PG&E cited for $7.5 million over power lines

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. was ordered Monday to pay California $7.5 million because state officials identified two safety problems in the company’s inspections of its power equipment.

Staff at the California Public Utilities Commission issued one $5 million citation against PG&E due to a series of deficiencies the company found on a high-voltage power line in southern Marin County.

CPUC officials issued a second $2.5 million citation against PG&E that relates to the company’s failure to adequately inspect nearly 55,000 poles on lower-voltage power lines throughout its service area.

Additionally, the CPUC directed PG&E to take steps to resolve another problem regarding inspections for potential dry rot in wood power poles, an issue that arose after an incident at a customer’s East Bay home last year.

The three regulatory actions against PG&E come after the company has struggled for years to make its power system safer and state officials have sought to increase their scrutiny of the electric grid. PG&E power lines have sparked devastating wildfires in recent years that have killed more than 100 people and destroyed many thousands of homes from the North Bay to the northern Sierra. Most recently, the utility is suspected of sparking the Dixie Fire, the second-largest fire in state history that destroyed most of the Plumas County town of Greenville this year.

PG&E’s $5 million citation traces back to a deficiency the company self reported two years ago. When PG&E conducted a wildfire safety inspection of the Ignacio-AltoSausalito transmission line near Mill Valley and Sausalito in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, the company found that 21 towers needed urgent repairs, including to equipment pieces that were too rusted and hooks that were too worn.

PG&E initiated an emergency project to replace and repair the towers but “it failed to resolve these deficiencies in a timely manner” required by state law, the CPUC said in a news release. The CPUC also found that PG&E had failed to properly inspect the line from 2008 through 2019.

The company completed the needed repairs in April 2020 but should have finished them sooner, the CPUC said.

The $2.5 million citation arose from an unrelated issue the company reported with its power line inspections this year. In May, PG&E told the CPUC that the company’s internal records showed that 54,755 lower-voltage power poles did not get a routine detailed inspection required by state law.

Most of the poles had been assessed under a 2019 wildfire safety inspection program. But that program didn’t meet all the requirements for detailed examinations that the law prescribes. PG&E had planned to inspect the poles in question in 2020 but “due to a miscommunication, the 2020 work plan was not updated” to include them, so “consequently most of these poles were not inspected in 2020,” the CPUC said in its citation.

Separately, PG&E realized it had a potential dry rot issue after a power pole broke in a Danville backyard last year. Afterward, the company realized that its inspection processes for wood poles that had been treated with a certain preservative “failed to accurately assess pole integrity and identify potential internal dry rot,” according to the CPUC.

PG&E and other utilities had commonly used the odorless preservative Cellon to protect wood poles from damage by water and other weather conditions. While PG&E hasn’t installed Cellon-treated poles since 1989, the company told the CPUC in May that it still has about 543,560 of them in service.

The CPUC responded with a directive that has established various reporting requirements and corrective actions for PG&E to undertake to resolve to the Cellon issue.

PG&E spokesperson Jennifer Robison said in an email that the company had “discovered issues with some of our equipment inspection processes and findings” from 2019 to 2021. She said the company had reported the problems to the CPUC as part of its “commitment to transparency.”

“PG&E also created corrective-action plans to resolve the issues safely and as quickly as possible, including completing missed inspections and making high-priority transmissionline replacements,” Robison said. “Those actions do not change the fact that we fell short of our commitment to our customers and communities in each instance.”

She said PG&E was continuing to implement changes and was “working hand in hand” with CPUC staff “to show how we continue to improve our processes.”