PG&E says abundance of caution influenced massive power shutoff
Pacific Gas & Electric Co. told state officials and an irritated public last week that shutting off power to wide wind-blown swaths of California was a prudent decision that may have headed off multiple wildfires that would have been far worse than an annoyance.
Utility officials appeared at an Oct. 18 emergency hearing before the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to explain their decisions to order a precautionary shutoff of power that affected more than 700,000 customers during the week of Oct. 7 and had state officials declaring the situation to be unacceptable.
Marybel Batjer, president of the CPUC, said: “Failures in execution, combined with the magnitude of this…event, created an unacceptable situation that should never be repeated. The scope, scale, complexity, and overall impact on people’s lives, businesses, and the economy of this action cannot be understated.”
The shutoffs were the first time that PG&E had cut off electricity over a large area in the anticipation of dangerously high winds, which could have caused downed lines or arcing wires and ignited a potentially fast-moving wildfire. California utilities have been declared liable for damages caused by their equipment regardless of fault, a legal situation that drove PG&E into Chapter 11 bankruptcy early this year.
The extent of the shutdowns was apparent in terms of power demand during the shutoffs. The authoritative U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said that about 13 percent of PG&E customers had their power cut off beginning Oct. 9, which caused the company’s overall power demand to drop by an identical 13 percent. Power was restored beginning the next day to about half of the customers affected. The EIA also noted that the California Independent System Operator pegged a 7-to-10 percent dip in electricity demand statewide on Oct. 9.
Media reports leading up to the CPUC hearing had PG&E leadership acknowledging that the operation had not been flawless. Communications with the public were dicey as the PG&E website was overwhelmed and many residents were stranded without internet or television.
But the company also took to the newspapers to state its case that the shutdown had not only been warranted but that it also worked as intended in a hazardous situation.
Company meteorologists monitoring conditions in the backcountry announced that the winds were as predicted with gusts above 40 miles per hour in each of the 22 counties impacted by the shutdowns. Sonoma County, which experienced significant damage and loss of life from wind-driven fires in 2017, led the way in October with a gust clocked at 77 mph.
“Our in-house meteorological team and experts from the National Weather Service and other federal agencies were all in agreement that this event had the potential for strong winds and a heightened wildfire risk,” said Scott Strenfel, PG&E’s principal meteorologist. “That’s exactly what happened. The winds arrived and our system sustained considerable damage, yet no fires started as power lines were de-energized.”
PG&E President and CEO Bill Johnson said in an op-ed article printed in the San Francisco Chronicle the day before the hearing that the company had made the best call it could based on the information at hand, and that its crews had indeed located areas where de-energized lines had failed or might otherwise have sparked a fire had they been live. “When we patrolled all 25,000 miles of lines that we had turned off, we found more than 100 confirmed cases of wind-related damage — including trees into power lines and downed power lines,” Johnson wrote. “Had we not shut-off power, this type of damage could have sparked a fire.”
Johnson’s point was that while long-running blackouts were obviously an inconvenience to PG&E customers, they would be a fact of life for folks living in the hills of inland California where hot electric transmission lines were not a good mix with a long-running drought and seasonal winds. “We must also ask the people and communities we serve to prepare for more safety shutoffs, should similar weather conditions occur again, as well as (in times of) other emergencies and natural disasters,” he said.
Johnson later testified to the CPUC that preventative shutoffs could be part of PG&E’s wildfire-prevention strategy for as long as a decade as it continued to harden its infrastructure and improve policies. “None of us wants a future where safety shut-offs are commonplace, or even imaginable,” Johnson said in his op-ed. “But our intent is to show our customers that PG&E will always act with their safety foremost in our decision-making, no matter how difficult that action may be.”
