San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
PG&E has new plan to prevent wildfires
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. has come up with a new way to decide where and when it will make investments intended to prevent its power lines from starting more catastrophic wildfires.
PG&E leaders said Friday that they’ve developed a model to calculate the risk that any portion of the electric system could start a fire and, if so, how much destruction the blaze would cause.
The model looks at the density and dryness of vegetation, the landscape surrounding power lines, the amount of homes nearby and the number of recent outages
along a particular circuit, according to the company. Analyzing those and other factors will help PG&E figure out where it needs to focus most on tree trimming, equipment upgrades and inspections, said Matt Pender, director of the company’s community wildfire safety program.
“It allows us to target much better,” Pender said. “Our old model allowed us to target down to a countylevel kind of concept, and now we’re at the city level. It’s just that much more granular in terms of where the risk is.”
PG&E announced the model as it unveiled its latest plan to avoid power line-caused wildfires, a document the state requires all investorowned electric utilities to submit each year.
The plan must still be reviewed and approved by regulators at the California Public Utilities Commission, who are expected to make a decision by June. Commission spokesperson Terrie Prosper confirmed in an email that the regulatory agency’s Wildfire Safety Division has three months to review and approve the plan, and it can extend that period if warranted.
It’s an essential part of the state’s efforts to avoid more disasters like the ones PG&E repeatedly caused in recent years — a track record so deadly and destructive that it prompted the company to file for bankruptcy protection and plead guilty to 84 felony counts of involuntary manslaughter.
PG&E emerged from bankruptcy last summer, but it’s under suspicion of causing yet another deadly fire, the 2020 Zogg Fire that killed four people and destroyed more than 200 homes west of Redding. Authorities are investigating whether a PG&E power line started the fire.
The company touted its new risk model as the centerpiece of its efforts to prevent fires this year. But the plan includes other measures too, such as adding 300 more weather stations to monitor dangerous conditions and installing 135 additional highdefinition cameras to spot new fires when they occur.
The utility plans to have 1,300 weather stations and 600 cameras by the end of next year.
PG&E also intends to conduct more rigorous treetrimming efforts along 1,800 miles of power lines this year, aiming to create even more space between vegetation and electrical equipment in fireprone parts of the state.
The company further plans to invest in costly upgrades — including stronger power poles and covered or buried wires — across 180 miles of line. That’s a little more than half the area PG&E covered in a similar effort last year, a change that Pender attributed to the company spending money more wisely thanks to the new risk model.
“Our bang for the buck is much higher,” he said.
But some critics are not convinced.
Focusing on tree trimming and preemptive power shutoffs is a fundamentally flawed approach, said April Rose Maurath Sommer, the executive and legal director of Wild Tree Foundation.
“Their focus continues to be, as far as I can tell, what are the two leasteffective techniques for decreasing wildfire ignitions from utility infrastucture,” Sommer said. More effective and cheaper would be using “covered conductors,” or covering bare wires with plastic she added.
About 171 miles of highrisk wires and equipment were “hardened” in 2019 by putting them underground or adding insulation, the report said. The company plans to complete another 180 miles this year.
Sommer said the progress was far too slow to make a difference.
More important is if the preventative work is being done where it will have the most impact, said Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network consumer group.
“We continue to have a concern that PG&E in particular has not done a sufficient job in cutting down or trimming the trees that need to be cut down in the locations that they need to be,” Toney said.
In all, PG&E’s fire prevention plan is projected to cost $10 billion over two years, according to the company. Pender said the core components of the plan cost about $6 billion of the total and the remainder reflects a change in what PG&E is required to report to its regulators.
Prosper said the state PUC has made changes to its wildfire plan requirements, including guidelines to make them more consistent and easier to evaluate. She added that the agency does not direct utilities to pursue specific programs to prevent fires.
PG&E isn’t asking for rate increases as part of the plan it submitted to the utilities commission. Some of the money will come from funds regulators have already signed off on; the rest will be included in future requests to the commission, Pender said.
The company will continue to turn off power this year when the weather is extremely dry and windy. Though such fire prevention shutoffs have been highly controversial, PG&E insists they are a necessary if lastditch measure to prevent wind from damaging power lines and sparking yet another disaster on the company’s watch.
PG&E has also been criticized for using diesel generators to keep the lights on during shutoffs. The company said it would be looking for other sources to provide power when it does shutoffs, but the plan did not offer many specifics on those alternatives.
The utility estimates that about a third of its overhead power lines and other equipment is in areas more prone to fire. The pandemic has pushed more people out of cities and into rural areas, a trend which PG&E said could mean more people living in fireprone locations.
Last year, PG&E set out to make its fire prevention blackouts affect onethird fewer customers than they would have under the same conditions in 2019. The company exceeded its goal, narrowing the shutoffs by 55%, Pender said, adding that crews also restored power 40% faster.
He said the company does not currently have a similar goal for 2021. Though PG&E is still trying to improve the shutoffs, “the opportunity for such a huge improvement is shrinking,” he said.
PG&E’s shutoff program may be affected by the actions of U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who oversees the company’s probation stemming from the 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion. In light of the Zogg Fire investigation, Alsup is considering imposing new probation conditions on PG&E that would force it to account for vegetation conditions near power lines when deciding whether to cut electricity.
Alsup held a hearing on the matter Wednesday but didn’t make a decision. He followed up with orders Thursday and Friday that directed further responses from PG&E, including to new changes he proposed. Alsup scheduled another hearing for March 9.