The California power outages everyone is railing against
A year ago, right after the terribly destructive fires in northern California, PG&E was heavily criticized for not having cut the power sufficiently when the winds blew.
Now they are criticized for cutting the power when the winds blow and not having managed in the past year since the fires to have fixed everything that was wrong so that cutting power wouldn’t be necessary. To me this seems an unreasonable set of demands. The magnitude of the problem is huge, and the money (and perhaps even the time) it would take to fix it enormous.
There is no question that the power outages are a hardship, especially for the disabled and/or elderly who rely on various devices that might be electrically powered. But a devastating fire is worse.
And I have no trouble believing that PG&E is poorly managed. But I don’t think that changes what I’m saying.
Last year after the fires in early November I wrote several posts on the subject, but this one has the most information in it. I’m going to quote from it now:
You might say that the victims of the fire should sue PG&E, which may or may not be responsible (or at least partially responsible) for the conflagration. But there’s a catch, because no power company can be 100% successful at preventing these events and still provide power to the public. If PG&E had to pay out to all the fire victims, it goes bankrupt or passes the whole thing onto its customers in a huge rate increase. And what would replace it?
This is how California has recently decided to handle it (from September 2018, prior to the Paradise fire):
“In California, utilities are responsible for fires traced to their equipment whether or not they are complying with regulations. PG&E faces about 200 lawsuits on behalf of 2,700 plaintiffs stemming from last year’s fires.
“…This [recently passed bill] would soften that standard by having regulators determine liability based on whether equipment was reasonably maintained and operated. It would also let utilities issue bonds to help pay damages, with a surcharge on ratepayers’ bills helping to cover interest payments.”
PG&E’s priority right now is to prevent fires as well as the huge liability that comes from them. How can it pay for the upkeep necessary for more meaningful prevention, and who is going to pay? Their equipment is part of the issue, but so is forest management, and the state can’t decide what is that best way to deal with that.
If you think the answer to that last problem is a simple one, and only lack of will and leftist politics makes it seem difficult, I beg to differ. Yes, lack of will and politics are in there, too, but the debate is also real. Among my gazillion post drafts I have one provisionally entitled “The great eucalyptus wars,” and it consists only of links to eleven fairly lengthy arguments on the subject of forest management for fire prevention in California. I read them all last year but never wrote the post because the subject was so overwhelming.
Right now I’ll quote a bit from one of those articles. The following passage just scratches the surface of one small element, but it’s interesting in that it describes a dispute that’s primarily among conservationists on the left, which is rather common in California:
There is, to put it mildly, widespread disagreement about what to do with [Bay Area eucalyptus trees, otherwise known as the blue gum]. The argument is as complex and tangled as the bark streamers that hang from the blue gum’s trunks. In the most general terms, there is a faction of environmentalists that want to see many of these eucalyptus trees removed, because they are a fire hazard close to homes, or because they are non-native and make poor habitat for native species, or both…This faction also includes the local chapter of the Sierra Club.
There is another faction of environmentalists that dispute that the trees are more of a fire hazard than what might replace them, see them as decent or even very valuable habitat, and want to retain them to sequester carbon, provide shade, beauty, and recreation, and to avoid the use of the herbicides that are generally necessary to thoroughly kill them off. This faction includes a longtime correspondent of mine, Mary McAllister, and allies in different groups, including the Hills Conservation Network and the small-but-fierce Forest Action Brigade…
This fight is many years old. There have been lawsuits and there have been letters to the editor pro and con. There have been protests and postcard campaigns and blog posts and newsletters and lots and lots of official public comment on management plans for various eucalyptus forests and groves. It is a classic Bay Area dispute: greens vs. greens, experts vs. experts, and committed amateurs vs. committed amateurs. And it has gotten very hot…
So which side does science support? Well, it is complicated…
And that’s just a tiny topic that’s part of the huge topic of forest management to try to prevent catastrophic California fires. Controlled burns is probably the best answer, but even that prescription has its dangers:
The biggest objection to prescribed fire is not the smoke, but the possibility that it will escape—as Shew says, “the fire doesn’t know it’s supposed to be a prescribed fire.” In 2012, a prescribed fire southeast of Denver, Colorado, escaped and burned 16 houses and killed three people; more than a decade earlier, an escaped fire entered the town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, destroying some 300 homes and buildings. There have been dozens of other escapes and near-escapes each year over the last few decades, occurring in roughly one percent of prescribed fires. The potential for unintended consequences can make the practice a hard sell to the public, says Scott Stephens, a UC Berkeley fire ecologist. “Any time you do something like that,” he says, “there’s risk.”
