Pacific Gas and Electric is California's largest utility
company. And it has a massive wildfire problem.
The utility giant PG&E filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
protection, the company facing billions of dollars in potential
liabilities for its role in last year's deadly wildfires.
A new report out today on California's deadliest wildfire
ever the inferno north of Sacramento killed 85 people,
destroyed 18,000 homes and buildings.
The Sonoma County DA has filed criminal charges against PG&E
over its role in starting the 2019 Kincade fire.
5 of the 10 most destructive fires in California since 2015,
have been linked to PG&E's equipment. With 25,000 miles of
power lines in high fire threat areas. PG&E has spent the last
couple years relying heavily on one simple way to reduce the
risk of it causing a spark. Shut the power off.
So it happened twice for almost a full week at a time and we
essentially lost that full week of service. We lost all of our
food supply, we were not able to operate, we lost that revenue.
So now PG&E is trying out a new solution for keeping the power
on safely in remote areas. It's this small standalone renewable
microgrid in the mountains of Briceburg, California.
So this system is powering five customer meters year round 24/7
365.
PG&E is also building bigger backup microgrids as part of its
$5 billion 2021 Fire Mitigation Plan. It also includes 300 new
weather stations to monitor for severe conditions, LIDAR, drones
and hundreds of cameras to provide 90% visual coverage of
high fire threat areas, hardening the system by doing
things like moving 23 miles of line near Paradise underground,
and more aggressive clearing of trees around powerlines.
We must succeed, civilization, California, our communities need
all of us to come together to figure out how to solve all
these things at once to get clean, reliable, safe,
affordable energy. But, we have to we are not just going to pack
up and leave California.
We went to Briceburg to see the five customer microgrid that
PG&E says is proof it's committed to doing better and
visited communities asking the utility to work harder at
keeping their power on and keeping them safe.
Keeping the power on for 16 million Californians is a big
job. So is maintaining the integrity of more than 100,000
miles of power lines, while keeping it clear of vegetation
that could turn a spark into a deadly wildfire.
All this while answering to California regulators and as an
investor owned utility, shareholders.
The management of the company mostly tried in the years
leading up to Napa Sonoma and Paradise to please shareholders
by controlling costs.
The deadliest fire in California history occurred in Paradise in
2018 when a live wire broke free from a 99 year old PG&E electric
tower. It was 25 years past what PG&E considers its useful life.
85 people died.
There's one person who committed suicide in his home. As the fire
was bearing down on him he decided to take his own life,
rather than wait for the fire to consume him. So PG&E did not
plead guilty to the death of that person. But they did plead
guilty to the death of 84 other people
Clearly there were oversights. And clearly we wish it hadn't
happened.
PG&E is trying everything it can think of, because it knows that,
you know, it needs to repair its relationship with the state of
California.
By January 2019, PG&E was in bankruptcy. It emerged last year
after agreeing to pay more than $25 billion in damages to
insurers and 70,000 victims of the fires it's caused since
2015.
The way that we operated our electric system in the 20th
century, is no longer safe. We've got crumbling
infrastructure as a country, all over the place. This is not
unique to PG&E.
Indeed, investigators in Southern California found San
Diego Gas and Electric at fault for a series of fires that
killed 10 people in 2007. Texas power companies failed to keep
the power on during this year's winter storms. Portland based
Pacific Power is under investigation for the deadly
2020 wildfires. But a frontline investigation found that going
back more than a decade, PG&E resisted spending money on
preventative measures, saying wind driven fire risk and its
territory of Northern California was significantly lower than in
Southern California. But while utilities in Southern California
launched weather stations, cameras and satellites after the
2007 fires, climate change has drastically increased the risk
in the north. Last year saw five of the six largest wildfires in
California's history all in PG&E's service territory.
Since 2018, the simplest way PG&E reduces the risk of
equipment sparks is by shutting it off in high risk areas during
dry, windy weather. It calls these Public Safety Power
Shutoffs or PSPS events.
There was a big fire in 2019 called the Kincade fire that was
ignited by PG&E equipment. But because it was the only fire
during a wind event that would have ignited many, many fires,
if the power hadn't been shut off, all of Cal fires resources
were dedicated to controlling it and containing it, and that
meant that Healdsburg and Windsor didn't burn down.
PG&E had nine power shutoffs in 2019, lasting from 14 hours to
seven days and impacting at least 1.3 million customers.
That number dropped to six outages in 2020 impacting
650,000 customers. Despite earlier assurances they were
temporary, PG&E says PSPS events are here to stay.
