsuits happened, the environmental review happens ("we plan on killing lots of things, and then we're going to set the rest of the stuff we didn't kill on fire" isn't exactly going to sail through the review process), and everyone gets their beaks wetted, it'll just end up being a giant waste of money that gets ended with the fires occur anyhow. And the fire breaks would have to be huge; we're probably measuring the necessary widths with miles fairly reasonably. (Possibly <1 mile, but certainly multiple tenths of a mile.) And the liability. Nobody sane would take that job.
SllX 7y ago
Not to dispute your later statement, but power outages aren’t a new thing in California. This State of affairs in particular is because PG&E has been held liable for fires caused by their equipment, to which they flipped off the courts and filed for bankruptcy. Should they be held liable? I don’t know, but effectively an entire town was wiped off the map and we experienced a couple weeks of continuous smog as far south as Santa Cruz from what I heard, San Francisco was just filled with smoke and pollution and face masks became part of the uniform around here along with Apple Watches, AirPods and messenger bags or backpacks. Long term, power generation will become more decentralized anyway, because if there’s one thing we have in abundance it is sunshine. Most houses even with solar panels could not disconnect themselves from the grid and not lose their power, but this will likely incentivize people to look into being able to run their homes off-the-grid for at least a few days at a time. As for tech companies? For any datacenter, or company running enough equipment to qualify as more or less a datacenter, power outages are a risk factor that you plan for and you try to mitigate. Doesn’t matter where in the world you are or what the capriciousness of the local electrical utility is like, even if you’re running your own source of power.
- snagglegaggle 7y ago
  The rub with this is PG&E was avoiding maintenance to pay out dividends. The situation was entirely preventable. Frankly it's scary how everyone is apologizing for the utility company's management.
  - AJ007 7y ago
    They also had massive negative cashflow going back over a decade and paid for those dividends with lender’s money. The entire thing wasn’t sustainable. It isn’t necessarily fair to single out California because many other public utilities are in a similar situation, California just has added significant natural disaster risks. Regulated utilities have been considered a safe investment for so long that many shareholders and probably management have been asleep at the wheel for years. The regulatory aspect means there isn’t much those parties can do without state/voter approval. I’m hardly an expert in capital markets, so I’m not going to claim if PG&E did or didn’t pay dividends X would happen. I don’t know. What I do know is PG&E probably needed 3-4x the revenue they had, either by increased rates or borrowing which would lead to even greater rate increases eventually. I would say in general this is a good thing. California’s residents are now extremely incentivized to move to home solar + battery storage. California may even hit their renewable energy goals ahead of schedule.
netsharc 7y ago
> Something has gone seriously wrong when we're seeing near-daily stories about power outages in the tech capital of the world. Welcome to the climate crisis.
- eganist 7y ago
  PG&E is a bit more nuanced and short-term, though the climate crisis might be contributing with the longevity of droughts and fires. The issues around PG&E were largely self-reinforcing (I'm either oversimplifying and/or just plain wrong, but this is my understanding from someone who's probably not authorized to speak on the matter): * PG&E devised fairly minimal maintenance schedules because money. * Regulators approved said minimal maintenance schedules because it minimized disruption to residents. * Residents largely perpetuated this by sponsoring politicians and policies that enabled the lack of upkeep. with the inevitable conclusion being egregious levels of maintenance debt enabling or even causing disasters on massive scales. Where climate change probably contributed to this entire circle is the "on massive scales" part. --- Disclosure: This is not my field. I'm parroting something I don't quite fully understand. Someone with more direct experience or exposure to the matter can probably clarify or correct me where needed, to include possibly all of this comment.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Fire risk in California has been growing rapidly over the past two decades. Fire records have been kept reliably since 1932. Of the 20 largest fires in state history, one dates to the 1930s. None have occurred in the 1940s, 50s, or 60s. Two occurred in the 1970s, 1 in the 1980s, and sixteen since 1999. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires This is independent of structures or urban-rural interface. The measurement here is area burnt. And despite advances in detection and firefighting methods, the situation has been deteriorating rapidly. All of this is independent of PG&E. That the utility's equipment has been directly responsible for multiple blaze ignitions is absolutely true. But this doesn't seem to me to be the biggest factor, and a focus on ignition rather than increasing latent fire risk seems to me absurdly myopic. (The power curtailments themselves seem fairly prudent. Though horribly disruptive.)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
choppaface 7y ago
To be fair, while some parts of the peninsula saw outages, essentially all of SF City (and County) has had uninterrupted power. Moreover, in the Los Angeles area, neither power outages nor fires have touched the most affluent areas of West LA / Orange County / Santa Monica (besides the brief Getty fire, which triggered a couple of celebrity tweets). The governor, Gavin Newsom, does have principal residence at his wife's family's house in the North Bay, which lost power, but since becoming governor he's there less frequently. So the issue is that the power outages and fires really haven't affected the wealthy or tech elite. There's a lot of California outside of those circles.
- mieseratte 7y ago
  > So the issue is that the power outages and fires really haven't affected the wealthy or tech elite. Between that and the favel... homeless camps, California is really looking foreign. Perhaps they can secede and join the BRICS club. /s
- FerretFred 7y ago
  > So the issue is that the power outages and fires really haven't affected the wealthy or tech elite And this is always the problem! As soon as someone rich/techie gets burnt there'll be a social media outburst and something will happen. While it's just happening to the "little people" and money's still coming into the company coffers it's no big deal.
  - eweise 7y ago
    Sounds like you're not familiar with the north bay. Marin is one of the richest counties in the state.
    - rsync 7y ago
      ... and was, as far as I can tell, shut off completely unnecessarily. Forecasted and actual winds during this entire period, in Marin, did not exceed normal, seasonal winds and I don't believe the populated areas of Marin (San Rafael, Mill Valley, Ross Valley, etc.) get their transmission through the wildland. I will be interested to learn the rationale for the Marin shutoff when I call my county supervisor and state reps, etc., next week.
Dumblydorr 7y ago
Its absolutely crazy that climate change is hitting California with devastating wildfires? It's only going to get worse, on top of the hurricanes in the SE, the flooding in the Midwest, polar vortex in North... makes me feel lucky to be in New England.
- bluGill 7y ago
  This isn't climate change. The forests in California regularly go up in flames when there is a drought which is semi-regular. The trees are also high oil - the type that when they burn burn very hot. This has been happening for hundreds of years.
- jpindar 7y ago
  I live on the New England coast, and we're getting increased flooding too. That's only right on the coast though.
m3kw9 7y ago
In programming this is called not handling an exceptional scenario. Also could be called neglect.
mikelyons 7y ago
Moving half of California into Seattle really doesn't sound like "winning out" to me ...