The risk of runaway fires is part of the logistical tightrope that the “burn bosses” I talk with say they must walk in lighting a prescribed fire, as they try to hit the meteorological conditions that will promote a fire that carries without growing too powerful, get approval from air quality districts, and secure both the money and personnel to carry out the work; the fire crews I meet, now lighting fires, had just come off weeks of fighting fires across the western U.S. Legal liability, too, is a constant worry.
Despite these hurdles, prescribed burning seems to be gaining support in California.
And it’s not as though there aren’t already prescribed fires in California; there are:
Look around, and you’ll find plenty examples of people lighting prescribed fires—in the North Bay alone, land managers at Point Reyes National Seashore, state and county parks, and land trusts have all employed fire to manage fuel loads and encourage native flora and fauna. Some 18,407 acres have been burned in the Bay Area over the last decade, according to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. The problem is scale. The current enthusiasm for prescribed burning is digging out of a deep hole. This fiscal year, Cal Fire aims to treat 20,000 of the 31 million acres in its purview with prescribed fire, and even more in the future. This is a drastic improvement over years of burning only 2,000 or 3,000 acres, but it regularly burned 60,000-plus acres as recently as the 1980s. As Pimlott says, the new numbers may “not sound like a lot, when we talk about needing to burn three or four million acres across the state.”
During the March hearing, Pimlott also noted that although the number of wildfires had grown substantially between 2015 and 2016, the agency had still achieved its goal of keeping 95 percent of non-prescribed fires on the lands it manages to less than 10 acres. As David Shew told me, that goal “kind of flies in the face of the natural ecology of the landscape”—a fact that Cal Fire is well aware of. Although the Forest Service and other federal land managers have been able to walk back somewhat from all-out suppression, sometimes leaving fires burning under preferable conditions, Cal Fire is more constrained, says Daniel Berlant, the department’s assistant deputy director. “The majority of the land we protect is privately owned,” he says, “inhabited by homes, structures, and infrastructure.” In the North Bay, 81 percent of the fires were on private property. Choosing to let those fires burn wasn’t an option. As the wildfire season stretches, he says, the amount of time that Cal Fire’s seasonally employed fire crews have for prescribed fire and other vegetation management, as well as defensible space inspections, shrinks. The state’s leading firefighting body is trapped in a cycle of fire suppression.
That was written in early 2018, and last year’s fires came many months later. I’m not sure what has happened since (my guess is that the rate of prescribed fires has probably increased), but the problems remain. And in the meantime, PG&E is trying to be careful during the riskiest time of the year.
And my guess is that the position I’m talking here might be an unpopular one.
We can’t do this because we can’t do that; and we cannot do that because we cannot do the other, because need, and pain, and feelz …
If there were not a few normal people still left in the state, I’d say who cares if it all burns, and just let it.
But the relentless and aggressive neediness of the organisms of the left, ensures that no matter where you live they will seek that place out, migrate there, and dedicate their entire existences to attaching themselves to you and draining your energy until they gain control.
I don’t think a wall or a mountain range or ocean for that matter will do it to keep the double bind creators from worming their way into and sabotaging every life project or domain to which they gain entry.
Maybe pity, is the problem in the first place.
There is, to put it mildly, widespread disagreement about what to do with [Bay Area eucalyptus trees, otherwise known as the blue gum].
