Restoring power difficult after bomb cyclone
About 1 million Bay Area households and businesses lost power over the past few days when a stronger-thanforecast bomb cyclone storm hit the region Sunday. Schools closed and at least one hospital emergency room went dark.
Most have now been restored, as Pacific Gas & Electric Co. said Tuesday afternoon that fewer than 57,000 customers still had no power.
But many Bay Area residents stuck without electricity for hours or even days wondered why PG&E didn’t restore power sooner, and why the utility sometimes could not provide an estimated time of restoration.
The answer is that restoring power after a major windstorm is challenging: Roads can be closed, downed trees and other hazards abound, and workers must prioritize safety issues such as downed wires.
PG&E deployed crews to first inspect damage, then order repairs on hundreds of miles of power lines and grid infrastructure across a storm-battered region, according to spokesperson Jeff Smith. He said it can be a challenge to provide estimates for when power will be restored, especially before initial teams have been to the site to assess the damage and determine what it will take to repair it.
“These were some of the strongest wind gusts we’ve seen in 30 years,” Smith noted.
Gusts in the Bay Area topped 90 and even 100 mph in the windiest areas.
San Mateo County Supervisor Ray Mueller said Tuesday the blackouts were still causing havoc throughout the Santa Cruz Mountains, leaving some of the most vulnerable and isolated communities hemmed in by fallen trees and power lines and with no power to get water from wells.
The emergency department at Seton Medical Center Coastside lost power for eight hours, he said.
“To have multiday events like this without power — it truly is a public health crisis,” Mueller said.
But he credited PG&E for a quick on-the-ground response since Sunday and said the region needs a more resilient system overall.
“We need to do the actual infrastructure investment, so we’re not in every storm playing catchup with repairs,” said Mueller, who wants PG&E to make significant infrastructure improvements so the electrical grid is less vulnerable during winter storms.
Customers without power for 48 hours or longer could receive a payment from PG&E. Called a storm inconvenience payment, the program, which is automatic, sends checks between $25 and $100 depending on the amount of time a customer had no power.
The efforts to fix the extensive damage are at some point likely to show up in another rate hike. State law allows the investor-owned utility to recoup some of those costs from catastrophic events like storms and wildfires through temporary rate increases. PG&E spokesman Mike Gazda said they had no estimate yet for how much it will cost because the company’s emergency response was still underway.
A pending rate increase tied to last year’s storms could hit utility bills later this year. PG&E has applied to recoup $800 million in expenses associated with 15 major storms last winter, including the replacement of 4,500 electric poles and 850 miles of wire.
If approved when the commission meets in March, that could add another $14 to $15 to average residential customer bills, on top of a $34.50 hike from rate increases in effect as of Jan. 1. That includes rate reductions as previous temporary hikes, mostly for older storm and fire events, will sunset this year, a PG&E spokesperson said. (The rate hike, to recoup $2.1 billion in expenses PG&E has already paid, will include spending related to wildfire response and prevention as well as storms. A breakdown of storm-related costs wasn’t immediately available.)
Michael Wara, director of Stanford University’s Climate and Energy Policy Program, said this week’s storm is unlikely to have a significant impact on rates, noting that one of the biggest factors driving up electricity rates “are the cost of wildfires and avoiding wildfires.”
Lingering outages were most widespread in the North Bay where 26,908 customers remained without power Tuesday, followed by 15,662 in the South Bay, 13,324 on the Peninsula, 1,215 in San Francisco and 244 in the East Bay, PG&E said.