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I have a question I haven’t seen anyone address so far: how much can we expect this to reduce the frequency of wildfires? Intuitively, to me, the effect would s

I have a question I haven’t seen anyone address so far: how much can we expect this to reduce the frequency of wildfires? Intuitively, to me, the effect would seem to be negligible. All of the conditions for wildfires will remain in place. It’ll simply be something else that lights the spark. If it’s not power lines it’ll be lightning. So then to follow up: what is the point? To deflect blame from PGE? And who pays for it?

jlmorton 5y ago
I think you've hit the nail on the head. It's not entirely insignificant, but it certainly is not the driver of wildfires. If we perfectly buried all the power lines, we'd have fewer fires, but we'd still have most of the fires we already have. The primary problem remains fire suppression practices, forest management, and changing climate. This seems like a very expensive way to eliminate a quarter of our wildfires.
- completelylegit 5y ago
  As someone who lives 15 miles from Paradise, CA - A “very expensive solution” makes it sound like there are inexpensive solutions that would be just as effective. If there were, wouldn’t PGE have implemented them? Maybe its just “the solution”.
  - habibur 5y ago
    PGE is more concerned about the billion dollar law suites. This solution makes economic sense to them. But doesn't help the fire. As long the dry woods are piling up, which it eventually will, something else will trigger the fire. And amount of fire won't be even reduce by 25%. But the court won't be able to blame PGE then, that's the whole point.
    - brazzy 5y ago
      This, exactly. A PGE power line probably sparked the deadly Paradise fire, and I've repeadly see people blaming them for the deaths with metaphorical pitch forks in hand, completely ignoring the far more complex reasons for people being unable to get away from that fire safely.
  - bbarnett 5y ago
    In Quebec, Hydro Quebec trims trees and shrubbery from wires every summer. This is much, much cheaper than burying them, and they hire students going into forest, and related fields to assist with the work (heavily supervised). It is not even remotely hard to believe that Quebec has far, far more rural power lines than California. What's the difference? State run organizations like Hydro Quebec, are IMO not apt to create short term profits, by sacrificing long term cost saving measures. There is no CEO of Hydro Quebec getting a massive boost to income via stock profits, or awards due to profit targets met. The goal is instead, make delivery the safest and most cost effective over the long term. By burying wires, I suspect it achieves two things. Ensuring a CEO, or department head won't cost save for a bonus, and not trim wires, and to maybe do a one time write down. To highlight this? I accidentally had a tree fall the wrong way (I has ropes too, one slipped) during a cut. Hydro Quebec came and cut the tree from the wires, restored power, for free. In Ontario, where power is private now? I would have paid thousands. Why the difference? The loss of life, because someone tries to save money and deal with it themselves, isn't worth it. Especially when state paid health care, and disability exists. I'm 100% a capitalist. Yet some things make sense, run as a non profit, where costs are counter to societal safety and goals.
    - refurb 5y ago
      PG&E might have private investors but it doesn’t do anything with the Public Utility Commissions oversight. And they trim trees in CA too, but unlike QC which is typically green in the summer, CA is typically full of dry vegetation and a spark in the grass is still going to start a massive fire.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >What's the difference? State run organizations like Hydro Quebec, are IMO not apt to create short term profits, by sacrificing long term cost saving measures. There is no CEO of Hydro Quebec getting a massive boost to income via stock profits, or awards due to profit targets met. Not really. While it's true that a state run organizations might not cut costs to meet profits, that's just replaced with cutting to meet budget requirements. eg. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-system-failure-delays.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
xyzzyz 5y ago
If only conditions matter, but triggers do not, why don’t all forests catch fire all at the same time when it gets dry enough? Think about it: average forest in California will probably get dry enough to support forest fire at least every few years. Why then it takes decades or centuries until the fire actually visits them?
- chongli 5y ago
  Triggers are necessary for fires, obviously, but getting rid of the triggers does not solve the problem. There's another wrinkle to the whole matter: when a forest survives the dry season without burning down it doesn't reset. The following year there will be even more dead wood and other dry material in the area. This means next year's potential fire will be even worse than the last.
  - carabiner 5y ago
    One step at a time. Forest management is a huge issue. Wildland firefighters are zealous, almost paramilitary organizations that try to vanquish every fire like enemy invaders. In reality, fires are part of the lifecycle of forests that clear brush and make the forest healthier and more resilient in the future.
    - GavinMcG 5y ago
      At least nowadays wildland firefighters spend plenty of time conducting prescribed burns, too. They're not chuckleheads - they're perfectly well-aware by now that past practices contributed to the problem.
      - bluGill 5y ago
        But they are hired by and paid by politicians who know smokey the bear and don't care at all about the modern science of forests. Not to mention courts regularly block their attempts to control the forest (ironically often by lawsuits brought on by environmental organizations) As such they often are not allowed to do the right thing for the forest even though they know what to do.
