San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
PG&E’s goal for fire season: Avoid igniting catastrophes
CEO says utility has made big strides to reduce risks
CEO Patti Poppe gives updates at PG&E’s Hazard Awareness and Warning Center in San Ramon.
At this time last year, one of the largest wildfires in California history had destroyed the historic Gold Rush town of Greenville in Plumas County and scorched nearly 1,140 square miles in the Sierra Nevada. Pacific Gas and Electric
Co. equipment was once again to blame for a record-setting fire.
Californians have so far skirted another PG&E fire disaster this year, on the heels of a yearly run of PG&E fires that took homes and lives since 2017. Can PG&E get through a fire season without starting a major wildfire?
That goal was evident Tuesday in a conference room in San Ramon where utility managers with the company met with top executives for a weekly fire prevention briefing.
One manager held up a type of fuse that had sparked and potentially threatened to start several fires since late June. His team found a specific batch of these devices that posed a hazard, and the team was starting a plan to root them out. Another staffer discussed a problem with transformers overloading at mobile home parks and plans to install different equipment in areas with the greatest fire risk.
“There will be a time when our equipment is not related to wildfire,” Patti Poppe, chief executive officer of PG&E Corp., told The Chronicle after the briefing. “Maybe not this year. In our future, it is possible.”
Poppe joined PG&E Corp. in January 2021, taking the helm of a company convicted of crimes for neglecting the power grid and that had failed to prepare for the effects of a hotter, drier California. PG&E equipment has ignited catastrophic fires in the last six years that killed more than 100 people and destroyed towns and neighborhoods from the Sierra foothills to the North Bay.
Poppe, who previously worked for a Michigan utility, told The Chronicle she felt drawn to join PG&E and right the ship.
Six months into Poppe’s tenure on July 13, the Dixie Fire ignited in a remote Feather River canyon. PG&E had overhauled its fire prevention programs since the utility’s bankruptcy, driven by fire disasters in 2017 and 2018, and again the Dixie Fire proved it hadn’t gone far enough.
Kristopher Duncan-Sheehy monitors wildfires and other perils at PG&E’s San Ramon Hazard Awareness and Warning Center.
Under her watch, investigators pinned the Dixie Fire on a diseased tree that fell on power lines and blamed the utility’s sluggish response for allowing the fire to grow, undetected.
Since then, Poppe said the programs put in place would have prevented the Dixie Fire from starting and have collectively dropped the risk of power line-sparked fires by 90%.
But many of the company’s solutions come with costs.
One of PG&E’s top fire prevention strategies is to cut power more swiftly and automatically in fire-prone areas of California, a computerized solution that has slashed fire starts by just over 70% in dangerous fire areas compared with the three years prior, according to the company.
But the shutoff system undermined reliable electric service in in coastal and central mountain range communities, such as the Sierra foothills and the Santa Cruz Mountains, so much that federal lawmakers complained that the utility had shifted the burden of stopping fires onto the backs of their constituents, who suffered lost work, spoiled food and other inconveniences.
Another key strategy for preventing fires is to put 10,000 miles of power lines underground over the next decade, an expensive endeavor that some worry could drive up electricity rates for Californians.
Since last year, the company has put 175 miles of power lines underground at an estimated cost of $3.75 million per
mile and plans another 3,425 miles underground by the end of 2026.
Michael Wara, an energy expert with Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, said the company has dramatically improved its fire safety programs over the last five years. But he questioned whether the benefits of putting some power lines underground outweigh the costs in California, where electricity prices are second only to those in Hawaii.
Wara said he hopes state regulators examine those costs closely before allowing the utility to increase electricity rates.
“If a growing slice of California can’t afford to cool their homes in summertime, this is not a viable solution,” Wara said.
Poppe said they are making a case to state regulators that the one-time costs of putting wires underground will be offset by savings when those overhead lines no longer require vegetation management and other maintenance.
In addition, they have finetuned the sensors to reduce the number of power disruptions in fire-prone areas. And they added response teams to help keep those shutoffs short. She defended the system as essential in an era when drought and overgrown forests pose existential threats.
“Every one of those (power) interruptions was a potential wildfire,” Poppe said.