
PG&E to intentionally shut off power again – this time to 150k customers - bookofjoe
https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/20/us/california-pge-power-shutoffs/index.html
======
mikeknoop
Most reporting about intentional cut-offs makes vague claims about PG&E
wanting to avoid future culpability.

All the reporting I’ve seen is missing a key, interesting fact. A judge’s
court order from January requires them to do these intentional shut offs.

Source, w/ link to the court order:
[https://twitter.com/mikeknoop/status/1189400411175710722](https://twitter.com/mikeknoop/status/1189400411175710722)

~~~
Johnny555
"At all times during the 2019 Wildfire Season (and thereafter), PG&E may
supply electricity only through those parts of its electrical grid it has
determined to be safe under the wind conditions then prevailing. Conversely,
PG&E must de-energize any part of its grid not yet rated as safe by PG&E for
the wind conditions then prevailing until those conditions have subsided"

The court order doesn't prevent them from doing the work to declare more of
the system "safe" to reduce or eliminate the scope of the power shutoffs.

~~~
Blackstone4
Yes but they would need to have the capital and time to plan to carry out the
work. They are under financial duress and will probably go bankrupt so no one
will lend them cash. It may take years to fix everything...imagine if they did
not shut down the grid and there was another fire....what would you say to
that?

~~~
cgriswald
This is a poor time to be a PG&E apologist. While there are several factors
that contributed to the ignition, scale, and duration of the fires, PG&E has
been found criminally negligible.

People are rightly angry. They are still being victimized today for PG&Es
_long_ history of behavior. They see no evidence that PG&E is working to
correct the situation. They're told, "Hey, but you don't want a fire right" as
if that is the only alternative. People want reliable, safely transported
power. PG&E is not delivering.

And even if PG&E weren't to blame, they've fumbled on every one of these
outages from a customer perspective. I was never even notified of the first
outage. They communicated through Twitter and some other media. Even the one
we had in common I rarely use and when I use I don't see every post. Their
website was frequently down.

During the second outage their website often had no information, vague
information, or inaccurate information. Our neighbors got power back _days_
before we did. We literally had parts of our neighborhood all around us with
power, but we went without. And during that time they announced a third outage
with the same poor-quality information. We didn't even know if we'd get power
back on before the next one hit. Also during that time, they stopped having
humans answering their phones. Instead they just had a machine parrot the same
(lack of) information that was available on their website.

So, I don't know what to tell you. The idea that "a judge made them do it" is
absurd. A judge made them do the right thing or to not do the thing at all. It
is their history of not doing the right thing, but still doing that thing,
that lead us all here.

~~~
harshreality
Being mad about the past (and PG&E did bad things in the past) doesn't have
any bearing on what they're doing _now_.

Their equipment is poorly maintained. Fire risk is high. What do you want them
to do, keep running power in high risk areas, cause more fires, and go more
bankrupt? CA taxpayers pay either way, either more disruption from power
outages or more property destruction.

Note I'm talking _operationally_. Clawing back money from executives and
dissolving the company are not operational changes that address the risky
equipment and dangerous conditions. Neither of those will address this year's
or next year's problems, and that $100 million would pay for burying at most
about 50 miles of transmission lines.

As far as disabling the automatic reclosers, maybe they should, but I'm going
to take a wild guess that that they don't do that for a reason, and not just
that they are being stupid. Perhaps those breakers are tripped so frequently
that not reclosing them automatically would lead to massive outages anyway,
and those would be _unplanned_ outages which would be more difficult for
people to handle.

Nobody is talking about letting them off the hook. They're in bankruptcy court
and judge Alsup is taking things seriously. But being mad and assigning
penalties isn't going to fix the fires or the blackouts any time soon. It
would have been good years ago to dig through PG&E's financials and get mad
years about their misuse of maintenance funds, but nobody did that, or at
least nobody got sufficiently mad if they did. It's too late to be mad about
prior malfeasance once a disaster materializes.

Actual solutions would be to raise rates immediately by a lot, like 50-100%,
and pay people starting _now_ to go out and mitigate problems (clear
vegetation) and start to coordinate repairs. Every $.01 (per kWh) rate
increase generates $6 million per day assuming an average of 25,000 MW and no
usage-based pricing (and completely inelastic demand). 25e6 kW times 24h times
$.01/kWh

~~~
inferiorhuman
_What do you want them to do_

Easy.

Step 1: the $100 million from the safety budget that got redirected to the
CEO? Get it back. With interest. Use that $100+ million to start
undergrounding lines.

Step 2: disable the automatic reclosers like every other California utility
does during fire season.

Step 3: submit a dissolution plan to the CPUC

~~~
Rebelgecko
>Use that $100+ million to start undergrounding lines.

That'll get them how much, maybe 10-20 miles? LADWP just paid $130 million for
11 miles of undergrounding (although it was a higher voltage line in an urban
area which is a bit more expensive)

~~~
inferiorhuman
_That 'll get them how much, maybe 10-20 miles? _

Closer to 100 miles.

[https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/pge-underground-
power...](https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/pge-underground-power-lines-
cost-14503808.php)

------
Blackstone4
In this situation, I feel like it's a case of "don't blame the player, blame
the game". Californian law has been structured such that if PG&E maintains
equipment with best-in-class industry practises....it is still deemed to be
responsible for a fire if it started at one of their sites. So what would you
do? Shut the thing down...as to not cause any more fires... the fire services
has shown itself not capable of containing the blazes and the weather
conditions are terrible so...of course you blame the big evil company ....I'm
not saying PG&E should take no blame, they should where merited but I feel
like the public narrative has gone too far in one direction.