an_opabinia 5y ago
There's no point, you're right. On the other hand, there is no money shortage. I wish the government ordered PG&E to make poles ready for fiber instead.
- abricot 5y ago
  Makes more sense to put down fiber with the power cables. Why would you want to it on poles?
  - an_opabinia 5y ago
    Because digging entrenches incumbents.
floatingatoll 5y ago
I think there’s a big fire underway right now that PG&E thinks was probably set by two of their electrical fuses. Burying fire in dirt stops fire, so removing the power equipment from direct exposure to oxygen and tinder by burying it in dirt is a really effective way to stop electrical sparks from leveling up into wildfires. You might send a manhole cover into near earth orbit now and then when an underground transformer explodes. As the famous saying most definitely does not go: One small leap for manhole cover, one giant leap for not celebrating your fifth anniversary of burning down ratepayer homes and national parks. (As you might suspect, they’ve been making tidy profits every year for decades while choosing not to invest in burying power lines. The only reason there’s been such rapid change and a proper incident reaction in IT terms for an actual megacorp, is that they’re in bankruptcy court and the judge can compel them to act competently and rapidly, and shame them and penalize them for failing for the fourth year in a row to do so. Non-US folks, our power utilities are a mix of for-profit and not-for-profit, and ethical behavior that costs money is less common in for-profit ones. Co-ops are usually a good idea, but megacorps not so much.)
- Bayart 5y ago
  >Burying fire in dirt stops fire Not so fast ! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    Now I wonder if coal is more electrically conductive than dirt as well as thermally susceptible. Could you ionize a coal vein? Maybe we can transmit AM radio with it and map it with a heavy metal detector!
    - Bayart 5y ago
      It's carbon so there much be conditions in which it's semiconductor or conductor-like. But even if those occurred naturally, they'd have to occur consistently throughout a seam for it to be carrying radio waves. In any case coal dust should have pretty good electric capacitance. Combine with flammability...
nostrademons 5y ago
Electrical power causes about 10% of wildfires by number [1], but it's responsible for 7 out of the 20 most devastating wildfires [2]. Perhaps this is because power-line fires happen disproportionally in remote, unattended areas, where they can grow large and uncontrollable before firefighters arrive. It probably won't solve wildfires - there's still plenty of fuel, and hotter climates, and strong winds - but it can buy some breathing room. I suspect a bigger reason is to maintain the integrity of the grid. Buried power lines don't start fires, but they also don't get taken down when there is a fire, and they won't have a judge order them shut-off when there's a risk of high fire danger. Being perceived as an unreliable source of electricity is a far bigger threat to a utility than burning down a few towns - I know that was the primary reason I went solar, and a lot of my peers are also thinking of disconnecting from the grid because the grid isn't there when you need it. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/How-California-s-biggest-wildfires-ignited-13907244.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/How-California-s... [2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/californias-catastrophic-wildfires-in-3-charts https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/californias-catastrophi...
- devoutsalsa 5y ago
  It’s like enforcing a policy of not smoking next to the pumps at a fueling station.
  - SilasX 5y ago
    ... in a world where 4channers can anonymously spray sparks at gas stations and do it for the lulz, and it costs $1000 each time you tell someone to stop smoking at the pump. (That is, the policy is expensive, and there are numerous other hard-to-monitor causes of fires.)
- eldaisfish 5y ago
  If someone views a modern electrical utility in a Western country as unreliable then they either have no idea what they are talking about or have unreasonable expectations. See NERC's reliability report for 2020 - even accounting for fires, the average transmission capacity loss for the entire USA and Canada was mostly under 0.5%. (Page 65) https://www.nerc.com/pa/RAPA/PA/Performance%20Analysis%20DL/NERC_SOR_2020.pdf https://www.nerc.com/pa/RAPA/PA/Performance%20Analysis%20DL/... Solar and batteries aren't a substitute for grid transmission infrastructure and cannot match the amounts of energy a good transmission grid can deliver. The best part of the grid - you don't have to worry about balancing or when you need energy. You just flip a switch. Yes, PG&E could have done more and their investment choices led to lots of damage and loss but let's not jump the gun and term their grid unreliable. They are held to NERC's standards which are among the best in the world.
boulos 5y ago
One distinction versus naturally caused fires (like lightning) is that power lines are often downed by high winds over dry terrain. Lightning, usually, is accompanied by a storm so there’s at least some rain. It’s not going to stop everything, nor all human-caused fires (e.g., the “gender reveal” one last year), but I believe it shifts the likelihood more than you expect.
Proven 5y ago
Who pays? What do you think?
pengaru 5y ago
> what is the point? Presumably the point is to bring affected parts of California back to the first world by not having to shut off their power whenever there's heavy winds expected.
nraynaud 5y ago
Be mindful that it's not exactly the number or size of the fire they are optimizing for, but the cost. And I guess some smaller fires might cost a lot, if they are near rich people's estates.
zild3d 5y ago