I’ve never heard eucalyptus trees called “blue gum,” but there is no getting around their fire hazard. The standard simile one encounters is that burning eucalyptus trees go up like “roman candles” and throw off flaming chunks of debris for long distances.
I used to live across the street from the rim of Glen Canyon, my favorite park in San Francisco, which was filled with eucalyptus. I liked their soft bark, the dappled light of the sun shining through their leaves and their cough drop minty smell after a rain.
I have no problem with forest management and controlled burns. I live in Oklahoma and one fire problem is the Eastern Red Cedar tree. When there have been wild fires in the area, the news people always point out the explosive nature of cedar trees going up in flames.
Here are two interesting posts about controlled burns on pastureland.
https://thepioneerwoman.com/confessions/why-we-chop-down-cedar-trees/
https://thepioneerwoman.com/confessions/why-we-burn-our-pastures/
If your position is that this is a difficult problem which is fairly complicated to deal with, I don’t think anyone disagrees. I think the issue is that California is one of the biggest economies on Earth, this is a problem that has LITERALLY been around forever, and the best 21st century solution they can come up with is to simply turn off the power to hundreds of thousands of people.
There’s got to be a better way and it should have already been employed years ago. THAT’S where the political/ideological criticism comes in.
Mike
I had a brief conversation with a retired California firefighter just this morning (he’s vacationing and was looking for lay of the land directions hereabouts).
35 yrs on the job — he said he still has a hand in (driving semitrailer tankers of water on contract to resupply field crews). Lives near Yosemite — forest fires were/are his thing. His take on the horror show last year was 1) 4 years of drought left standing deadwood/fuel, and 2) the winds were unlike (stronger than) anything anyone had seen in living memory, so not only devastating in terms of speed and power, but too, reactions were slow because of lack of anticipation.
And there our conversation ended as his people were ready to go.
MBunge:
No, that’s not the only solution they’ve implemented. The post describes (and it only scratches the surface) other solutions that are ongoing and have been ongoing for quite some time: prescribed burns, for example. The disagreements about what to do are profound, and lawsuits have held up progress as well, but part of the reason for the lawsuits is that there are competing interests that each have cases to mke. In addition, California is large but also overextended and strapped for cash, and the way legal liability in the state has been structured until about a year ago is that PG&E was subject to the strictest of strict liabilities. That meant it was constantly being sued and in danger of bankruptcy, which would have been a different kind of disaster for California. That’s why, even in ultra-liberal California, the liability laws were loosened up.
Last year the solution PG&E came up with was to not cut power, and when the fires happened they were criticized for that omission. This year they have cut power, and they are being criticized for that.
Electricity is overrated. 😉
This from The Economist newspaper.
https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/1181795464724783105
Light to all nations? There is little evidence that electricity and light truly transform people’s lives
The underlying theme, regardless of the internal contradictions is as simplistic and rudimentary as the current political debate:
“Orange man bad.”
“Corporations bad.”
Thanks Neo for the clear view of the problems. I’ve seen many lamenting the turning off of the power, but no one noting that the multi-billion dollar judgement against PG&E led them to make sure they don’t get faulted again even if the fallout from the blackouts is bad.
When I was doing graduate work in Geography in the early 80’s focusing on remote sensing (satellite imagery analysis), a professor pointed out the problem with a set of imagery that included both Southern California and Baja California. The fire patterns on each side of the border were quite distinct, since CA had suffered from Smokey Bear’s put-em-all-out philosophy for decades while Tijuana had no resources to devote to forest fire suppression. Burns in Baja were small and frequent. Burns in CA were infrequent and massive. The experts all know that getting back to the natural forest mosaic with frequent small burns is what’s needed, but getting back to that state after decades of suppressing all fires is seemingly impossible.
As to the eucalyptus, I remember an old Ralph Story (LA TV man from the 60’s with the best newsman name ever) show noting that they were imported from Australia to help build the railroads due to their fast growth. The wood turned out to be too soft for railroad ties however, but the trees stayed. Their leaves and pods are really pungent as your reader Huxley notes, and the oil in their trunks does indeed burn like a torch made with oil-soaked rags. Also they have shallow roots and are given to becoming top-heavy enough to blow over. Every couple of years somebody dies locally when one blows down and happens to fall on them..