dredmorbius 7y ago

In many parts of the world, power is unreliable due to a lack of resources -- fuel, capital, labour, distribution, maintenance. Power cuts occur, either scheduled or unscheduled, due to an inability to meet demand. The case in California is different. The fundamental resources are present: there is fuel (or, in many cases, hydroelectric, geothermal, nuclear, wind, or solar power) for generation. Distribution systems exist. There is no shortage of local labour. Systems aren't going offline due to direct failures of maintenance. Rather: the outages are prompted by a consequence risk. Given the extreme fire danger throughout the state, the least source of ignition creates a fire hazard, and electrical transmission and distribution equipment is a high risk for such ignition. Previous major wildfires have been sparked by: mower blades, rims of flat tires sparking on pavement, catalytic converters parked over dry grass, sparks from a hammer. And electrical equipment. There's a case to be made that PG&E have neglected maintenance activies not related directly to continued operation of their plant, but to risk mitigation, and I'm not going to argue one way or the other. But the fundamental problem California's electric utilities face is not that of most of the world, where means are insufficient, but that consequence is too great to ignore. I'm coming to see this generally as a late-stage dynamic in many technological areas, one in which the unintended consequences (sometimes unanticipated, often not) simply rise to a level of major significance. You might think of these generally as hygiene factors (the phrase I've been using). Past examples would include: - Basic personal and public hygiene factors for maintaining public health in cities. - Pollution control laws affecting solid, liquid, and gas emissions of activities and plants. - Environmental contamination as with lead, asbestos, pesticides, tobacco, sulfur dioxide ("acid rain"), and CO2. - Individual psychological and widespread sociological negative impacts of information overload, media saturation and manipulation, and computer systems overexposure. - Running extensive high-capacity electrical distribution systems through increasingly fire-prone landscapes. Or put another way: this is increasingly our future.