> how much can we expect this to reduce the frequency of wildfires? A point to keep in mind here, PGE is a company. Their primary goal is to not be the cause of the wildfire and pay damages. If it also reduces the frequency of wildfires, great.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  NB: there's PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric), and PGE (Portland General Electric). Whilst their service areas differ (PG&E serves California, PGE serves Oregon), they're near enough and similarly-enough named that the distinction is useful. Both are for-profit companies. The article here refers to PG&E, Pacific Gas and Electric, an investor-owned private utility serving California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Compa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_General_Electric_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_General_Electric_Comp...
hnarn 5y ago
There are many long term economical effects of burying electric, not only does it reduce exposure to liability (you caused a natural disaster), it also reduces maintenance cost, failure rates and so on. Both customers and providers prefer buried cables, all things being equal. The only issue is that they're more expensive to actually place, so maybe them causing wildfires has finally pushed companies to put the cables where they belong.
- T3OU-736 5y ago
  As a corollary - maintenance of buried power lines is more expensive due to all the digging which has to be done. Power line inspection is also trickier. I also wonder if the unions representing linemen have a strong influence on "bury" vs "overhead" since most of lineman's job involves work up a pole rather than a tunnel. Lastly - burying anything in the ground in areas where the ground has been known to move (California is the "Earthquake" entry in the Bingo game of "choose which natural disaster" that is the continental USA) is liable to be a non-trivial endeavour, one which will require ongoing inspections and the like.
- raggles 5y ago
  There are lots of good reasons distribution companies don't like cables in some situations (especially rural). Connecting new customers and network alterations is much more expensive, changing to a higher voltage is not possible, upgrading capacity requires a whole new cable which is more expensive than replacing the conductors, cables only last about 30-50 years. Finding and fixing a cable fault usually takes much longer than overhead (although there are probably less of them per mile). Without wild fires, I seriously doubt cables are more economic in rural areas.
sathackr 5y ago
Because it's cheaper than paying $13.5B when it was your equipment that started it. This is nothing more than liability mitigation. And once complete, even if you don't maintain them, buried cabled generally can't start fires. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/12/06/pge-reaches-billion-settlement-with-california-wildfire-victims/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/12/06/pge-reaches...
rexreed 5y ago
The point is to avoid lawsuits not wildfires.
ashtonkem 5y ago
The biggest effect will be that they won’t have to trigger blackouts during high winds to prevent downed lines from starting forest fires. For those in the affected area, that’s a big deal. But if CA wants to reduce these fires, they desperately need to catch back up on their controlled burns. A combination of low brush fire for decades (not forest fire!) and changing environment has built up an extremely dangerous backlog of fuel that makes CA specifically and the PNW in general a massive fire risk. Short of fixing global warming and moving everyone away from the interface between nature and city, the only solution is to burn up all that fuel in a controlled way.
- bluGill 5y ago
  This doesn't apply to CA, but in general it is a good idea for most of the world. The vegetation there has been on natural cycles for years of burning hot every few years. Sure power lines start the file, but they will start anyway: large hot fires have always been part of the life cycle of that area. This is very different from the low brush fires that are a natural part of most other forests.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    CA has huge fires partly because they suppressed the low brush fires that were more common a century or two ago. Because they’re now decades behind on the natural burns that would normally happen every summer, the state will have to work overtime to catch back up to a safe equilibrium. To be fair, climate change and changing habitation patterns are also making this much worse. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/11/californias-wildfire-controlled-prescribed-burns-native-americans/ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/11/californias-...
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Fire intensity in California is absolutely related to frequency. Historically, most California forests had low intensity burns every few years. Now, these same forests haven't had a fire in 100+ years, resulting in extremely intense fires that leave behind ashen moonscapes. This is not the historic normal fire cycle in CA.
giantg2 5y ago
"To deflect blame from PGE?" I think that's the major part. It will look good for them from an ESG perspective. Also, I think some states, like CA, are talking about making the company pay for any fire starting from their equipment. So they are probably hedging that risk. If they wait, it could take them too long to complete the burial and then still be subjected to penalties under new laws in the future. Edit: why downvote? These steps may reduce a small percentage of wildfires (10% from electric utilities and PG&E isn't the only one). I think the main reasons they are doing it are what I stated about. I doubt the company truly cares about this unless it reduced the financial risk and helped them in the ESG space.
nemesisj 5y ago
My guess is that fire prevention is only part of the problem. Wouldn't burying the lines mean that their infrastructure is also not destroyed by wild fires? Things just burn above, and everything keeps on working?
cascom 5y ago
The point is that it increases profitability of the utility (by expanding the rate base), and so the customers are paying for it. If they get some good publicity and it marginally decreases fire risk those are secondary benefits.