Human managed ecology is still as much a fantasy as any religious or socialist utopia. Best we can do is try to get out of the way.
“In addition, California is large but also overextended and strapped for cash, and the way legal liability in the state has been structured until about a year ago is that PG&E was subject to the strictest of strict liabilities.”
See, THAT’S what people are complaining about. California on its own has the fifth biggest economy on Earth and it can also draw on federal support from the largest economy on Earth. And, unless I’m sadly mistaken, the ones mostly to blame for legal liability problems in California are Californians themselves.
I hate to break this to California but other stats have thorny problems and competing interests while most possess vastly fewer resources, yet they somehow manage to NOT revert back to Third World living conditions.
Again, I don’t think any informed person would pretend like this is a simple problem to fix but this is the 21st damn century in the United damn States of America and if the solution to a problem is EVER “well, let’s just turn off electricity to hundreds of thousands of people” that is an indication of a massive systemic failure for which there really is no good excuse.
Mike
There’s a kernel of irony in that, which is related to some recent articles I have been seeing.
It seems that progressive scholars have found the magical formula for wealth creation to be surprisingly elusive. After excluding all irrelevant factors such as free markets, the security of private property, the rule of law, honest government and public honoring of contracts, and the valuing of virtue, honesty, conscientiousness, and hard work among the populace, none of the acceptable factors has been proven to be decisive.
Quite a mystery. Must be geography or a history of animal husbandry or something.
There’s also the question of land use and its contribution to fires:
DNW on October 14, 2019 at 3:57 pm
That was a fun rant. You do know such diatribes will become illegal under Pres. Elizabeth Warren. Probably retroactively too.
This reminds me of the opening to Jacob Bronowiski’s “Ascent of Man” where he remarks, “Man has a set of gifts unique among the animals: so that he is not a figure in the landscape, he is a shaper of the landscape.”
Many other states have forested areas and dry spells and somehow manage to keep the lights on which is what consumers (over) pay them to do. PG&E has not maintained or updated its infrastructure nor have they taken common sense measures like cutting back foliage around their wires or burying wires in heavily wooded and isolated locations. Their “safety” measure – shutting down service to millions – is less about safety and more about CYA, and they couldn’t even do that right. Total disorganization laid bare for all to see (website crashes, website inaccuracies, easily anticipated problems ignored, etc. etc.). Plus, their shitty infrastructure which they should have been maintaining all this time, prevents expeditious renewal of service after a “rolling blackout.” NB, there were no blackouts in Sacramento. There’s a reason for that. It has nothing to do with safety.
“And I have no trouble believing that PG&E is poorly managed”, says Neo.
I say, give the managers a break! As a utility, PG&E faces both a Public Utilities Commission (rate-setting!) and an Energy Commission. Being publicly owned, PG&E also has a duty to its shareholders to try to make a profit.
It is the jaws of the vice, the Commissions, that should share in the blame, not just the utility that is squeezed between those jaws.
Natural wildfires are an ecologic blessing. It has been Smokey the Bear that has put them out.
DNW – unfortunately, I was only able to read a snippet of the article since it is behind a registration wall. But, there was enough info to suggest that the family is using Biolite Energy products. In particular, this product –
https://www.bioliteenergy.com/products/solarhome-620
This is an interesting company with a good mission. I’ve been buying their stuff in case of emergency as well as to support them. I worked at an NGO and visited sub Saharan Africa and having clean interior air is very important to health and having the battery storage to run lights is important.
https://www.bioliteenergy.com/pages/mission
A fire broke out in a town in Northern California during one of the black outs. The fire broke out next to PG&E power lines. I doubt that the black out provided any safety advantages to the residents and it probably hindered their notification and evacuation.
You really have to live here and experience the ineptitude of PG&E to really understand how bad they are and why people get upset when you try to devil’s advocate for them.
