
Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change - smaili
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-13/facing-17-billion-in-fire-damages-a-ceo-blames-climate-change
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dbcurtis
PG&E has is not trimming vegetation back sufficiently. It is an infrastructure
expense that is easy to defer -- for a while.

In the Sonoma County fires, trees contacting power lines and either catching
on fire directly, or causing a short leading to a transformer explosion
sparked a lot of fires. Of course, 100kph winds will cause the fuel to burn
wicked fast. I saw a photo of a melted cast metal BBQ grill after the Sonoma
fire. A fire that hot is hard to fight in any circumstances.

As far as climate change, goes... well, maybe? We had five years of drought,
followed by a very wet winter. I have property in the Sierra foothills. With
dry, drought-stressed trees interspersed with a few drought-killed trees,
there was a lot of standing "hot" fuel. The wet winter caused the grasses to
grow like mad the next year -- by late summer, when the grass was dormant and
tinder-dry, there was a lot of "cool" ground-fuel to spread fire. Some idiot
drove through tall grass and the hot catalytic converter lit the grass,
leading to the Detwieler fire, which burned over the top of my property --
most of which burned cool (I lost a few trees, and a 60 year old not-
historical-at-all outhouse... some of my neighbors were not nearly so lucky.)

Back to PG&E maintenance practices, there was a tree that fell on a power line
near my property taking a power for a short service stretch, luckily it didn't
spark any more fire on the mountain.

PG&E can whine about climate change, but bottom line, they need to be much
more diligent about vegetation control. It doesn't take a PhD to understand
how some wind and a dry branch can cause a whole lot of trouble.

~~~
almost_usual
PG&E needs to be doing a better job and California should consider bringing
back its logging industry.

I get burning wood isn’t the cleanest energy source but dead trees are going
to burn no matter what. I’d rather someone harvest it and burn it in a
controlled environment rather than it rage uncontrollably.

~~~
Fomite
There's plenty of western states on fire right now with robust logging
industries.

~~~
briffle
Which? Oregon and Washington are a small fraction of what they used to be.
Federal laws (endagered species act, etc) killed off the vast majority of it,
and decimated many small towns.

~~~
Fomite
Idaho and Montana.

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jerkstate
If she's blaming climate change, doesn't that make PG&E culpable? IIRC the
majority of their power is generated from natural gas (at least since they
shut down San Ohnofre and planned closure of Diablo Canyon), not to mention
what the "G" stands for.

~~~
aardvark291
Privatize the profits, socialize the losses...?

~~~
imsofuture
Works for banks alright.

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JshWright
Anthropogenic climate change is a real and significant threat to the current
state of our planet. That being said...

It is likely a fairly minor player in the uptick in major wildfires over the
past few decades. That is more due to mismanagement of forests, and a "zero
tolerance" policy towards fires allowing a huge build up of fuel loads.

~~~
decebalus1
> It is likely a fairly minor player in the uptick in major wildfires over the
> past few decades. That is more due to mismanagement of forests, and a "zero
> tolerance" policy towards fires allowing a huge build up of fuel loads.

Don't want to sound combative, I'm actually very interested. Do do you have
any proof of that?

~~~
simongr3dal
[https://youtu.be/Y27lFsPEZ30](https://youtu.be/Y27lFsPEZ30)

Tom Scott made a little 4 minute video about the topic.

Basically by letting the forrest burn more often there would be less fuel
available for the next fire.

And when the fires got smaller the biggest of trees in the forrest would also
be more likely to survive through the fire.

So in some forrests that’s what they do in some forrests now.

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alphabettsy
Ok it’s face it seems the fires are made worse by climate change, but probably
caused by poor infrastructure maintenance.

~~~
shard972
Which to me begs the question, shouldn't companies be doing more maintenance
to ensure fires don't get out of control? If you really believe climate change
was responsible, why were they asleep at the wheel?

Otherwise it just seems like a blatant attempt to socialize the losses.

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Simulacra
Novel, but likely ultimately to fail. IIUC, the CEO is claiming liability to
PG&E is negated by the overall affect of climate change. That would likely
have to be argued in court but that undertaking sounds quite massive, and
would require a tremendous amount of science. What I think is really going on
here is that she's trying to find someone else to take the blame, financially,
and probably pushing the state to indemnify PG&E. A novel idea, but I think a
court would rule this an act of God and tell PG&E that's what its insurance is
for.

~~~
jessaustin
She isn't setting this up as a court case. She's trying to manufacture enough
political cover for the governor and various other cronies to plausibly save
her firm from its self-imposed predicament. They can pass any law they want,
if the voting public is confused enough.

~~~
DoctorOetker
so confused we think its very nice of the legislative branch (or is it the
executive) to show the judicial branch how its done?

~~~
jessaustin
"California Bill Would Shield PG&E, Edison from Some Wildfire Liability"

[https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/west/2018/04/26/487452...](https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/west/2018/04/26/487452.htm)

On a national level, the same thing happened for ATT etc. when Room 641A was
exposed to public scrutiny. Otherwise there would have been lots of lawsuits
on that. Actually, aside from the _post facto_ nature of these particular
laws, I'm glad that the courts have to defer to the legislature in defining
the Law. Judges are on average even more corrupt than legislators.

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DoctorOetker
Could the hot air from these fires lift a balloon? Ignoring the difficulty of
attaching a burning tree to a balloon, could it lift its own weight? Fireproof
Robots, cutting burning trees into neat piles, tied together, to be lifted by
balloon?