jlmorton 5y ago

I think you've hit the nail on the head. It's not entirely insignificant, but it certainly is not the driver of wildfires. If we perfectly buried all the power lines, we'd have fewer fires, but we'd still have most of the fires we already have. The primary problem remains fire suppression practices, forest management, and changing climate. This seems like a very expensive way to eliminate a quarter of our wildfires.

completelylegit 5y ago
As someone who lives 15 miles from Paradise, CA - A “very expensive solution” makes it sound like there are inexpensive solutions that would be just as effective. If there were, wouldn’t PGE have implemented them? Maybe its just “the solution”.
- habibur 5y ago
  PGE is more concerned about the billion dollar law suites. This solution makes economic sense to them. But doesn't help the fire. As long the dry woods are piling up, which it eventually will, something else will trigger the fire. And amount of fire won't be even reduce by 25%. But the court won't be able to blame PGE then, that's the whole point.
  - brazzy 5y ago
    This, exactly. A PGE power line probably sparked the deadly Paradise fire, and I've repeadly see people blaming them for the deaths with metaphorical pitch forks in hand, completely ignoring the far more complex reasons for people being unable to get away from that fire safely.
- bbarnett 5y ago
  In Quebec, Hydro Quebec trims trees and shrubbery from wires every summer. This is much, much cheaper than burying them, and they hire students going into forest, and related fields to assist with the work (heavily supervised). It is not even remotely hard to believe that Quebec has far, far more rural power lines than California. What's the difference? State run organizations like Hydro Quebec, are IMO not apt to create short term profits, by sacrificing long term cost saving measures. There is no CEO of Hydro Quebec getting a massive boost to income via stock profits, or awards due to profit targets met. The goal is instead, make delivery the safest and most cost effective over the long term. By burying wires, I suspect it achieves two things. Ensuring a CEO, or department head won't cost save for a bonus, and not trim wires, and to maybe do a one time write down. To highlight this? I accidentally had a tree fall the wrong way (I has ropes too, one slipped) during a cut. Hydro Quebec came and cut the tree from the wires, restored power, for free. In Ontario, where power is private now? I would have paid thousands. Why the difference? The loss of life, because someone tries to save money and deal with it themselves, isn't worth it. Especially when state paid health care, and disability exists. I'm 100% a capitalist. Yet some things make sense, run as a non profit, where costs are counter to societal safety and goals.
  - refurb 5y ago
    PG&E might have private investors but it doesn’t do anything with the Public Utility Commissions oversight. And they trim trees in CA too, but unlike QC which is typically green in the summer, CA is typically full of dry vegetation and a spark in the grass is still going to start a massive fire.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >What's the difference? State run organizations like Hydro Quebec, are IMO not apt to create short term profits, by sacrificing long term cost saving measures. There is no CEO of Hydro Quebec getting a massive boost to income via stock profits, or awards due to profit targets met. Not really. While it's true that a state run organizations might not cut costs to meet profits, that's just replaced with cutting to meet budget requirements. eg. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-system-failure-delays.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