BTW, power to my business was off for nearly 24 hours last week – not because of any rolling black out (though that threat continued through the weekend) but because of poor maintenance. A power pole holding a number of lines in the area had to be replaced. We had no warning from PG&E; the electricity to our office and for several blocks around suddenly just stopped. Good thing we have emergency back ups on our computers. Another business expense in No. Cal.
Am I recalling correctly that I read somewhere, probably after the fire last year, that California makes removing dead vegetation from your own yard a giant, expensive bureaucratic nightmare?
“PG&E also has a duty to its shareholders to try to make a profit.”
What a fine job they are doing!
It seems likely that…for political reasons…substantial areas and populations in the US will be plagued with unreliable power over periods or decades.
Which means that standby generators…not just for homes and commercial buildings but also factories…will become common, as they are in many 3rd-world countries.
Some may decide to make their on-site generation primary, using natural gas (the delivery of which seems considerably more reliable than the electricity in many places), possibly with a solar or wind adjunct…so that the grid becomes backup to the on-site generation rather than the other way around.
We lived for a couple years in a small city in in western India. The power goes out regularly, often without warning. We learned to be prepared. California, which is becoming a third world country, needs to adapt to its new condition. Those who can afford it should be looking at inverters and generators (my brother is doing this). This would be imperative for anyone who relies on power for life.
David Foster, I think that California, like many other states, requires solar panels to be connected to the grid. When the power goes out, the solar panels don’t help the homeowner on whose roof they rest. (I don’t know if this applies to commercial installations.)
Kate– You think correctly. Most individual solar (read rooftop) do connect to the grid and the power they generate goes into the grid. None is stored for personal use unless the individual has the necessary inverter and batteries, etc. The benefit of solar that has sold so many on it, including the legislature who made it a requirement in new construction, is some level of credit on their utility bill, read PG&E. Most found this out for the first time early last week.
I left the Bay Area 20+ years ago for the quiet, less violent Sierra. Power outages became a somewhat normal occurrence. The power grid in these parts was so antiquated that any competent drunk drive could turn off a large portion of the county by hitting the correct utility pole. Falling trees deep in the forest had similar mystic powers. Think of those old Xmas lights where when one bulb burnt out the whole string went. It has gotten somewhat better over the past couple decades, but it still took 5 contacts of increasing hostilities over nearly a year to get PG&E to replace a deteriorating pole on my property.
We re-labelled our “earthquake kit” (food and medical and clothing to get on for maybe a month) to as a “power off kit” and never regretted it.
Last Xmas Santa brought a generator with all the auto-start features and this last fiasco was the 3rd time since then that we were glad we had it. This was the first intentional event however, but they have promised more as the storm season approaches.
And don’t forget that their gas service managed to burn down a significant portion of a neighborhood quite a few years back, south of SF, when an aging gas main finally gave up the ghost. PG&E is more interested in their stock price than they are the people they are there to provide electric and gas service to.
Unintended consequences, the natural product of government decisions/actions.
PG&E blamed and made to pay through the nose for last year’s fires, so PG&E is now in bankruptcy, and possibly over reacts this year. Who would have thought? (Daughter in a rural, by definition fire danger, area has been without power for a three day period twice now with moderate winds.)
Biggest fire in SoCal this year blamed on a burning trash truck. Investigating criminal action against the driver for dumping a smoking load. Wonder what, if anything, went on before that decision.
Blame Trump for not regulating trash trucks better. Could it be racism? Apocryphal I know, but there are a couple of near certainties; over reaction will follow, and productive .
decisions/actions unlikely.
I will say that California arguably has the best fire response organization and operational teams in the world. They are really superb. (When I look at TV and see one of the last planes I flew–the high wing, 4 engine jet–dropping on the fires I wish I were a bit younger than my 84 years. Would love be part of that.).
Power companies nationwide have been historically stingy about infrastructure upgrades because they are regulated monopolies. In the case of PG&E, these upgrades are vital for providing reliable service under conditions that are not seen in other areas of the country.
