PG&E- What are they actually shutting down? 3

[Mbrooke]

And why?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjpRK9tnsjY

Is it distribution? Transmission? Or both?

 

[davidbeach]

My understanding is that anything energized in the shutdown zone gets shut down. From the lowest voltage distribution feeders up to and including 500kV transmission.

 

[Mbrooke]

Wow

I wish there was a way around it.

 

[itsmoked]

Completely asinine.

Imagine it. Sixth largest economy IN THE WORLD and the lame-ass utility shuts off the power to it because the wind blows. What a bunch of incompetents at the top. Truly pathetic and an embarrassment. Think of the ruined food, loss of business, hazards to the medically challenged, can't get fuel, some cities can't pump water, stores can't operate, perishables ruined the list is so long.

Can you tell we're a bit pissed?

Keith Cress
kcress -

http://www.flaminsystems.com

 

[wroggent]

I realize this is insensitive but as someone who does not live there I find it to be kind of entertaining. At least nothing is on fire, right?

 

[oldfieldguy]

Didn't somebody blame last year's fire on PG&E and sue the stuffings out of them?

I seem to remember that story, which would make this move an act of self-preservation.

old field guy

 

[protoslash]

They filed for bankruptcy this year due to $billions of liability from the wildfire.

I guess their solution is, there won't be fire if there is no power. A couple days without power is less costly than 30 billions to the company from lawsuits.

 

[stevenal]

And when the fires happen anyway with no power to the water pumps feeding the hydrants? What will be the liability then?

It might be entertaining from a distance but the climate is changing everywhere, not just in the PG&E territory.

 

[davidbeach]

As I understand it, California law also leaves the utility with total liability even with no evidence of negligence. At this point they're sort of in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. It's also impossible to prove that the outage prevented a fire that never started.

 

[dpc]

Plenty of blame to go around. But this is basically extortion by PG&E to force the state to relent on the liability issue. The only viable solution is for the state and cities to carve up PG&E, buy out the shareholders and turn it into public power entities of some type - PUDs, munis, etc. In another era, the federal government would have taken it over by now.

 

[itsmoked]

I realize this is insensitive but as someone who does not live there I find it to be kind of entertaining.

Imagine, if after the first Pacific Graft and Extortion caused fire a couple of years ago, they invested 5 billion in their antiquated system to bring it up to modern standards. Putting in new wire, correcting things like slapping cables (Paradise), using insulated wire in logical places, replace work-harden ancient wire in other places, starting with the worst stuff they know they have. They wouldn't be in bankruptcy with more than a hundred fatalities notched up and $30B in liability, turning off people because the wind blows.

Sadly I believe you're correct dpc, it pretty much needs to be removed from the shareholders and the people in charge now.

On another point. I believe they are entitled by law to 10% profit each year. I bet you, they are going to raise rates because their profit will flag due to turning off power to paying customers.

I get a little closer everyday to going off-grid.

Keith Cress
kcress -

http://www.flaminsystems.com

 

[jraef]

stevenal, most water (and sewer) utilities are required by law to have their own backup generators in place.

The bigger problem is turning out to be communications. The steady loss of "hard wired" phone systems to cell based phones has resulted in people not being able to call for emergency services or get warnings when power is out. In one of our nearby communities last night (Moraga, in the hills east of Oakland) where power was cut, there was a house fire and it took a long time for firefighters to get notice of it, so it spread. Apparently the local cell towers had battery backup, but no generator so once the batteries died, all cell phone service was lost.

Personally, I don't really blame PG&E. The entire problem is much more complex than most of the media bothers to check into, because people love to find easy villains. We (collectively) in California did this to ourselves really, starting in about 1996 with partial deregulation for the sake of "introducing competition". We forced the electric utilities to divest themselves of most of their power generation capability and become "distributors" who can only make money on margin, not production. They no longer control the cost to produce the electricity, but the price they sell it for is still controlled by the PUC. Yet they are required to maintain the entire grid on what margin they are allowed to make. So being a publicly traded company with fiduciary responsibility to stockholders, they only thing they have control over is their grid operating and maintenance costs. At one point during the "Western Power Crisis" in 2000-2001, PG&E was losing upward of $20 million PER DAY because they were forced to buy power for upward of $1.35 per kWH during peak demands and yet still forced to sell it for $0.067/kWH. They declared bankruptcy back then too and have basically never recovered to their former status and that sort of thing causes deferred maintenance, which is exactly what happened. So now when the lawsuits hit over the fires a few years ago, they had to declare bankruptcy yet again and that cycle will continue.

PS: I love all the people saying "They should bury all the power lines!". Estimates run upward of $3 million per mile for underground utilities in urban and suburban areas, and PG&E owns 106k+ MILES of power distribution lines alone, then another 18k+ miles of transmission lines. So we are talking about well over $300 billion dollars...

