Yahoo Finance Newsom demanded PG&E ‘fix this damn thing.’ New CEO says they’ve made quick progress
As the Kincade Fire roared through Sonoma County in October 2019, fierce Diablo windstorms overtook much of Northern California. To prevent new wildfires, PG&E Corp. imposed a series of public safety power shutoffs that blacked out hundreds of thousands of Northern California customers.
Bill Johnson, the company’s chief executive at the time, told the Public Utilities Commission that there were no quick fixes. Climate change was making California so combustible, he said the state could look forward to 10 years of blackouts in the name of wildfire safety — a prediction that infuriated Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“It doesn’t take a decade to fix this damn thing,” Newsom said.
Two years later, Johnson is gone and PG&E’s new chief executive still has a mountain of problems on her desk. But she says the utility has made considerable progress since then — in protecting its customers from wildfire and reducing the number of times they have to endure blackouts.
“We are working around the clock to minimize the disruption of power to people and keep them safe,” CEO Patti Poppe said in an interview with The Sacramento Bee. “We don’t want to continue living in this environment where there’s a trade-off, a choice — a sucker’s choice, I call it — of safety (or) reliability.”
Poppe wouldn’t put a timeline on resolving the wildfire crisis, but said: “Something has changed at PG&E and we want people to know that.”
Nine months after Poppe took charge at PG&E, and more than two years after it was driven into bankruptcy after the Camp Fire in Butte County, the state’s largest utility’s wildfire safety record is still the object of intense scrutiny.
Cal Fire is investigating PG&E’s possible role in the Dixie Fire, which is still burning after three months and is the second-largest wildfire in California history. The company is under criminal indictment in connection with the Kincade Fire and last year’s Zogg Fire, which killed four people in Shasta County, and is likely facing more than $600 million in civil liabilities from those two fires.
Meanwhile, the blackouts continue, including public safety power shutoffs affecting thousands of homes and businesses in the past week. In addition, two weeks after the Dixie Fire began in the company heightened the sensitivity on many of its circuit breakers in fire-prone areas, making them shut off the power more quickly. PG&E says the enhanced settings have prevented new fires — but have also caused more than 400 blackouts.
In other words, Poppe’s work is just beginning.
Stanford University’s Michael Wara, who’s advised the Legislature on fire, energy and climate issues, said PG&E officials still seem to be years away from fire-proofing the grid — and are leaning towards turning the lights off as the best way to maintain safety.
“What’s drilled into them from Day 1 is reliability, reliability, reliability,” Wara said. “What the company appears to be doing is turning all of the knobs to safety.”
What’s more, state officials say PG&E has fallen short of its promises to do better.
In April the Public Utilities Commission placed PG&E under “enhanced oversight and enforcement” after declaring that the company wasn’t adequately trimming trees and clearing other vegetation from around its power equipment. The stricter oversight is the first step in a phased system that could theoretically result in PG&E’s takeover by the state.
But Poppe, who ran Michigan utility CME Energy Corp. before coming to California, said the commission was basing its decision on 2020 results.
This year PG&E’s vegetation-management operations “far exceed anyone’s expectations, frankly,” Poppe said. “We are well on track.”
Besides spending billions in recent years on tree trimming and removal, the company has begun insulating some of its overhead wires and replacing wooden poles with metal. PG&E just finished planting four miles of wires underground in a section of Sonoma County, an initial step on her pledge to move 10,000 miles of wires underground.
Meanwhile, the company has installed “sectionalizing” technology and devised better weather forecasting to reduce the footprint of its pre-planned public safety power shutoffs, or PSPS events. It’s taking less time to restore power after the blackouts.
“Where we had hundreds of thousands of people disrupted, now we have tens of thousands,” she said.
By next year, she said PG&E hopes have technology in place that would enable electric vehicles to feed their power into the grid, further reducing the impact of the blackouts.
“We’re going to make PSPS events invisible,” she said.
Climate change is ‘our common enemy’
The effects of these combined improvements show up in PG&E’s internal modeling, said Sumeet Singh, the company’s chief risk officer.
If the power safety shutoffs and other tools had been deployed in the fall of 2017, Singh said PG&E could have saved 96% of the properties that were destroyed by the major wildfires linked to the company’s equipment: the 2017 wine-country fires, the 2018 Camp Fire and the Kincade and Zogg fires.
Yet even as PG&E works to buffer its grid from wildfire, the impacts of climate change are intensifying throughout its 70,000-square-mile territory. In 2012, a Public Utilities Commission study found that 15% of PG&E’s territory was at serious risk for wildfires. When the commission updated the study in 2018, it was up to 50%. Singh said PG&E now estimates the figure is up to 55%.
Poppe called climate change “our common enemy,” and said the drought isn’t helping, either.
Case in point: Cal Fire believes the Dixie Fire started when a healthy-looking tree made contact with PG&E’s power equipment in a remote area west of Quincy, Plumas County. PG&E said the tree had been inspected in January and showed no signs of problems.
“What the Dixie Fire tells us all is that there’s a bigger picture here,” said Poppe, who visited the devastation the fire caused when it wiped out much of tiny Greenville’s business district. “The drought conditions have weakened trees and created an ignition spread capacity that is unprecedented.”
