Utility comes under withering criticism over the disruptions
For many Northern Californians, there was little remarkable about the weather that swept through the region in the middle of last week.
Bone-dry winds came down from the north and east, gusting across a landscape parched from months without significant rain, raising the danger of wildfires. But it had been a relatively mild fire season so far, and this was a relatively typical October windstorm.
Yet the winds prompted Pacific Gas and Electric Company to unleash an unprecedented intentional blackout across vast swaths of the state that disrupted millions of lives and cost, according to some estimates, billions of dollars in economic losses. And now, in the aftermath, a key question remains: Was all this disruption really necessary?
Schools, universities and businesses closed for days. Food thawed and spoiled in freezers. Oxygen and CPAP machines for sleep apnea stopped working.
Local government officials rushed to find generators to power traffic lights and key tunnels, and neighborhoods far from any wildfire danger were plunged into darkness.
PG&E told people to visit its website to find out whether their lights would stay on, but the website quickly crashed as millions did just that; the utility directed people to its call centers, but those were overloaded, too.
The blackouts, and the confusion surrounding them, led to a fresh round of criticism of California’s largest utility, led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, who called the shutdowns the “unacceptable” result of PG&E’S “greed and mismanagement,” a sentiment echoed by angry residents of darkened neighborhoods. As the week ended and PG&E worked to restore power, there was renewed talk of reining in or even breaking up the beleaguered utility and uneasy comparisons with rolling blackouts that helped cost an earlier governor, Gray Davis, his job.
At a news conference Thursday, PG&E CEO Bill Johnson apologized for the agency’s poor communication, acknowledging that the utility was “not adequately prepared,” but insisted that the dangerous weather forced its hand.
Yet as she charged her cellphone at a San Jose community center Thursday afternoon after PG&E cut the power to her home in the Silver Creek neighborhood, Helen Mcarthur, like many across the Bay Area, was doubtful.
“I don’t think it’s warranted,” Mcarthur said.
Was a huge shutoff necessary?
As much as Newsom and others have criticized PG&E, neither have they shown a willingness to embrace the choice at the heart of last week’s blackouts: whether or not to cut power when dangerous weather moves in.
Someone must own that choice. And hindsight is always 20/20.
After last week, officials want PG&E to be more judicious about shutting off the power because of how disruptive the outages can be.
But one need not look far for a counter-example: PG&E considered shutting down power near the town of Paradise early on the morning of the Camp Fire, then decided against it — weather conditions did not warrant it, the utility said — with disastrous results.
PG&E officials explain their Public Safety Power Shutoffs as “a choice between hardship or safety.”
“We chose safety,” Johnson said.
To Newsom and a raft of PG&E critics, though, that was a “false choice,” and one the company arrived at only after a cascading series of problems — many of which were of its own making.
It was PG&E that for years deferred maintenance on its infrastructure and lagged behind its goals for clearing trees and other potential fire fuels from around power lines.
Given those deficiencies and the threat posed by last week’s weather, utility and fire science experts say a power shutoff was warranted. A better question, they say, is whether so many people needed to lose power.
“Under the circumstances, a shutdown of some sort was necessary,” said Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment. “It’s not clear whether the shutdown as instituted by PG&E was necessary.”
PG&E wasn’t the only utility to cut power during the week to reduce wildfire danger, but its blackouts were by far the most far reaching. More than 700,000 PG&E customers throughout the Bay Area and Northern California lost power at some point.
As winds spread south across the state, Southern California Edison turned off power to about 21,000 customers and advised 223,000 more that they could be affected as of Friday. San Diego Gas & Electric cut power to about 200 customers, while 30,000 were advised they may lose power.
Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science at UC Berkeley, said Southern California’s utilities “have invested more in the ability to shut off much more strategic, smaller areas of their grid” than PG&E has. They also have done more to bury their transmission lines, replace wooden power poles with more durable concrete poles and improve weather monitoring to track dangerous winds.
After its wires sparked the deadly 2007 Witch Fire, San Diego Gas & Electric essentially rewired its grid to cut power only to those areas at greatest risk, minimizing the impact elsewhere.
PG&E’S capabilities are far less refined: The utility only began proactively shutting down power last year, and its grid is older and covers a larger, more diverse area, with many communities linked to a single major power line.
A line shutdown in one area can affect many customers in lower-risk areas as well.
“PG&E is growing their capabilities, but they’re not where they need to be to isolate specific circuits,” said Elizaveta Malashenko, deputy executive director for safety policy at the California Public Utilities Commission. “They don’t always have the capability to be surgical in what they shut off and end up shutting off larger portions of their lines.”
And as an investorowned company, critics note, PG&E is also weighing the impact of its decision on shareholders and seeking to avoid adding to the billions of dollars in liability it has by sparking another deadly and destructive fire.
That’s part of the problem, according to Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network.
“The shareholders, not the ratepayers or the taxpayers, must be responsible for paying the costs of these shutoffs,” Toney said. Otherwise, they function as “a ‘get out of jail free card’ any time they have a problem they should have prevented.”
A troubled history
Tolerance for the shutdowns might have been higher had they not been carried out by a utility whose attempts to deliver electricity and gas across a vast and varied landscape have seemed to lurch from one scandal to another.