Public Safety Power Shutoff is a tool that's probably going to be
around for quite a while. California is not getting
wetter. It's getting drier it's getting hotter.
Just to end those first couple outages. Our losses exceeded
$30,000.
Brennen Jensen is part of the quarter of California's
population. 11.2 million people who live in 4.5 million homes in
the wildland urban interface threatened most by growing
wildfire risk. In 2019, she and her husband bought the 100 year
old Hotel Charlotte in the town of Groveland, a gateway to
Yosemite.
In normal times, this would be a bustling of restaurants. When
you go through the whole process to determine whether or not to
to take over a business in a particular area, never in that
calculus did we consider that our well established major
utility could turn off the power without any real notice.
Six months into running the hotel, their first PSPS outage
lasted seven days.
One of my employees who didn't have power for several days and
had only an electric stove, you know, called me at late at night
and was like can I come to the hotel and use the propane stove
so that I can make a bottle for my infant son.
Although PG&E does have a safety net program to reimburse
residential customers up to $100 for things like spoiled food,
losses during a Public Safety Power Shutoff are not eligible.
The food was really compromised and had to all be tossed. That
was really unfortunate. Twice.
Residents in high risk areas who can afford it are putting in
generators to keep the power on.
We have seen an incredible amount of demand on Generac
products in the last 12 to 18 months. From an order intake
perspective, it doubled even tripled for a while what we were
used to seeing.
I was actually the primary operator of our generator
throughout the timeframe not sleeping all through the night.
Jensen's generator is decades old. It was so cumbersome and
costly to run during the long PSPS outages in 2019 that they
opted to shut down their restaurant before the 2020
wildfire season rather than struggle to keep the power on at
their own cost.
One improvement came in 2020 when regulators started
requiring more ample notice to customers when the power was
going to turn off. PG&E also says the power came back on an
average of seven hours sooner in 2020 compared to 2019.
Power Shutoffs are here to stay. They may get smaller, but they
are going to be something that we have to live with for the
time being until we develop technological alternatives that
really work and that's gonna take time we have to invent
stuff to get our way out of this.
That's exactly what PG&E has done in one tiny remote area for
now.
Historically, microgrids have been thought of as as a backup.
This is not the backup solution, it is the solution and we think
it's the first of its kind.
They are cranking right now because it's a very sunny
afternoon.
The big difference between this standalone power system and an
off grid solar system you might think of on a cabin in the
woods. This thing is comparable to what a wire can provide. This
system is also designed to stay energized during Public Safety
Power Shutoff.
In April, this first of its kind renewable microgrid started
providing power to five customers including two homes
and the Briceburg Visitor Center. They've been living
solely off of diesel power generators since a 5000 acre
fire destroyed their high voltage line in 2019.
These customers are not paying for this directly. This is PG&E
using its budget for distribution costs. We were
going to have to rebuild this wire one way or another, we're
choosing to rebuild it with this system instead.
PG&E commissioned Grass Valley based startup BoxPower to build
a containerized microgrid powered by a minimum of 70%
solar. It's similar to systems that BoxPower deployed in Puerto
Rico in 2018 after Hurricane Maria took out the power grid
for nearly a year.
It's solar to batteries and then the batteries maintain that so
at nighttime when the sun isn't shining, that's where the
customer is getting their power from.
Two solar arrays pump power down to be stored in a lithium ferro
phosphate battery bank in a fire resistant shipping container.
In the event that there isn't enough solar, we do have the
backup propane generators.
It's to make sure that you never run out of energy no matter what
because this is not connected to the grid. You can't get power
from anywhere else. It's all produced right here on site.
Insulated lines, then take the power up a fortified pole and
across the Merced River to three of the customers
6 or 700 feet over across the river to the homes that are now
being served off this system 24/7.
Two similar remote grids are already in the works. Although,
they're facing permitting issues due to the presence of
threatened species. PG&E is aiming to have 20 standalone
remote grids operational by 2022. With plans for several
hundred more.
Within three to five years, you'll be able to look at and
say this was not just a one off. But wow this is a pattern.
Isolating standalone power systems like this means fewer
miles of wire and fewer chances of sparks. PG&E is helping build
another 100% renewable microgrid in Humboldt County too. It'll
power 18 customers, including a regional airport and a U.S.
Coast Guard Station. And then there's 11 larger microgrids
being built as backup power for whole communities powered by
diesel generators that kick on during PSPS outages. Groveland
was supposed to get one last year, but PG&E says it's now
delayed until the end of this year.