xyzzyz 5y ago

If only conditions matter, but triggers do not, why don’t all forests catch fire all at the same time when it gets dry enough? Think about it: average forest in California will probably get dry enough to support forest fire at least every few years. Why then it takes decades or centuries until the fire actually visits them?

chongli 5y ago
Triggers are necessary for fires, obviously, but getting rid of the triggers does not solve the problem. There's another wrinkle to the whole matter: when a forest survives the dry season without burning down it doesn't reset. The following year there will be even more dead wood and other dry material in the area. This means next year's potential fire will be even worse than the last.
- carabiner 5y ago
  One step at a time. Forest management is a huge issue. Wildland firefighters are zealous, almost paramilitary organizations that try to vanquish every fire like enemy invaders. In reality, fires are part of the lifecycle of forests that clear brush and make the forest healthier and more resilient in the future.
  - GavinMcG 5y ago
    At least nowadays wildland firefighters spend plenty of time conducting prescribed burns, too. They're not chuckleheads - they're perfectly well-aware by now that past practices contributed to the problem.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      But they are hired by and paid by politicians who know smokey the bear and don't care at all about the modern science of forests. Not to mention courts regularly block their attempts to control the forest (ironically often by lawsuits brought on by environmental organizations) As such they often are not allowed to do the right thing for the forest even though they know what to do.

an_opabinia 5y ago

There's no point, you're right. On the other hand, there is no money shortage. I wish the government ordered PG&E to make poles ready for fiber instead.

abricot 5y ago
Makes more sense to put down fiber with the power cables. Why would you want to it on poles?
- an_opabinia 5y ago
  Because digging entrenches incumbents.

floatingatoll 5y ago

I think there’s a big fire underway right now that PG&E thinks was probably set by two of their electrical fuses. Burying fire in dirt stops fire, so removing the power equipment from direct exposure to oxygen and tinder by burying it in dirt is a really effective way to stop electrical sparks from leveling up into wildfires. You might send a manhole cover into near earth orbit now and then when an underground transformer explodes. As the famous saying most definitely does not go: One small leap for manhole cover, one giant leap for not celebrating your fifth anniversary of burning down ratepayer homes and national parks. (As you might suspect, they’ve been making tidy profits every year for decades while choosing not to invest in burying power lines. The only reason there’s been such rapid change and a proper incident reaction in IT terms for an actual megacorp, is that they’re in bankruptcy court and the judge can compel them to act competently and rapidly, and shame them and penalize them for failing for the fourth year in a row to do so. Non-US folks, our power utilities are a mix of for-profit and not-for-profit, and ethical behavior that costs money is less common in for-profit ones. Co-ops are usually a good idea, but megacorps not so much.)