The outages evoked memories for many people of the rolling blackouts in the early 2000s when the state tried to deregulate its electricity markets in a botched bid to promote cleaner and cheaper power. That effort turned into a multibilliondollar fiasco and prompted PG&E’S first bankruptcy.
Next came the fallout from the fatal explosion in San Bruno in 2010 that federal investigators say resulted from the lethal combination of PG&E’S flawed record-keeping and shoddy maintenance. The utility was convicted of felony criminal charges and is still under federal probation.
Meanwhile, PG&E’S equipment has continued to spark fires, most notably several blazes that scorched the North Bay Wine Country and nearby regions in 2017 and the Camp Fire, which killed 86 people and all but burned down the town of Paradise.
A federal judge has issued orders aimed at forcing PG&E to improve the safety of its gas and electricity systems, and the state government has enacted a law to oblige PG&E to take steps to prevent wildfires.
But Loretta Lynch, a former president of the California Public Utilities Commission, said the regulator has rubber-stamped PG&E’S plans. Lynch said she believes the commission, the California agency responsible for oversight of PG&E, must share the blame for the power shutdowns.
“Instead of being a watchdog, the PUC acts like PG&E’S lapdog,” Lynch said.
Severin Borenstein, director of the Energy Institute at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, said the commission is underfunded and “effectively doesn’t have a ground operation for safety anywhere near the scale needed to directly regulate.”
“We’re essentially trusting utilities to do what’s right on safety, and in some cases that’s clearly not worked out,” he said.
But forces beyond the control of PG&E or its regulators also have been at work and will pose greater challenges in the future.
California’s dry season is longer, and a crippling drought left tens of millions of dead trees in the state’s forests. Sprawling development has pushed more people and power lines into fire-prone areas.
“Transmission and utility lines have caused fires for 100 years,” Borenstein said. “But they’re starting bigger fires now.”
Newsom talks tough
It may not be far from Newsom’s mind that the last California governor to face massive blackouts in the state was recalled by the voters in the middle of his second term. While Davis also was hampered by other issues, such as a budget crisis, his experience shows how the interruption of a service as basic as electricity can be politically fatal.
To be sure, the crisis Davis faced and the power outages last week are drastically different. The blackouts in the early 2000s were caused at least in part by behind-the-scenes speculation by energy companies like Enron, not by the risk of wildfires.
Still, Davis acknowledges that blackouts can be devastating to an elected leader’s popularity.
“There’s no question they didn’t help,” the former governor said in an interview. “People don’t like blackouts, even if they’re for a precautionary reason, and they have a right to be upset.”
Like lawmakers and local officials across the state, Newsom has taken a tough line on PG&E.
In a news conference Thursday night, Newsom said he would be “pushing very hard to make sure PG&E fulfills all of their commitments they’re making privately, and all of the commitments they’re making publicly, to turn the lights on as quickly as possible.”
Newsom has the power to reshape the Public Utilities Commission: He already has appointed two of its five members, including new President Marybel Batjer.
Those commissioners could more aggressively push PG&E to make improvements and launch investigations into how the company handled last week’s outages.
The governor also could issue an executive order directing the PUC to take new regulatory action, for example by forcing PG&E to speed up its plan to mitigate wildfires. Newsom’s first state budget includes $75 million that can be distributed to local governments to help with the cost of power shutoffs.
Davis tried to show he was on top of the problem, but it wasn’t enough — his approval ratings tumbled and he was ultimately recalled in October 2003. It remains to be seen how Newsom will be judged if sweeping shutoffs continue.
“Optically, he needs to show he’s completely on top of this, and not just shouting at PG&E like everybody else,” said Steven Maviglio, a Democratic strategist in Sacramento and Davis’ former press secretary. “You have to show action.”
Expect more shutoffs
The list of potential fixes for the problems facing PG&E — and California — is long and varied.
The most ambitious plans call for breaking up the utility or restructuring the electrical system into community-level “microgrids.”
In the near term, experts say PG&E needs to focus on hardening its existing infrastructure by working through backlogs of tree-trimming and maintenance and catching up with Southern California utilities in using extensive “sectionalization” of the grid to more precisely target power shutoffs.
In the Bay Area, former PUC Commissioner Catherine Sandoval said PG&E’S efforts should be particularly focused on areas where the region’s topography creates vicious wind tunnels, like along the ridges of Mount Saint Helena in Napa and Sonoma counties, and between Mount Diablo and the Sunol Ridge.
“We can’t have massive outages year after year, while PG&E moves at a slow pace,” Sandoval said. “We have to find a happy medium where we have both reliability and safety.”
In a region where customers already pay some of the highest utility bills in the country, none of these solutions will be cheap. And all of them will take at least several years to become reality, during which hot, dry winds will continue to sweep across Northern California at the end of the dry season. The conditions that created last week’s blackouts, in other words, will not be changing any time soon.
“This is going to be a regular part of the fall,” Wara, of Stanford, said.
Sure enough, as PG&E worked to restore power at the end of last week, National Weather Service meteorologist Drew Peterson was tracking the early warning signs of another round of the windy, dry weather the Bay Area had just experienced.
“It’s that time of year,” Peterson said.