That people are actually defending PG&E is yet another sign of how badly things have gone off the rails in the trump era. I guarantee their executives are laughing it up right now about how much of the public and media they've somehow fooled into taking their side. (And make no mistake, if you think they're doing anything other than being greedy buttholes? You are taking their side.)

Gotta love the media and their "both sides-ism". "PG&E appears to have bent over millions of Californians. Is this wrong? Let's give equal time to both sides."

Let them eat cake!

PG&E Apologizes For Holding Wine Party Just Before Planned Power Outage | Top Stories | NewsRadio KFBK

https://kfbk.iheart.com/featured/sacramentos-latest-news/content/2019-10-11-pge-apologizes-for-holding-wine-party-just-before-planned-power-outage/

No fux given

Utility management at all levels, Fed, State, local, corporate is just not good. PG&E is not a worse case, but definitely could be the poster child. Many utility providers hide behind government (aka DOD) customers to delay infrastructure upgrades, San Diego has done this with storm water and sewage discharges for decades. It's amusing when residents complain of TJ sewer failures, but ignore breaches on the US side. One DOD base used to pay millions a month in discharge fines because they treated their own wastewater inadequately. Other SD bases just dump their waste into the SD system that has been out of compliance for decades,

During the last major round of base closures, those bases who had invested the time and effort to study the environmental risks of their utlity systems were closed. Bases that had done nothing for years remained open. The do-nothing bases were paying massive fines but the decision makers were afraid that if the polluters were closed the base closure cleanup costs would be billions more. They were probably right, but it meant sheltering the worst utility managers from consequences. And the military managers readily find jobs in public utilities.

Big Dog said:

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510 Bear said:

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That people are actually defending PG&E is yet another sign of how badly things have gone off the rails in the trump era. I guarantee their executives are laughing it up right now about how much of the public and media they've somehow fooled into taking their side. (And make no mistake, if you think they're doing anything other than being greedy buttholes? You are taking their side.)

Gotta love the media and their "both sides-ism". "PG&E appears to have bent over millions of Californians. Is this wrong? Let's give equal time to both sides."

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Trump has nothing to do with this cluster.....

The State PUC is in charge of (ahem) regulating PG&E. They clearly don't do squat, except perhaps wine & dine themselves after 'earning' a patronage job. The Governor appoints the PUC commissioners; the PUC is enabling the greedy butt-holes.

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I'm not linking the trump era to the fact that this cluster happened in the first place (the roots of it go deeper than that), I'm linking it to the public and media's apologist reaction to it.

Not a good look

Yikes.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/pge-california-outage.amp.html

The Hill news flash needs to be pulled for inaccuracy and stupidity.
Big difference between an oxygen concentrator and oxygen tanks.
And both come in portable and bedside units. My wife passed away from
COPD and we shuffled through all four types her last two years.

To hijack this thread away from PG&E, but our health insurance would not authorize both tanks and
a concentrator. If you had a home concentrator you couldn't have portable(smaller) tanks
for when you left home. It was a real fight to get a portable oxygen concentrator for use
on an airplane flight home (you couldn't take oxygen tanks on a plane as a passenger).
The portable concentrator worked well on airplanes but only had about 8 hours working
life on an extra capacity battery, we always carried a spare battery and never had a problem.

The real issue, since these 'precautionary' blackouts will continue into the future, is whether
health insurance companies will be allowed to deny their subscribers 'backup equipment'
for power outages. When we tried to get the portable converter it tooks weeks of pressure,
time most people won't have in advance of a shutdown. We were buying a portable converter
on our own dime when the insurance company relented. I have an aunt who can't get a
portable converter for when she travels away from home, she has to bring a large O2 bottle.
Kind of surprised if only one COPD sufferer was affected.

Cutting off power at Cal can have some really bad consequences.

https://abc7news.com/science/ucb-grad-student-says-research-may-have-been-destroyed-by-pg-e-outage/5615023/

http://www.mercurynews.com/how-pges-power-shutdown-threatened-a-nasa-mission

the second article maybe true, but it's also the stupidity of the Cal lab management. If they really are 'mission critical', there is no excuse for not having backup generators and/or UPS batteries. 'Stuff' happens all the time (in earthquake country), and not having a plan for a loss of power is bad planning and bad management.

Done

More blackouts probably happening this weekend. Looks like the same area as the last big one.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Potential-PGE-shutoff-Alameda-Contra-Costa-14560986.php

Guess I'll be listening to the game on my wind up emergency radio.

It also looks like PG&E's blackouts didn't actually prevent fires.

https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Kincade-Fire-sends-PG-E-stock-reeling-could-go-14562445.php

This company, ugh.

Kincade Fire near Anderson Valley...reportedly started by a broken PG&E transmission tower. PG&E stock plunges by 25% overnight.

p.s. methinks it's time to put power lines underground. It will cost billions but the fires have cost that and more.

PG&E cut off power to the residents but not on its transmission lines.

Interesting decision.

bluehenbear said:

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Guess I'll be listening to the game on my wind up emergency radio.

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May be better not to watch us get thrashed by the Utes anyway.

What's the other option?

going4roses said:

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What's the other option?

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More multi-billion dollar fires every year.

Damn.... what about mandatory solar for all structures in CA or would that be more expensive?

going4roses said:

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Damn.... what about mandatory solar for all structures in CA or would that be more expensive?

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Never thought of that. You're on to something. Solar costs keep dropping and requiring it on new structures makes sense. The downside is ramp up would take years but why not start now? It would or could help in electric vehicle recharging, and not being fossil fuel driven electrify.

dimitrig said:

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PG&E cut off power to the residents but not on its transmission lines.

Interesting decision.