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refurb
Hmmm... data in the article isn’t that compelling. You’d need to go back
decades to see if recent fires are out of the norm.

~~~
harlanlewis
There's a lot of data on this subject. BuzzFeed News recently had an article
about how fires have changed over the past decades:
[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/california...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/california-
wildfires-people-climate)

And for the HackerNews-y type, they even made all the data and R code for the
visualizations publicly available:
[https://buzzfeednews.github.io/2018-07-wildfire-
trends/](https://buzzfeednews.github.io/2018-07-wildfire-trends/)

It is hard to pin the increase on any one cause - it's a confluence of
factors. Here's a perspective piece by a few well regarded experts:
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/07/californ...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/07/california-
wildfires-megafires-future-climate-change)

One of those experts is Daniel Swain, who has an excellent Twitter account
which posts a lot more data:
[https://twitter.com/Weather_West](https://twitter.com/Weather_West)

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mikec3010
I blame firefighting causing forest change. Firefighting causing fuel levels
to build up to unprecedented densities. Who put out fires before we started?
Nobody. Nature handles that fine herself. But leave it to us to try to
"improve" on it.

~~~
waterphone
Fire suppression is a major problem, for sure. But it wasn't all natural in
the past, either. Humans have been managing forests through the use of fire
for a very long time, setting fires to thin out the understory and make areas
more appealing to wildlife they could then hunt, etc., which would in turn
make the forest healthier and less prone to megafires.

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musgrove
Bloomberg should hire writers that know how to proofread their writing: "He’s
proposed a bill that would lesson utilities’ exposure to damages from fires,
citing climate change." That tends to "lesson" their credibility.

~~~
spacehome
Enlighten me, what's the typo?

~~~
wgerard
they used "lesson" in the quote/article when they almost certainly meant
"lessen".

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aardvark291
This is why the rest of the world has abandoned above-ground power lines in
favor of secure underground power lines. Fewer fires, fewer black outs...

~~~
eigenvector
There is nowhere in the world that power lines are put underground unless
there is a reason they can't go above ground: dense urban area, unable to
secure a right-of-way, crossing another piece of linear infrastructure like a
highway, etc.. It's way more expensive to go underground, it causes technical
challenges at high voltage necessitating additional, expensive infrastructure
like capacitor banks and point-on-wave energization control and it's harder
and more costly to inspect, test and maintain. Insulated power cables are
subject to third-party intrusion (technical jargon for people digging and
hitting them), water and contaminant ingress, and it's hard to determine their
condition without taking them out of service and using specialized equipment
for testing. Even then, it's very hard to pinpoint the exact location of
degradation and you have to dig to access it. Splicing them requires very
highly trained workers and if the work isn't done right it fails in the middle
of the night 5 years later.

There is more underground distribution (medium voltage) in Europe because
cities are denser and older and there's less space for overhead lines.
Transmission (high voltage) is still 99% above ground.

I'm a power systems engineer and I have no idea what 'rest of the world'
you're talking about. The first choice for cost, reliability and ease of
maintenance is always overhead.

~~~
nikonyrh
Finland is moving quite a lot of power lines underground especially in the
middle of forests, because falling trees are a problem during a seasonal
storm[0]. I'm not sure how this cheaper than cutting down the trees though.
Sadly most of the information is in Finnish.

>In reality, the difference in the status of power lines between Canada and
Finland is not so clear-cut. As things stand now, 11% of power lines in Québec
(my province of Canada) are buried, while this number is approximately 42% in
Finland. The main difference though, is that Finland has an active strategy to
increase this number to 65% by 2029. Helen, the energy company for Helsinki,
already operates a power network buried at 97,7%.

The new law seems to demand that power outages must not be longer than 6 hours
within cities or 36 hours on rural areas[1][2].

[0] [https://www.tys.fi/power-lines-buried-finland-not-
canada/](https://www.tys.fi/power-lines-buried-finland-not-canada/) [1]
[https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-6927938](https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-6927938) [2]
[https://www.tekniikkatalous.fi/tekniikka/katkoton-sahko-
vie-...](https://www.tekniikkatalous.fi/tekniikka/katkoton-sahko-vie-kaapelit-
maan-alle-tiedossa-miljardilaskut-6210295)

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walrus01
At a certain point, it's going to cost less to cover every sun facing surface
in ultra low cost photovoltaics, and have on site battery storage, than to
maintain, replace and repair last mile power lines and middle-mile + long
distance high voltage lines. Imagine eliminating all of the salary and benefit
costs for thousands of linemen, bucket trucks, insurance, consumables,
transformers, substations, not to mention the cost of poles and lines
themselves.

If PV panels were $0.10/watt and Powerwall-like batteries were 1/5th of the
cost they are now, per kWh stored, I can totally see a future where suburban
density homes have no power grid connections at all.

~~~
nradov
What happens when it's cloudy for a few days and the batteries are dead?

~~~
kwhitefoot
Why are the batteries dead? Anyway you might be able to run a cable to your
next door neighbour. I know of people who already sell solar power to their
neighbours.

~~~
nradov
Batteries die when it's too cloudy for solar panels to keep them charged. And
unless "you" are a licensed electrician it's highly dangerous and
irresponsible to run a cable to another house. That's how fires get started
and people get electrocuted. In most of the developed world it's easier,
safer, and cheaper to keep a grid connection for backup even if you generate
most of your own power.

