Weather stations reduced outages

About 50 weather stations in Mendocino County

A newly expanded network of weather stations and cameras across Northern California helped “reduce the size of each Public Safety Power Shutoff event in 2020 on average by 55 percent,” the Pacific Gas and Electric company reported.

According to PG&E, the utility has “1,000 weather stations and 340 cameras in operation throughout Northern and Central California, providing more precise weather data, (and) more than 48 of those weather stations and 12 cameras are in Mendocino County.”

The utility reports that “the weather stations along with sec

tionalizing devices that isolate the grid into smaller segments and deployment of temporary generation and microgrids,” made it possible for more than 800,000 people who lost power in 2019 to not be included in the preemptive outages in 2020.

In 2020, PG&E installed 400 new weather stations and 216 HD cameras as part of its Community Wildfire Safety Program, tools designed to “provide better situational awareness and more precise weather monitoring and forecasting that allowed for more precision in determining where” power needed to be shut off.

PG&E reports that it “plans to install 1,300 weather stations by the end of 2021, creating a density of roughly one weather station for every 20 miles of electric lines in high firethreat areas.

By the end of 2022, PG&E plans to have nearly 600 cameras installed. When complete, PG&E expects to have the ability to see in real-time roughly 90% of the high fire-risk areas it serves.”

The stations provide temperature, wind speed and humidity data, and the weather station observations are available to state and local agencies as well as the public, through PG&E’S website at www.pge.com/ weather and through Mesowest.

The WSOC staff also use PG&E’S network of firewatch cameras to monitor and respond to wildfires. These resources are also available to Cal Fire and other fire agencies, as needed, and can be viewed publicly by anyone through the Alert Wildfire Network at www.alertwildfire.org.