It would be nice to have some better communication and
realistic timelines so that we can properly prepare and come up
with alternative strategies in the meantime.
Jensen who worked as an environmental scientist and
consultant before running Hotel Charlotte says that PG&E should
be powering all its microgrids and more with renewable sources
like in Briceburg.
I hope that they adopt a renewable approach that they
commit to scaling and replicating throughout the
state. This is the opportunity to be able to do this.
A few miles outside of Groveland, Jensen's friends
Deborah and Kevin Kalkowski run a four room bed and breakfast
and small ranch.
So these two horses you see here, these are Arabians.
When PG&E shuts the power off, Kevin uses this tractor to haul
five generators down from their upper farmland to keep the
business operating.
This is a 3000 watt, this is a 2000 watt. We have two of these.
In 2013, you know, we had to evacuate our guests. Yeah, that
was like our first year oh my gosh, I'm opening the business
and people are trying to come to Yosemite there's a buyer and
everything gets shut down. Luckily, in our situation where
it's unique, I can fall back on Kevin.
Kevin owns a forestry business that's booming, because people
hire him to clean up after PG&E comes in to cut down a rapidly
growing number of trees around power lines on private land.
PG&E has fallen hundreds of trees on some of our projects,
depending on how the transmission lines run through
that property.
In 2017, four fires in Napa broke out when trees hit PG&E
power lines. Last year, the Zogg fire killed four people in
Shasta County after a gray pine fell on a PG&E line.
It's not an easy job. Are they going to protect the community?
Are they going to keep people powered up? Are they're going to
try to maintain the integrity and the aesthetics of the
forest?
Aside from equipment failure, the leading cause of ignitions
in high fire threat districts is vegetation coming into contact
with power lines. So in 2020, PG&E did what it calls enhanced
vegetation management along more than 1800 miles of power lines.
This means that in addition to clearing all growth within 12
feet of a line, PG&E evaluates any tree tall enough to strike a
power line and potentially cuts it down, PG&E determined that
5.3 million trees have the potential to strike their lines
in high fire threat areas. Its 2021 plan calls for another 1800
miles of clearance like this, and it adds 200 inspectors and
full 3D imaging with LIDAR to check for issues after it clears
an area.
Until this year, they took the position that the trees, the
lumber was the property of the landowner and so they weren't
going to remove it. But, if they just leave it that's a huge
risk. Right you've got dead fuel on the forest floor in a high
risk area next to a power line.
You can rake every leaf you can move your wood pile you can do
different things. But there is nothing the homeowner can do
about the fact that the wooden pole in your backyard is likely
suffering from dry rot and is at risk of collapse.
With so many fires caused by failures of aging or improperly
maintained equipment, PG&E has increased the frequency of
inspections. And in place of what campfire prosecutors called
a Run to Failure policy. It's started replacing parts before
they fail.
We've got inspectors out looking at our transmission towers,
we've got helicopters and drones using aerial imagery and LIDAR
and other technologies to keep eyes on the system and make sure
that every every piece of line that we have traverse in a high
fire threat district gets some form of human or technological
eyes on it, we can then prioritize the maintenance work
accordingly.
Despite lofty goals, PG&E admitted to regulators in May,
that it failed to carry out inspections on more than 50,000
poles last year 3000 of which are in extreme fire risk areas.
And it recently disclosed that flawed inspections mean more
than half a million ageing poles are at risk of dry rot. It's
committed to proper inspections by the end of the year.
They are all at risk of collapse. Why are they pushing
these poles past their useful life?
While PG&E has made major missteps, providing power is
inherently full of risk. The U.S. power grid has close to 7
million miles of power lines, and much of it was installed
decades before fire risk was high enough to warrant
insulation that helps prevent sparks.
It is the world's largest machine, right? And then if you
were to run it around the circumference of the Earth,
right, the electric grid would go around the circumference of
the Earth several times. So the number of miles is staggering.
Yet, we are still doing things like we did in 1889.
And with the state's wildfire burn area projected to increase
77% by the end of the century, the need for rapid progress on
fire prevention has never been greater.
We have an energy system that's been built up over many, many
decades. You know, 50, 60, 70, 80, 100 years. We don't have 50,
60, 70, 80 or 100 years to rebuild it or to transform it.
That's going to require a lot of nimble quick responses and
significant investment. And I hope that PG&E is up to the
challenge.