Bayart 5y ago
>Burying fire in dirt stops fire Not so fast ! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  Now I wonder if coal is more electrically conductive than dirt as well as thermally susceptible. Could you ionize a coal vein? Maybe we can transmit AM radio with it and map it with a heavy metal detector!
  - Bayart 5y ago
    It's carbon so there much be conditions in which it's semiconductor or conductor-like. But even if those occurred naturally, they'd have to occur consistently throughout a seam for it to be carrying radio waves. In any case coal dust should have pretty good electric capacitance. Combine with flammability...

nostrademons 5y ago

Electrical power causes about 10% of wildfires by number [1], but it's responsible for 7 out of the 20 most devastating wildfires [2]. Perhaps this is because power-line fires happen disproportionally in remote, unattended areas, where they can grow large and uncontrollable before firefighters arrive. It probably won't solve wildfires - there's still plenty of fuel, and hotter climates, and strong winds - but it can buy some breathing room. I suspect a bigger reason is to maintain the integrity of the grid. Buried power lines don't start fires, but they also don't get taken down when there is a fire, and they won't have a judge order them shut-off when there's a risk of high fire danger. Being perceived as an unreliable source of electricity is a far bigger threat to a utility than burning down a few towns - I know that was the primary reason I went solar, and a lot of my peers are also thinking of disconnecting from the grid because the grid isn't there when you need it. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/How-California-s-biggest-wildfires-ignited-13907244.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/How-California-s... [2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/californias-catastrophic-wildfires-in-3-charts https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/californias-catastrophi...

devoutsalsa 5y ago
It’s like enforcing a policy of not smoking next to the pumps at a fueling station.
- SilasX 5y ago
  ... in a world where 4channers can anonymously spray sparks at gas stations and do it for the lulz, and it costs $1000 each time you tell someone to stop smoking at the pump. (That is, the policy is expensive, and there are numerous other hard-to-monitor causes of fires.)
eldaisfish 5y ago
If someone views a modern electrical utility in a Western country as unreliable then they either have no idea what they are talking about or have unreasonable expectations. See NERC's reliability report for 2020 - even accounting for fires, the average transmission capacity loss for the entire USA and Canada was mostly under 0.5%. (Page 65) https://www.nerc.com/pa/RAPA/PA/Performance%20Analysis%20DL/NERC_SOR_2020.pdf https://www.nerc.com/pa/RAPA/PA/Performance%20Analysis%20DL/... Solar and batteries aren't a substitute for grid transmission infrastructure and cannot match the amounts of energy a good transmission grid can deliver. The best part of the grid - you don't have to worry about balancing or when you need energy. You just flip a switch. Yes, PG&E could have done more and their investment choices led to lots of damage and loss but let's not jump the gun and term their grid unreliable. They are held to NERC's standards which are among the best in the world.

boulos 5y ago

One distinction versus naturally caused fires (like lightning) is that power lines are often downed by high winds over dry terrain. Lightning, usually, is accompanied by a storm so there’s at least some rain. It’s not going to stop everything, nor all human-caused fires (e.g., the “gender reveal” one last year), but I believe it shifts the likelihood more than you expect.

Proven 5y ago

Who pays? What do you think?

pengaru 5y ago

> what is the point? Presumably the point is to bring affected parts of California back to the first world by not having to shut off their power whenever there's heavy winds expected.

nraynaud 5y ago

Be mindful that it's not exactly the number or size of the fire they are optimizing for, but the cost. And I guess some smaller fires might cost a lot, if they are near rich people's estates.

zild3d 5y ago

> how much can we expect this to reduce the frequency of wildfires? A point to keep in mind here, PGE is a company. Their primary goal is to not be the cause of the wildfire and pay damages. If it also reduces the frequency of wildfires, great.

dredmorbius 5y ago
NB: there's PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric), and PGE (Portland General Electric). Whilst their service areas differ (PG&E serves California, PGE serves Oregon), they're near enough and similarly-enough named that the distinction is useful. Both are for-profit companies. The article here refers to PG&E, Pacific Gas and Electric, an investor-owned private utility serving California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Compa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_General_Electric_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_General_Electric_Comp...

hnarn 5y ago

There are many long term economical effects of burying electric, not only does it reduce exposure to liability (you caused a natural disaster), it also reduces maintenance cost, failure rates and so on. Both customers and providers prefer buried cables, all things being equal. The only issue is that they're more expensive to actually place, so maybe them causing wildfires has finally pushed companies to put the cables where they belong.