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That was probably done to minimize the down time for electricity transmission from the extensive set of geothermal power plants just north of the area. Geothermal plants which provide about 50% of the electrical power for Northern California. So there's a strong motivation to keep that electricity flowing. The ironic thing is that now, probably because the main transmission lines were kept running and failed, that electricity source is offline for an even longer time.

As far as solar, there is now an additional incentive for power users to have some electrical generation on site. Also an additional incentive to have electrical storage on site (i.e. home battery installation). However residential solar doesn't reduce the use of electricity transmission lines by much, since half the time the home solar is sending electricity upstream to the utility. Moreover, at least in the Bay Area, a lot of the obvious (i.e. financially rational) home solar installations have already been done. If you have a home in the Bay Area you get at least one call a month offering you FREE solar installation, in exchange for buying that solar unit's electrical output at below utility rates. It's pretty compelling. Except that if you agree, THEN they check satellite photos for tree/shade coverage. The majority of the good sites at this point should already have solar.

Another Bear said:

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Kincade Fire near Anderson Valley...reportedly started by a broken PG&E transmission tower. PG&E stock plunges by 25% overnight.

p.s. methinks it's time to put power lines underground. It will cost billions but the fires have cost that and more.

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The report I saw was not a broken tower, but a dangling jumper cable on a tower. The easiest way to damage one of those is with a deer rifle. They aren't easily accessible from the ground like local power lines and the ground under high voltage lines is clear cut so there are no tree branches to hit the lines 100 feet off the ground.

Putting high voltage lines under ground is not the same as putting local electrical lines under ground. For national security concerns the right of way would have to be fenced off from public access and patrolled, to prevent a yahoo in a 4X4 messing with the vaults or playing in them. On our newer Navy bases with high voltage underground lines these vaults were up to 60 feet deep and had to be checked for gas free condition before entry by maintenance personnel.

Much cheaper to tell everybody to go fly a kite and pray for rain...

sp4149 said:

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Another Bear said:

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Kincade Fire near Anderson Valley...reportedly started by a broken PG&E transmission tower. PG&E stock plunges by 25% overnight.

p.s. methinks it's time to put power lines underground. It will cost billions but the fires have cost that and more.

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The report I saw was not a broken tower, but a dangling jumper cable on a tower. The easiest way to damage one of those is with a deer rifle. They aren't easily accessible from the ground like local power lines and the ground under high voltage lines is clear cut so there are no tree branches to hit the lines 100 feet off the ground.

Putting high voltage lines under ground is not the same as putting local electrical lines under ground. For national security concerns the right of way would have to be fenced off from public access and patrolled, to prevent a yahoo in a 4X4 messing with the vaults or playing in them. On our newer Navy bases with high voltage underground lines these vaults were up to 60 feet deep and had to be checked for gas free condition before entry by maintenance personnel.

Much cheaper to tell everybody to go fly a kite and pray for rain...

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Well that is a new one to me

Well, I'm definitely seeing a lot more wind today than during the last shutoff.

(Thankfully my house is just out of the shutoff zone.)

The wind this morning should have everyone blacked out. So many trees down

Heads up Highway 13 sb redwood road exit has tree blocking the pathway be careful

sycasey said:

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It also looks like PG&E's blackouts didn't actually prevent fires.

https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Kincade-Fire-sends-PG-E-stock-reeling-could-go-14562445.php

This company, ugh.

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That fire would have been prevented if they turned off power 20 minutes earlier on that line.

So are you arguing for larger scale outages or earlier outages? I am not sure what the claim is.

Another Bear said:

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Kincade Fire near Anderson Valley...reportedly started by a broken PG&E transmission tower. PG&E stock plunges by 25% overnight.

p.s. methinks it's time to put power lines underground. It will cost billions but the fires have cost that and more.

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The cost of the fires isn't close to the cost of undergrounding.

The cost of undergrounding is orders of magnitude more expensive. Hell, the cost of undergrounding is about than the cost of a Paradise scale fire every year for 100 years. JUST the transmission lines in PGEs territory would easily be around $100 billion to bury. The distribution lines would be $750b-1t to bury, realistically.

I think people really, deeply misunderstand the scale of costs related to undergrounding transmission lines in the third largest, most populated state. The distances are bonkers. The terrain is rough and remote. The customers are far flung.

There is also the issue of lines being incredibly prone to failure when there are earthquakes and much more difficult and time consuming to repair. Thank God we don't have earthquakes.

LunchTime said:

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sycasey said:

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It also looks like PG&E's blackouts didn't actually prevent fires.

https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Kincade-Fire-sends-PG-E-stock-reeling-could-go-14562445.php

This company, ugh.

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That fire would have been prevented if they turned off power 20 minutes earlier on that line.

So are you arguing for larger scale outages or earlier outages? I am not sure what the claim is.

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That they don't seem to know where or when to shut down the lines anyway. Despite the PSPS, still a fire. Is it worth it for everyone to lose power too?

sycasey said:

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LunchTime said:

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sycasey said:

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It also looks like PG&E's blackouts didn't actually prevent fires.

https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Kincade-Fire-sends-PG-E-stock-reeling-could-go-14562445.php

This company, ugh.

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That fire would have been prevented if they turned off power 20 minutes earlier on that line.

So are you arguing for larger scale outages or earlier outages? I am not sure what the claim is.

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That they don't seem to know where or when to shut down the lines anyway. Despite the PSPS, still a fire. Is it worth it for everyone to lose power too?

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Well that's the choice, isn't it. Try and not cause a fire, or just DGAF and let that ***** burn so I can watch TV.

Maybe we should vote. More people live where wildfire is zero concern, so we could probably get the win.