PG&E restores power to more than 2 million customers who lost power in New Year’s storm
Continuing work begun over the New Year’s holiday weekend when a major storm knocked out power throughout California, Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) on Tuesday announced that the largest storm response effort in its history has restored power to more than 2 million customers.
More than 90 percent of impacted customers had regained power within 24 hours, but another round of storms this week complicated matters further. As of 3:00 p.m. Tuesday, the company reported somewhere around 108,000 customers remaining without power, more than half of them in the state’s South Bay and Central Coast regions. Overnight, portions of the state were slammed with more than 100 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes and heavy doses of rain and wind up to 70 mph. Despite having gotten outage numbers down to just over 80,000 as of Jan. 9, 2023, at noon, the additional squalls jumped figures to approximately 190,000 customers in the dark.
Work remains ongoing, care of more than 5,000 PG&E crews, contractors, and mutual aid workers. They began assessments and restoration efforts as soon as it was safe to do so, following the pattern of: visually inspect, isolate and repair, with the final stage to be full blown re-energization of poles, towers, and lines. The last step only comes when safe to do so, however.
“PG&E teams got prepared and in position, before the first storm rolled in on New Year’s Eve weekend to lessen the impact of these storms,” Adam Wright, PG&E’s executive vice president of operations and COO, said. “As we make assessments, we will restore power as quickly as safety allows. Challenging conditions could delay our efforts and extend our customers’ outages, but we won’t rest until our last customer is safely restored.”
Additional adverse weather could continue into the coming weekend. The latest round began on Saturday, Jan. 7, 2023. So far, in addition to its restoration work, PG&E has also supplied thousands of supply bags at warming centers in El Dorado, Humboldt, San Mateo, Sonoma, and Yolo counties and deployed 20 MW of temporary generation to serve about 6,300 customers and mitigate the effects of the storm.
PG&E serves more than 16 million people throughout Northern and Central California.
