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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 t

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...
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Fortunately, California has a very low incidence of coal fires.
roenxi 5y ago
I'm no accountant, but if you go bankrupt as a result of an activity then the activity likely doesn't count as profitable. Cash flow positive, yes. Profitable, no. Profitability and bankruptcy sit in a mild opposition to each other.
- kelnos 5y ago
  PG&E is usually profitable; the cause of their bankruptcy is all the damages and fines levied as punishment for their part in starting wildfires.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    If they are found to be the cause of the fires, then this was probably a predictable outcome. If it is a predictable outcome, the accountants would probably do something like accrue a liability for causing forest fires. They might have made a mistake about how much they accrued in the past, but going forward they wouldn't be able to call the decision profitable. It clearly wasn't. If a business goes bankrupt, at least one of its past decisions was an unprofitable one. That is a difficult fact to escape from.
  - galangalalgol 5y ago
    i think the fine was something like 15e9 USD. It is interesting to see what happens when financial penalties for bad corporate behavior are large relative to profits.
  - MereInterest 5y ago
    Damages and fines levied are part of the "costs" side of a balance sheet. If those costs outweigh the revenue, then the business is unprofitable. I think I can see the point you're trying to make, with a distinction between the usual running mode, and abnormal circumstances imposed from an external source. I disagree with that point, as no company exists in a vacuum. The laws and regulations of their environment may impose costs, and those are part of the cost of doing business.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    what you armchair accountant aces don't know is, years ago top PG&E management found a way to take out a lot of capital and capital gains from PG&E, even though PG&E is tightly regulated. New top-level holding companies were formed. They were using this top-level capital structure to purchase other financially performing assets, like power plants in other parts of the US. This was uncovered during the ENRON blackout response. I believe that many US companies have made distinct fortunes based just on capital asset valuations, along with some strategic sales and trades here and there. PG&E is in the center of that, being a massive landowner for its infrastructure. Second fun-fact, when California State regulators requested inventory details for things like transmission facilities, the response was "trade secret" or "homeland security" or "you will sell this info" .. basically deny, delay and deprive. So even the agencies tasked to regulate PG&E did not have complete asset inventories to refer to.. If anyone has info on the current court-ordered restructuring since the criminal negligence conviction, don't be shy !
seanmcdirmid 5y ago
PG&E doesn’t really make that much money from serving those more rural communities and houses where those fires are likely to occur. They subsidize those higher cost to serve areas with all the money they make in the big urban areas that aren’t at risk at all. Burying lines will just cause urban areas to subsidize urban areas even more, when there really should be some consequence for deciding to build your house in or abutting a dry forest with the need to have power brought in through that forest.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  I absolutely agree that the incentives to build homes in/by forests need to be rethought, or at least handled better at the building code / enforcement level.
- mlyle 5y ago
  In many cases these are transmission lines between urban areas that cross rural areas. Or in the case of the Camp Fire, we're talking about a transmission line constructed in the 1920's to carry hydroelectric power from the Sierra Nevada to other areas-- primarily Contra Costa County.
- hedora 5y ago
  If that is true, then how do rural-only power companies outside of California provide much better service at much lower prices than PG&E? Also, running a mile of power line in a California city is orders of magnitude more expensive than running a mile of power line in rural areas outside of California. To the extent that PG&E follows the law (sometimes they just steal the money, and blow up towns years later when the system decays), I doubt they make much profit in the city. At any rate, PG&E prices are completely out of control in rural areas. All in, I paid ~$10K for a 5 foot run from an existing transformer. All they did was run three wires five feet, and re-energize their own transformer. It took them three years. In the meantime, we built a house with a gas generator and Lithium ion batteries. I’m not including that expense in the $10K, nor am I including delay of construction or wiring on our side of the PG&E box. I am including the second pole and power backing board they had us build because the first one (built to their specifications) was unacceptable. Edit: Also, they made us bury our lines, but refused to bury theirs in a reasonable timeframe. Hopefully we’ll get buried service lines out of this. Edit 2: I forgot. They refused to give us permission to move our box to eliminate their unburied lines. So, it wasn’t that we wanted them to pay to bury the lines. We wanted their engineers to sign off on moving a transformer, and then decommissioning their lines. Since then, they’ve had people on our property multiple times to deal with trees that interfere with the line they wouldn’t let us pay to eliminate.