Unfortunately, the green desires of the ratepayers may prevent this from happening. Although the pain inflicted by these blackouts may bring about adult thinking on the financial realities of the problems at-hand. We can only hope.
I think most solar installations connect to the grid so that they can use the grid for backup during those times when the solar panels aren’t generating much or at all….such as night and cloudy weather. Unless priced very intelligently, these connections are a detriment to the grid, because the grid managers must make (expensive) generating and transmission capacity available even though they are used infrequently and hence generate little revenue. (“intelligent pricing”, for example a monthly readiness-to-serve charge based on the KW level that the customer wants to have available when he needs it…billed whether used on not used)
I don’t know whether California *requires* a grid connection or not…a few minutes of searching was not enlightening.
With the current state of battery technology and economics, it is not likely that a person or business will be able to totally disconnect from the grid, unless he wants to be exposed to no air conditioning or oven use (or, in the case of manufacturing business, plant shutdown) at times of unfavorable weather conditions. I was thinking more of the solar as an *ancillary* to on-site natural gas generation.
The legacy sociopolitical quagmire promises sustainable progress. They need to practice conservation and reconciliation, and demote the Green blight and lobbyists.
Power outages are drastic.
If this doesn’t mean CA stops voting Dem, it’s not yet drastic enough.
Venezuela chose, with “democratic socialism”, to go from richest to one of the poorest South American countries. It was such a shame. All “elites” who support socialism are partially to blame.
CA can follow that example. It would be a shame.
Shame, but not a surprise.
Australia struggles with bushfires of major magnitude every year, and I have not once seen the Aussie power grid shut down for prophylactic fire control, even though some fires have been traced directly back to downed or “sparking” lines.
(Australian electrical power generation & distribution is a whole other kettle of fish)
What I do see is a growing acceptance of controlled burning & significant fuel load-clearing (clean out the dead & dry tinder) before the fire season.
This year will be a year to watch in Oz… “historic” drought conditions across vast stretches of New South Wales and Queensland. No relief in sight and Summer isn’t even close. Spring just started.
And…if you’re inclined to pray, it would be nice if you offered a few for folks Down Under. Lots of rural stretches are not just dry & barren but running out of drinking water. Oh…a huge player in the fire fighting here are the many volunteer fire departments that are the only fire departments in most of rural Oz. So…while you’re praying…those men and women get ‘er done.
huxley…there’s a gazillion varieties of “gum tree.” Blue, box, red, stringy bark…you get the idea.
And yeah the oil/sap can even explode in the Summer sun…hence in Oz you take a risk parking under the shade of the old coolibah tree when it’s 43 degrees C outside because that big ol’ shady limb could land on your car or your noggin.
They’re beautiful trees…but I wouldn’t want to be near ’em in a raging bushfire.
Tom Grey– Don’t count on that voting shift. The grasshoppers now outnumber the ants. As long as the rent control, subsidized rent no less, free school lunches for all, etc, etc. continue the Dems will keep getting elected. The people who elect them don’t think its their problem.
David Foster– They do connect to the grid and feed their produced power into the grid in exchange for a break on their utility bill. When the grid goes down the generated power goes no place. PG&E gets credit for obtaing power from “renewable” sources to be in compliance with a foolish law passed by Cali a couple years back.
I have a generator. I have friends with solar and when the power was cut they were in as much dark as me. Except that mine only lasted about 20 seconds, then the generator kicked in. My down stream problem became whether or not my propane would outlast the blackout. Turns out it did, so I don’t have to take the contents of my freezer and frig to the dump.
There are solar installers around here offering battery systems in conjunction with the panel systems. They sound very pricey.
Back when Pacific, Gas & Electric was a smoking blues-rock band (integrated, no less), they asked the musical, ultimate question, “Are You Ready?”:
There’s rumors of war
Men dying and women crying
If you breathe air, you’ll die
Perhaps you wonder the reason why
But wait, don’t you worry, a new day is dawning
We’ll catch the sun and away we’ll fly
Are you ready to sit by His throne?
Are you ready not to be alone?