T3OU-736 5y ago
As a corollary - maintenance of buried power lines is more expensive due to all the digging which has to be done. Power line inspection is also trickier. I also wonder if the unions representing linemen have a strong influence on "bury" vs "overhead" since most of lineman's job involves work up a pole rather than a tunnel. Lastly - burying anything in the ground in areas where the ground has been known to move (California is the "Earthquake" entry in the Bingo game of "choose which natural disaster" that is the continental USA) is liable to be a non-trivial endeavour, one which will require ongoing inspections and the like.
raggles 5y ago
There are lots of good reasons distribution companies don't like cables in some situations (especially rural). Connecting new customers and network alterations is much more expensive, changing to a higher voltage is not possible, upgrading capacity requires a whole new cable which is more expensive than replacing the conductors, cables only last about 30-50 years. Finding and fixing a cable fault usually takes much longer than overhead (although there are probably less of them per mile). Without wild fires, I seriously doubt cables are more economic in rural areas.

sathackr 5y ago

Because it's cheaper than paying $13.5B when it was your equipment that started it. This is nothing more than liability mitigation. And once complete, even if you don't maintain them, buried cabled generally can't start fires. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/12/06/pge-reaches-billion-settlement-with-california-wildfire-victims/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/12/06/pge-reaches...

rexreed 5y ago

The point is to avoid lawsuits not wildfires.

ashtonkem 5y ago

The biggest effect will be that they won’t have to trigger blackouts during high winds to prevent downed lines from starting forest fires. For those in the affected area, that’s a big deal. But if CA wants to reduce these fires, they desperately need to catch back up on their controlled burns. A combination of low brush fire for decades (not forest fire!) and changing environment has built up an extremely dangerous backlog of fuel that makes CA specifically and the PNW in general a massive fire risk. Short of fixing global warming and moving everyone away from the interface between nature and city, the only solution is to burn up all that fuel in a controlled way.

bluGill 5y ago
This doesn't apply to CA, but in general it is a good idea for most of the world. The vegetation there has been on natural cycles for years of burning hot every few years. Sure power lines start the file, but they will start anyway: large hot fires have always been part of the life cycle of that area. This is very different from the low brush fires that are a natural part of most other forests.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  CA has huge fires partly because they suppressed the low brush fires that were more common a century or two ago. Because they’re now decades behind on the natural burns that would normally happen every summer, the state will have to work overtime to catch back up to a safe equilibrium. To be fair, climate change and changing habitation patterns are also making this much worse. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/11/californias-wildfire-controlled-prescribed-burns-native-americans/ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/11/californias-...
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Fire intensity in California is absolutely related to frequency. Historically, most California forests had low intensity burns every few years. Now, these same forests haven't had a fire in 100+ years, resulting in extremely intense fires that leave behind ashen moonscapes. This is not the historic normal fire cycle in CA.

giantg2 5y ago

"To deflect blame from PGE?" I think that's the major part. It will look good for them from an ESG perspective. Also, I think some states, like CA, are talking about making the company pay for any fire starting from their equipment. So they are probably hedging that risk. If they wait, it could take them too long to complete the burial and then still be subjected to penalties under new laws in the future. Edit: why downvote? These steps may reduce a small percentage of wildfires (10% from electric utilities and PG&E isn't the only one). I think the main reasons they are doing it are what I stated about. I doubt the company truly cares about this unless it reduced the financial risk and helped them in the ESG space.

nemesisj 5y ago

My guess is that fire prevention is only part of the problem. Wouldn't burying the lines mean that their infrastructure is also not destroyed by wild fires? Things just burn above, and everything keeps on working?

cascom 5y ago

The point is that it increases profitability of the utility (by expanding the rate base), and so the customers are paying for it. If they get some good publicity and it marginally decreases fire risk those are secondary benefits.