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...
dredmorbius 5y ago
Fortunately, California has a very low incidence of coal fires.

roenxi 5y ago

I'm no accountant, but if you go bankrupt as a result of an activity then the activity likely doesn't count as profitable. Cash flow positive, yes. Profitable, no. Profitability and bankruptcy sit in a mild opposition to each other.

kelnos 5y ago
PG&E is usually profitable; the cause of their bankruptcy is all the damages and fines levied as punishment for their part in starting wildfires.
- roenxi 5y ago
  If they are found to be the cause of the fires, then this was probably a predictable outcome. If it is a predictable outcome, the accountants would probably do something like accrue a liability for causing forest fires. They might have made a mistake about how much they accrued in the past, but going forward they wouldn't be able to call the decision profitable. It clearly wasn't. If a business goes bankrupt, at least one of its past decisions was an unprofitable one. That is a difficult fact to escape from.
- galangalalgol 5y ago
  i think the fine was something like 15e9 USD. It is interesting to see what happens when financial penalties for bad corporate behavior are large relative to profits.
- MereInterest 5y ago
  Damages and fines levied are part of the "costs" side of a balance sheet. If those costs outweigh the revenue, then the business is unprofitable. I think I can see the point you're trying to make, with a distinction between the usual running mode, and abnormal circumstances imposed from an external source. I disagree with that point, as no company exists in a vacuum. The laws and regulations of their environment may impose costs, and those are part of the cost of doing business.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  what you armchair accountant aces don't know is, years ago top PG&E management found a way to take out a lot of capital and capital gains from PG&E, even though PG&E is tightly regulated. New top-level holding companies were formed. They were using this top-level capital structure to purchase other financially performing assets, like power plants in other parts of the US. This was uncovered during the ENRON blackout response. I believe that many US companies have made distinct fortunes based just on capital asset valuations, along with some strategic sales and trades here and there. PG&E is in the center of that, being a massive landowner for its infrastructure. Second fun-fact, when California State regulators requested inventory details for things like transmission facilities, the response was "trade secret" or "homeland security" or "you will sell this info" .. basically deny, delay and deprive. So even the agencies tasked to regulate PG&E did not have complete asset inventories to refer to.. If anyone has info on the current court-ordered restructuring since the criminal negligence conviction, don't be shy !

seanmcdirmid 5y ago

PG&E doesn’t really make that much money from serving those more rural communities and houses where those fires are likely to occur. They subsidize those higher cost to serve areas with all the money they make in the big urban areas that aren’t at risk at all. Burying lines will just cause urban areas to subsidize urban areas even more, when there really should be some consequence for deciding to build your house in or abutting a dry forest with the need to have power brought in through that forest.

floatingatoll 5y ago
I absolutely agree that the incentives to build homes in/by forests need to be rethought, or at least handled better at the building code / enforcement level.
mlyle 5y ago
In many cases these are transmission lines between urban areas that cross rural areas. Or in the case of the Camp Fire, we're talking about a transmission line constructed in the 1920's to carry hydroelectric power from the Sierra Nevada to other areas-- primarily Contra Costa County.
hedora 5y ago
If that is true, then how do rural-only power companies outside of California provide much better service at much lower prices than PG&E? Also, running a mile of power line in a California city is orders of magnitude more expensive than running a mile of power line in rural areas outside of California. To the extent that PG&E follows the law (sometimes they just steal the money, and blow up towns years later when the system decays), I doubt they make much profit in the city. At any rate, PG&E prices are completely out of control in rural areas. All in, I paid ~$10K for a 5 foot run from an existing transformer. All they did was run three wires five feet, and re-energize their own transformer. It took them three years. In the meantime, we built a house with a gas generator and Lithium ion batteries. I’m not including that expense in the $10K, nor am I including delay of construction or wiring on our side of the PG&E box. I am including the second pole and power backing board they had us build because the first one (built to their specifications) was unacceptable. Edit: Also, they made us bury our lines, but refused to bury theirs in a reasonable timeframe. Hopefully we’ll get buried service lines out of this. Edit 2: I forgot. They refused to give us permission to move our box to eliminate their unburied lines. So, it wasn’t that we wanted them to pay to bury the lines. We wanted their engineers to sign off on moving a transformer, and then decommissioning their lines. Since then, they’ve had people on our property multiple times to deal with trees that interfere with the line they wouldn’t let us pay to eliminate.