But I'd say probably 99% of the people I have talked to in the last few weeks are totally unaware that PG&E no longer generates most of the power they sell (they still own the Diablo Canyon nuke plant until it is shut down in 2024 and a few small hydro dams that they couldn't find buyers for, but that's it). Almost all of the power generation is coming from Mirant, Dynegy, AES and Williams (and originally, the good folks at Enron, who were the main protagonists of this fiasco in the late 90s). So while all of those companies are making record profits, PG&E gets the blame AND the lawsuits when their cutback on maintenance resulted in failures.

This is those 1996 chickens coming home to roost...


" We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know." -- W. H. Auden

 

[Mbrooke]

I heard that SCE and few municipals are also cutting power.

PS: I love all the people saying "They should bury all the power lines!". Estimates run upward of $3 million per mile for underground utilities in urban and suburban areas, and PG&E owns 106k+ MILES of power distribution lines alone, then another 18k+ miles of transmission lines. So we are talking about well over $300 billion dollars...

Thats only half of it. At the 115kv and up level the amount of reactive power is so high that AC becomes impractical mandating DC for anything over a few miles of underground which is another 300 billion in technology. Still yet you will need AC at some point which will require some level of reactive power mitigation either way.

 

[stevenal]

Irstuff,

Do you have a link to these laws? Do the laws include the amount of fuel storage and maintenance and size of the generators? East Bay seems to think there is an issue:

The East Bay Municipal Utility District, a water utility, said its pumping capacity would be affected by the shut-off and urged its customers to minimize water use and turn off their irrigation systems.

Link

Now add a serious fire to the mix.

Funny how NERC began writing and enforcing reliability standards to specifically prevent blackouts. I guess they forgot to include a rule that prevents a utility from opening the switches and going home.

 

[dpc]

AFAIK, there's no legal requirement for water treatment plants to have sufficient standby generation to actually treat and pump finished water. California may have some specific requirements I'm not familiar with. For wastewater plants, EPA generally requires a second source of power for primary treatment, not full treatment. In many cases, a second utility source is allowed in lieu of on-site generation, provided the two sources come from different substations without much risk of common mode failure.

I think Jeff is being a little too kind to PG&E, but as I said earlier, plenty of blame to go around. California pushed regulated utilities to separate their generation business from their transmission and distribution business (the Enron fiasco). This left the T&D rump utilities with most of the liabilities, but rates set by the PUC. Municipals such as SMUD did not have to divest, and generally have had far fewer issues. The investor-owned utilities are run by people focused on short-term profitability with little understanding of how electric utilities operate outside of their corporate headquarters.

Wildfires have been around in California forever. They may be more severe or more frequent because of climate change, but how someone thought shutting off the power to large areas is a viable solution is beyond me. It's appalling.

 

[Palletjack]

Here on the east coast we were discussing deregulation when California led the way.
After a couple of years we saw what was happening and quickly gave up the idea.

Turning off the power? You sue me for all those fires I would turn it off also...
Because the wind blows? That wind blows hard in those hills. 40 MPH winds cause havoc over here on this side also.

One problem is right of ways that are 30-40 ft wide for distribution. The trees are 60-100 ft tall. We can’t cut them all...
Same for transmission. 100’ wide ROWs, but there are 100’ tall trees.
“Cut them” you say. Tree huggers own them and don’t want them cut until a natural disaster causes the power to be out for days.

Even with no trees, the wind blowing causing the wire to resonate and slap together is a very real possibility.

Yes, there are fires all the time there. Some are caused by downed wires, some are wires slapping together. Some were caused by careless people.
Who got sued...

I would tend to say some of it was brought on by the combination of state governments and residents that wants everything both ways. Power, liability, and low prices. Can’t happen.

 

[ScottyUK]

It's interesting watch the privately-owned utility model fall apart in the US. In the UK I think we are on a similar course as the last of the CEGB-era generating plants retire and the nation faces growing exposure to the economic vagaries of generating power in other nations and the practical vagaries of large-scale domestic wind power without significant mass-storage capacity. There's no appetite for building large central generating plant - lots of financial risk, long payback times, uncertain or non-existent strategic energy policy.

 

[boBK7IQ]

The sun pretty much works in California. You can make your own electricity and at least power the critical loads like refrigerator and lights.

 

[JayMaechtlen]

You can make your own electricity and at least power the critical loads like refrigerator and lights.
providing you have batteries, and providing you have enough capacity so that even when overcast /raining for a few days/weeks you can keep the batteries going.

Jay Maechtlen

http://www.laserpubs.com/techcomm

 

[itsmoked]

Here we've only seen the sun for perhaps 4 hours in the last 3.5 weeks. In fact we haven't seen the ground not sopping wet for all of the 3.5 weeks.

My off-grid design is reeling over this experience.

Keith Cress
kcress -

http://www.flaminsystems.com