~~~
diffeomorphism
That is the narrative PG&E is trying to push but I am not buying it.

What seems to be the case instead is that "best-in-class industry practises"
would be completely fine but are deemed to be too expensive.

So their choices are:

\- Actually employ best practices.

\- half-ass it and possibly be punished for it (too risky).

\- Moan loudly about how horrible everything is, shutdown much more than
necessary and wail how you are "forced" to do that. If you are obnoxious
enough about it for long enough some legislation will be passed to allow you
to half-ass it.

-

~~~
dahdum
Those best practices are deemed too expensive by the CPUC, who has authority
over the PG&E budget and retail rates.

PG&E is legally allowed only a small profit as a percentage of revenue.
Without it they couldn’t raise private capital, and would require public funds
directly. They have every incentive to spend as much money on maintenance as
is required, assuming the politicians allow the rates to rise.

~~~
LorenPechtel
Exactly. Don't give them the budget but expect them to do it anyway.

~~~
inferiorhuman
[https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/PG-E-diverted-
safety-...](https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/PG-E-diverted-safety-money-
for-profit-bonuses-2500175.php)

How about we just get that money back before jacking up rates?

------
soapboxrocket
Did we all just as a society completely forget about Enron? Enron did rolling
brown outs to help boost pay, and used the excuse of demand. Now PG&E has
stepped it up by doing blackouts and claiming its because of fire risk.

~~~
harshreality
The systems effects resulting from a combination of free markets and well-
intentioned government regulation can be tricky.

Enron's problem was obvious, though. They controlled both the distribution
lines and the generation facilities, and were allowed to participate in an
energy derivatives market too. And either no caps on profits or no meaningful
caps. And California let that happen. It's like letting wild cats live on your
ranch and then being shocked, shocked when they start killing your cattle.
Except in this case I think California was actually shocked, because the
politicians were too clueless to realize what could happen.

~~~
ncmncm
Governor Gray Davis was acting to contain Enron and their ilk, so they
arranged a recall, and installed Schwarzeggar. Who turned over $80B of state
money to them, as apparently prearranged.

------
devmunchies
My power is scheduled to be shut off by this outage. It was literally raining
all night, the roads were still wet as i was leaving for work this morning.

The ground is soaked. I don't see how a fire could spread in this weather.

------
chaostheory
On the bright side, it’s a good time for society to seriously start taking
steps to help decentralize power production through a combination of solar and
home batteries from vendors like Tesla. It’s easier for consumers to account
and plan for vs a real disaster like an overdue earthquake

~~~
rtkwe
Most home solar installations don't come with proper grid isolation and the
inverters aren't designed to create a stable AC signal in the absence of a
grid power signal so they can't really solve this problem.

~~~
guntars
But they could, though, with a small increase in complexity and cost. People
didn’t find it worthwhile because the grid in the US has been fantastically
reliable, until now.

~~~
rtkwe
It's not really low cost, to truly do off grid solar you need to have a
battery pack plus the isolator (so you don't fry the people trying to fix the
system with back-fed current) and a true sine wave inverter which is pretty
expensive. You have to have the battery pack because solar has a very harsh
drop off in produced energy if you try to extract too much and that level
moves around a lot as the light level on the cell changes. Because of this you
have to have a reserve that can power the entire house by itself since a cloud
can drop out 90% of the solar energy completely randomly.

------
panic
2020 X Prize: $10M to the first person who can figure out how to keep
California's electricity on.

~~~
thedogeye
Bury the power lines. Will cost more than $10M though. But less than we're
spending on fire recovery and prevention.

~~~
drdeadringer
What was the reason(s) the lines weren't buried in the first place?

~~~
inferiorhuman
_What was the reason(s) the lines weren 't buried in the first place? _

PG&E was too busy spending its income on cash bonuses, dividends, and stock
buybacks. It really is just a matter of money.

[https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/pge-underground-
power...](https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/pge-underground-power-lines-
cost-14503808.php)

------
cgriswald
One of my college professors professed that we should all prepare for the
zombie apocalypse, because it's fun, and because in doing so you're actually
preparing for real disaster scenarios.

As displeased as I am about these shutoffs (trying not to rant), it has shown
me the strengths and weaknesses of my preparedness plans; and it's helped keep
me motivated and keeping things regularly rotated, etc.

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carapace
They haven't dared to blackout major population centers yet, have they?

\- - - -

Just a little history of PG&E shadiness:
[http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Hetch_Hetchy_Stor...](http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Hetch_Hetchy_Story,_Part_II:_PG%26E_and_the_Raker_Act)

TL:DR; SF has been supposed to have it's own power from Hetch Hetchy for
nearly 100 years and PG&E has MITM'd the scheme to this day.

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thedogeye
Ayn Rand wrote about this in one of her books.

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moralestapia
Didn't knew Elon was behind this as well.