Someone’s coming to take you home
And if you’re ready then He’ll carry you home
Are you ready?
–https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8jhRuZhkRI
Well, are you?
BTW, California electricity rates are the fourth-highest in the country, behind Hawaii, Alaska, Massachusetts and Connecticut.
https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
If it is not buring it is mud sliding or the ground is shaking. So it goes. Much of CA is beautiful, we spent our two week honey moon, long ago, traveling the state from death valley to the Big Sur and beyond to Eureka. Stunning contrasts. But even then we youngsters realized it could not survive on borrowed water.
It is now, over. It is a race to determine which state will fail first: Illinois or California. “There is no success like failure, and failure is no success at all.”
Another Mike…”They do connect to the grid and feed their produced power into the grid in exchange for a break on their utility bill.” Yes, and in many states–perhaps most–the credit they get for power at any particular moment has nothing to do with whether the grid needs the power at that moment or not. There is no downside to the customer for connecting to the grid: sell power when you have excess, and buy power when you need it, letting (depending on pricing algorithms) the other customers bear the cost of providing the reserve capacity to be there when you want it. There’s a big downside for the management of the grid.
What I don’t know is whether any states *require* solar/wind customers to connect to the grid, although…as noted above…there’s no downside to doing so, AFAIK. I’ve never heard of any state requirement allowing grid demands to preempt a homeowner’s own use of solar or wind….would be interested if any such really exists.
Tom Grey on October 14, 2019 at 7:59 pm said:
Power outages are drastic.
If this doesn’t mean CA stops voting Dem, it’s not yet drastic enough.
Venezuela chose, with “democratic socialism”, to go from richest to one of the poorest South American countries. It was such a shame. All “elites” who support socialism are partially to blame.
CA can follow that example. It would be a shame.
Shame, but not a surprise.
* * *
https://reason.com/2019/10/11/californians-are-fleeing-the-states-progressive-policies/
Public utilities are VERY highly regulated. The state regulates what they can and cannot do and how much they can charge for it. Every single decision made can be second-guessed by the regulators.
So, whatever blame there might be for this situation, it should be shared equally by PG&E and the State of California.
I have no doubt that the engineers told management what they wanted to do to prevent this from happening and how much it would cost. I am equally sure that the management and the political bureaucracy decided that they couldn’t raise rates enough to cover the cost. So, here we are.
However, even after defending PG&E, I am also fairly certain that, being a regulated monopoly, it has become bloated and inefficient. It is probably long overdue for a shakeup. So, if this is the issue that initiates a reorganization, so be it.
I don’t know about “many states” but here in the Land of Fruit and Nuts there is now public law in place mandating that utilities providing power derive a percentage of that power from “renewable sources”, namely wind and solar. The solar panels on private structures that feed into the grid for a bounty provide some of that percentage, easing the burden on the utility.
There are many off-the-grid operations that have the necessary batteries for storage and that provide their own alternative power creation when needed (generator, evil hydrocarbon fueled). the only benefit to the utility is that they don’t have to distribute power to those operations.
The now current (over the past few years) troubles are the chickens of deferred maintenance on the power infrastructure coming home to roost.
AeosopFan– Most CA voters have little knowledge, let alone understanding, of the situation in Venezuela. They will continue to vote for “free s**t”.
The Californian fires has always been suspicious recently. The theory and thesis is that the Deep State is testing an energy weapon there.
I am in Carmel right now. When my husband and I drove up here 12 years ago to meet our daughter’s future in-laws we were amazed at the evident overgrowth throughout the area. It reminded me of an article I read about 28 years ago about how our national forest policies were going to create dangerous fire conflagrations. The article went into the details about how during Indian/pioneer days all the local forest were maintained with significant space between trees…lots of space and how that was also necessary for the overall health of woodlands (protection from diseases etc). It seems all of our book-knowledge and good intentions are in conflict with true wisdom. After all the fires up here, we still see the conditions that would make for a horrible fire should it manifest locally. In Los Angeles we have lost over 4 million trees in the last 2 years; the result of the drought, people not taking care of their trees and then subject to the beetles, diseases etc. I spoke with the person that oversees all the trees of the San Fernando Valley where I live and he told me the primary reason for the large trees being required for all project development in the history of our city (any city?) is to keep the ambient temperature of the environment lower because all the hardscape increases temperatures. So, instead of management of our existing resources, our city encouraged people to pull out their lawns and trees and put in unsightly stones which many did so they didn’t have to pay for high water bills. So convenient to be able to blame global-warming for what will be the rising temperatures that will result. This man retires in 2 years and told me he is moving to New Hampshire with his California pension.