PeterStuer 7y ago
You could argue that the lack of resources also plays in California, not because of a fundamental shortfall, but due to all the resources being sucked out of the system by extreme capitalism.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Howso? Resources devoted to firefighting have increased by any possible measure.
throw0101a 7y ago
> Previous major wildfires have been sparked by: mower blades, rims of flat tires sparking on pavement, catalytic converters parked over dry grass, sparks from a hammer. And electrical equipment. A citation: * https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-29/how-do-wildfires-start https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-29/how-do-w... Another one: > Fear of insects. A rancher tried to plug a wasp’s nest in the ground by jamming a stake into the ground. That unleashed a spark that began burning waist-high grass. He tried to smother the flames by tossing a trampoline on it, but that just worsened the flames. It caused the start of the largest of two fires that merged to become California’s largest wildfire on record, the Mendocino Complex fire, which burned more than 450,000 acres in four Northern California counties — Colusa, Lake, Mendocino and Glenn. The above was Mendocino: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendocino_Complex_Fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendocino_Complex_Fire
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Thanks. I should have supplied cites, wasn't feeling up to it. About three weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21218868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21218868 Citing: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/us/california-wildfires-human-causes-arson.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/us/california-wildfires-h...
jerf 7y ago
"Previous major wildfires have been sparked by: mower blades, rims of flat tires sparking on pavement, catalytic converters parked over dry grass, sparks from a hammer. And electrical equipment." Honestly, at that point, you have a fire, it's just not burning yet. The idea that we can prevent fires from happening by preventing all sources of ignition in hundreds and hundreds of square miles is completely absurd. Even though Man is responsible for a lot of ignition, he's not responsible for all of them. Even if you completely removed civilization, it's still going to be a fire. I don't have a solution, or any good news here. Best thing I can think of at this point is spending a shit ton of money and creating some very large fire breaks around cities and then burning on purpose, but California probably can't do that either. By the time the eminent domain lawsuits and counterlawsuits happened, the environmental review happens ("we plan on killing lots of things, and then we're going to set the rest of the stuff we didn't kill on fire" isn't exactly going to sail through the review process), and everyone gets their beaks wetted, it'll just end up being a giant waste of money that gets ended with the fires occur anyhow. And the fire breaks would have to be huge; we're probably measuring the necessary widths with miles fairly reasonably. (Possibly <1 mile, but certainly multiple tenths of a mile.) And the liability. Nobody sane would take that job.

SllX 7y ago

Not to dispute your later statement, but power outages aren’t a new thing in California. This State of affairs in particular is because PG&E has been held liable for fires caused by their equipment, to which they flipped off the courts and filed for bankruptcy. Should they be held liable? I don’t know, but effectively an entire town was wiped off the map and we experienced a couple weeks of continuous smog as far south as Santa Cruz from what I heard, San Francisco was just filled with smoke and pollution and face masks became part of the uniform around here along with Apple Watches, AirPods and messenger bags or backpacks. Long term, power generation will become more decentralized anyway, because if there’s one thing we have in abundance it is sunshine. Most houses even with solar panels could not disconnect themselves from the grid and not lose their power, but this will likely incentivize people to look into being able to run their homes off-the-grid for at least a few days at a time. As for tech companies? For any datacenter, or company running enough equipment to qualify as more or less a datacenter, power outages are a risk factor that you plan for and you try to mitigate. Doesn’t matter where in the world you are or what the capriciousness of the local electrical utility is like, even if you’re running your own source of power.

snagglegaggle 7y ago
The rub with this is PG&E was avoiding maintenance to pay out dividends. The situation was entirely preventable. Frankly it's scary how everyone is apologizing for the utility company's management.
- AJ007 7y ago
  They also had massive negative cashflow going back over a decade and paid for those dividends with lender’s money. The entire thing wasn’t sustainable. It isn’t necessarily fair to single out California because many other public utilities are in a similar situation, California just has added significant natural disaster risks. Regulated utilities have been considered a safe investment for so long that many shareholders and probably management have been asleep at the wheel for years. The regulatory aspect means there isn’t much those parties can do without state/voter approval. I’m hardly an expert in capital markets, so I’m not going to claim if PG&E did or didn’t pay dividends X would happen. I don’t know. What I do know is PG&E probably needed 3-4x the revenue they had, either by increased rates or borrowing which would lead to even greater rate increases eventually. I would say in general this is a good thing. California’s residents are now extremely incentivized to move to home solar + battery storage. California may even hit their renewable energy goals ahead of schedule.

