
PG&E is shutting off power in Northern California again - pmoriarty
https://www.pge.com/en_US/safety/emergency-preparedness/natural-disaster/wildfires/psps-service-impact-map.page
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GrayTextIsTruth
3rd time in 3 weeks. I joked that the difference between a 1st world and 3rd
world country is that a 1st world country will tell you before they cut you
power for 2 days.

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mc32
Problem is, the state has shrublands and, grasslands and forests which
historically have been prone to natural fires. Fires happen. People also like
building and living in these areas.

The state regulates PG&E, sets rates, and also establishes liability on the
utility for incidental fires. So the state regulates them, they follow
regulation but when something anticipated happens they’re still liable.

So the natural thing to do in that conundrum, as the Wargames villain quoth:
the only winning move is to not play.

Ergo they take their energy and go home.

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jasonpeacock
PG&E has consistently _not_ invested in maintaining the land around their
power lines. This is an entirely preventable problem and caused by a lack of
long term investment in infrastructure maintenance.

They've admitted they don't have the time, money, nor manpower to go out and
play catch up with all the maintenance that they have deferred, and now the
public (their customers) is suffering.

They deserve to go bankrupt from this.

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mc32
I hope so too. I’m looking forward to seeing how much better the state runs
what then will be a department.

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eganist
Not-a-PG&E-customer here: where's the animus against _specifically_ catching
up on infrastructure maintenance debt coming from?

Corollary: why was said animus not directed to PG&E at the time that
maintenance was neglected?

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DeepYogurt
I haven't followed this closely, but last year's camp fire was blamed on
poorly maintained infrastructure and the PG&E line was that there was a lot of
poorly maintained infrastructure around the state.

To the corollary; most people don't complain about the lack of maintenance
until the lack of maintenance becomes a clear problem.

That said, I do not know what sort of details PG&E put out in prior reports. I
don't know what, if any, public oversight was in place and I don't know if
there's merit to the idea that PG&E has been deferring maintenance in exchange
for short term profits.

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lokar
The regulator specifically approves the maintenance levels.

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lacker
Sigh. PG+E texted me to say that _maybe_ our power would get turned off. I
immediately checked online, where it says that our power will not get turned
off. I guess they have multiple databases that are out of sync with each
other?

I am not an expert on electricity infrastructure. However, as a software
engineer I can tell that PG+E's software systems are low-quality and full of
bugs. I can only assume that the rest of their operations meet the same low
quality standards.

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entangledqubit
Has anyone seen any plausible estimates of the additional fire danger arising
from the use of all the small generators that are firing up during these
periods?

I'm curious if all this represents a greater risk than powering up the lines.
(But at least PG&E won't foot the bill...)

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ww520
I notice some of the over the air TV channels have no signal. Wonder whether
the PGE power shutoff has affected the TV towers.

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8ytecoder
Very likely given where they are likely to be situated

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baddox
It's fascinating that we're apparently tolerating them turning people's
electricity off _and_ burning down large parts of the state. You'd think we'd
only accept one or the other. Or in a crazy utopian world, neither!

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notadoc
This sounds like something you read about in the undeveloped world.

Something is very wrong that this is happening in the USA, let alone a state
with the 6th largest GDP in the world.

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maxpert
I think the rich and wealthy valley brains need to solve this problem too.
This company is definitely done, they already have caused a fire despite
outages.

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BurningFrog
PG&E is a government granted monopoly.

Not much SV brains can do about that.

In other words, this is a problem of power, not brains. (no pun intended...)

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avelis
For those who can afford it. It's a great time to get home solar. Even a small
3.7kW solar panel system can help out with the basics if not more.

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newnewpdro
Small battery-less grid-tied systems go down when the grid is down, it's a
requirement for safety so a malfunctioning grid isn't kept hot by residential
sources.

I do think this will sell a bunch of powerwalls to rich californians though.

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unlinked_dll
It's like they're trying to get nationalized

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Consultant32452
At some levels of regulation, there is no meaningful difference between
private and nationalized. Owning the means of production includes certain
rights like deciding what to do with the capital/equipment. Every regulation
that controls your actions with the equipment or what your workers can do is,
in part, the state seizing the means of production. Similarly with taxes. The
difference between a nationalized PG&E and a private one is that if the state
lights a forest fire due to poor maintenance on the lines, the state isn't
going to allow you to sue them.

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unlinked_dll
>At some levels of regulation, there is no meaningful difference between
private and nationalized.

The one regulation missing for this in PG&E's case is mandating profit
reinvested in infrastructure ahead of shareholder dividends, buybacks, and|or
executive compensation.

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Consultant32452
I think you'd get better results with a system that increases competition and
incentivizes things like quality of service. The competition has the side
benefit of decreasing those profits you seem concerned about.

Forcing them to spend money internally just incentives internal costs to
increase, not to improve quality of service.

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davmar
i have this conspiracy theory: PG&E is normalizing power shutdowns around this
time of year and on Nov 3, 2020 they'll shut off power to specific areas while
people are voting for the next president.

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GrayTextIsTruth
I live in the outage zone so i've been hearing some conspiracy theories.

Trying to get a govt bailout, diverting power to a big secret government
project, or (here's a good one) prepping us for more outages so they can start
taking people (specifically anti-zionists) in the night, Bolshevik-style. lol.

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davmar
those are some interesting theories. the big secret gov't project is probably
like stranger things then. they need the power to drill a hole into the upside
down!