If politics is “the way people in groups make decisions”, then the natural monopoly of electricity distribution is a wonderful example as to where politics is needed. And it is illogical if the Legislature and the Governor only pick off the low hanging fruit—telling PGE how much power is to be obtained from solar and wind cf fossil; how they are to install net-metering in new solar homes; how much they are to pay homeowners per kWh who supply unused solar power to the grid…on and on—but they also have to be part of the tactical operations too. Can we imagine anything more political than deciding where to start prescribed fires or where to require blackouts in dangerous weather or where to send air tankers or fire crews from other states? Huge groups of people are favored and disfavored.
Blaming forever and ever is not going to fix California’s fire dilemma. The people in PG&E are just like you and me. Accountability for what a natural monopoly like PG&E does has to fall on all of us, just as if we were in a war. The Governor and the Legislators (some or all), who are the standard representatives of us, have to be in the group that decides where to cut power during emergencies. Gavin Newsom’s fingerprint should have been on these decisions. The governing folks need tactical input so that the public can identify accountability. They have already thoroughly interfered with how PG&E spends its capital and forced a sustainable paradigm on all of us, and them. They shouldn’t be left off the hook when these big decisions are made during catastrophic fire seasons. There is no Santa Ana wind god in PG&E’s management. If they are going to spare Malibu and let Oxnard go, we need to understand everything about this decision. Politics is a sine qua non of these big decisions. A group of legislators and the Governor should have been seated with the PG&E management when this power outage scheme was discussed and the Governor’s sign off required.
The anti-PG&E comments here are not enlightened or enlightening. Particularly the complaint against the notion that PG&E has a duty to its shareholders, who nominally own the company. PG&E is in bankruptcy!
All utilities are highly regulated as to what they may do and what they may not do; what they may charge, and what % profit they may earn. The attitude of the regulators is what matters (e.g. South Carolina v. California). I suggest the CA regulators are a major part of the problem.
I have a whole-house generator supplied by a natural gas line. Ain’t no hurricane gonna distress me, not here in the humid South.
New York will have a problem this winter with natural gas. They keep denying new pipelines to supply the area. One utility (National Grid) made a decision not to install any new gas hookups since they could not supply the gas to their clients. Cuomo has ordered them to install the hookups.
I wonder how they will all feel when everyone starts using the gas to ward off the winter cold and crashes the entire system.
https://nypost.com/2019/10/11/cuomo-administration-orders-national-grid-to-let-gas-flow-in-brooklyn/
So, both coasts are crazy.
What is the legal basis for Cuomo’s order?
If everyone uses gas that is of limited availability, gas pressure falls, the gas flames diminish, the places get cold. Then Cuomo will demonize National Grid for “letting people freeze” and lawsuits will follow.
It’s what happens when you elect a Medusa-like head of snakes.
Speaking PG&E and other publicly sanctioned monopolies; before we moved to California seven years ago, our electricity was provided by the Northern Virginia Electric Coop (NOVEC). Small, lean, and customer owned. They were diligent about cleaning their right of ways, mostly to protect against the effects of ice, of course. When the big power companies around the DC area lost power, NOVEC frequently kept on humming.
Since NOVEC is a co-op, I don’t know how much government regulation they endure. I don’t think anyone tells them which trees they can trim, or remove. I do know that they put their priorities where they should be. Maybe the preferred model should be for all utilities to be Co-Ops, with owner-customers.