netsharc 7y ago

> Something has gone seriously wrong when we're seeing near-daily stories about power outages in the tech capital of the world. Welcome to the climate crisis.

eganist 7y ago
PG&E is a bit more nuanced and short-term, though the climate crisis might be contributing with the longevity of droughts and fires. The issues around PG&E were largely self-reinforcing (I'm either oversimplifying and/or just plain wrong, but this is my understanding from someone who's probably not authorized to speak on the matter): * PG&E devised fairly minimal maintenance schedules because money. * Regulators approved said minimal maintenance schedules because it minimized disruption to residents. * Residents largely perpetuated this by sponsoring politicians and policies that enabled the lack of upkeep. with the inevitable conclusion being egregious levels of maintenance debt enabling or even causing disasters on massive scales. Where climate change probably contributed to this entire circle is the "on massive scales" part. --- Disclosure: This is not my field. I'm parroting something I don't quite fully understand. Someone with more direct experience or exposure to the matter can probably clarify or correct me where needed, to include possibly all of this comment.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Fire risk in California has been growing rapidly over the past two decades. Fire records have been kept reliably since 1932. Of the 20 largest fires in state history, one dates to the 1930s. None have occurred in the 1940s, 50s, or 60s. Two occurred in the 1970s, 1 in the 1980s, and sixteen since 1999. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires This is independent of structures or urban-rural interface. The measurement here is area burnt. And despite advances in detection and firefighting methods, the situation has been deteriorating rapidly. All of this is independent of PG&E. That the utility's equipment has been directly responsible for multiple blaze ignitions is absolutely true. But this doesn't seem to me to be the biggest factor, and a focus on ignition rather than increasing latent fire risk seems to me absurdly myopic. (The power curtailments themselves seem fairly prudent. Though horribly disruptive.)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

choppaface 7y ago

To be fair, while some parts of the peninsula saw outages, essentially all of SF City (and County) has had uninterrupted power. Moreover, in the Los Angeles area, neither power outages nor fires have touched the most affluent areas of West LA / Orange County / Santa Monica (besides the brief Getty fire, which triggered a couple of celebrity tweets). The governor, Gavin Newsom, does have principal residence at his wife's family's house in the North Bay, which lost power, but since becoming governor he's there less frequently. So the issue is that the power outages and fires really haven't affected the wealthy or tech elite. There's a lot of California outside of those circles.

mieseratte 7y ago
> So the issue is that the power outages and fires really haven't affected the wealthy or tech elite. Between that and the favel... homeless camps, California is really looking foreign. Perhaps they can secede and join the BRICS club. /s
FerretFred 7y ago
> So the issue is that the power outages and fires really haven't affected the wealthy or tech elite And this is always the problem! As soon as someone rich/techie gets burnt there'll be a social media outburst and something will happen. While it's just happening to the "little people" and money's still coming into the company coffers it's no big deal.
- eweise 7y ago
  Sounds like you're not familiar with the north bay. Marin is one of the richest counties in the state.
  - rsync 7y ago
    ... and was, as far as I can tell, shut off completely unnecessarily. Forecasted and actual winds during this entire period, in Marin, did not exceed normal, seasonal winds and I don't believe the populated areas of Marin (San Rafael, Mill Valley, Ross Valley, etc.) get their transmission through the wildland. I will be interested to learn the rationale for the Marin shutoff when I call my county supervisor and state reps, etc., next week.

Dumblydorr 7y ago

Its absolutely crazy that climate change is hitting California with devastating wildfires? It's only going to get worse, on top of the hurricanes in the SE, the flooding in the Midwest, polar vortex in North... makes me feel lucky to be in New England.

bluGill 7y ago
This isn't climate change. The forests in California regularly go up in flames when there is a drought which is semi-regular. The trees are also high oil - the type that when they burn burn very hot. This has been happening for hundreds of years.
jpindar 7y ago
I live on the New England coast, and we're getting increased flooding too. That's only right on the coast though.

m3kw9 7y ago

In programming this is called not handling an exceptional scenario. Also could be called neglect.

mikelyons 7y ago

Moving half of California into Seattle really doesn't sound like "winning out" to me ...