2019 California power shutoffs


The 2019 California power shutoffs, known as public safety power shutoff events, were massive preemptive power shutoffs that occurred in approximately 30 counties in Northern California and several areas in Southern California from October 9 to November 1, 2019, by Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric. The power shutoffs were an attempt to prevent wildfires from being started by electrical equipment during strong and dry winds. The shutoffs initially affected around 800,000 customers, or about 2.5 million people but expanded to cause over 3 million people to lose utility-provided electrical power by late October as more utility companies from around the state also did preemptive power shutoffs.
The shutdowns have drawn widespread fierce backlash and criticism from residents as well as government officials as PG&E, SCE, SDG&E and the California Public Utilities Commission issued an apology. Many residents complained of either being misinformed or not informed when shutdowns would occur, while officials such as California governor Gavin Newsom blamed the shutdowns on PG&E's "greed and mismanagement." Some people expressed their frustrations through vandalism and violence, including the egging of a PG&E office's front doors and someone shooting at a PG&E vehicle.
For the state's largest utility, PG&E, to bury all of its distribution lines would cost per customer.

Background

The “Public Safety Power Shutoff” has been standard practice in California for many years, though in the past, the preemptive shutoffs occurred predominantly in rural areas. PG&E warned the state for months of its impending action, set to commence when the combination of high autumn winds and dry conditions made the fires more likely to happen. PG&E began its series of power blackouts in the San Francisco Bay Area on Wednesday, October 9, at around 12 AM PDT in order to reduce the risks of devastating wildfires caused by PG&E's power lines or equipment, like the October 2017 Northern California wildfires and the 2018 Camp Fire, responsible for a combined total of 95 deaths.
As California's population has continued to grow in suburban and exurban areas that were formerly wilderness, the risk and size of fires has escalated. More than a third of California's housing is now located in areas known as wildland–urban interface. When wildfires happen upon these communities, they become more dangerous and leap from structure to structure in what is called “fast-moving urban conflagrations” that firefighters find difficult to stop.

Legal setting

Besides safety, one of the reasons behind PG&E's imposition of the blackouts is a legal doctrine known as inverse condemnation, which makes California utilities responsible for wildfire destruction regardless of whether the utility acted negligently or not. California's interpretation of inverse condemnation is unique. The tenet is applied in other states, usually to government entities that damage private property when engaged in a public service. California's courts have ruled the principle can be applied to utilities. So the utilities are held liable for damage, even if they comply with all of California's strict energy-related rules.
This policy resulted in $30B of liability for PG&E from the 2017 & 2018 fires and drove it to bankruptcy proceedings.
In July 2019, a new $21 billion wildfire trust fund was created to pay for damages from future wildfires, started with a 50-50 balance of utility and customer monies and also reduced the liability threshold for utilities to where customers must prove negligence before companies are held liable.
Critics of inverse condemnation point out that it can lead to utility bankruptcies which can threaten the integrity of the California power grid as well as hurt financing the states' efforts for renewable energy and against climate change, one of the causes of the intensified fire threat.
In addition to court cases in recent years and the evolution of case law which have made new standards of legal liability, the California State legislature and the Governor also enacted new statutory laws to modify the legal regime under which electrical utilities operate in California. Over 20 new wildfire-related laws were enacted in the 2019 legislative session, several of them affecting the electrical service providing utility companies.

Undergrounding

The fire risk from the electricity supply is principally from the large amount of energy carried in above-ground power lines, which under fault conditions can become a factor in the ignition of wildfires. Public utilities in the state of California have a total of of high voltage transmission lines, and of distribution lines. Distribution lines bring electricity directly to homes; two thirds of them statewide are above ground.
For transmission lines, the cost of constructing these underground is approximately per mile
while for distribution lines, the construction cost of new underground lines is about per mile, compared to overhead lines at about $800,000 per mile.
The state's largest utility, PG&E, has of distribution lines, of which are overhead. The cost to convert all of PG&E's overhead distribution lines to underground lines would be approximately, or roughly per PG&E customer.

Timeline

A man dependent on an oxygen supply died 12 minutes after the outage started in his area on October 11. An investigation has been initiated. His family said he could not reach his battery-powered tank in time. Large numbers of other disabled people reported issues with poor communication by PG&E of when shutoffs would occur, and with the inability to power or charge electrical devices on which their wellbeing depended during shutoffs. Affected devices included ventilators, oxygen concentrators, nebulizers, dialysis machines, refrigerators for drugs such as insulin, and electrically powered beds, hoists and wheelchairs. PG&E had a list of over 30,000 customers registered on their Medical Baseline program as being vulnerable to shutoffs, but used it only as a contact list, leaving the affected disabled customers unsupported. Dependence on the Medical Baseline list meant PG&E inevitably missing many more disabled people not registered with the program. Others who were registered reported they were not contacted. PG&E also refused to give many local counties access to the Medical Baseline list, leaving them unable to check on vulnerable residents.
Under backup power on October 11, 2019 , the Mission Operations Center at the Space Sciences Laboratory at University of California, Berkeley oversaw the deployment of a satellite launched from Cape Canaveral. Paula Milano, who helps run the Laboratory, did not want to postpone the launch saying “If a scrub of the mission happens because of Berkeley, that's a huge black eye for us, and it's a huge public black eye for NASA.” After notification on October 7, the lab began extensive preparation for the power outage.
By late October, water had been restricted for some in areas which rely on pump stations.
Sonoma–Marin Area Rail Transit commuter rail services were cancelled on October 28 and 29 due to loss of power at crossings throughout the system. Partial service as far north as Downtown Santa Rosa was restored the following day.

Potential fires averted

After the early October power shutoffs, the CEO of PG&E stated that they found more than 100 cases of "wind-related damage" to the 25,000 miles of power lines they had de-energized. He also stated "More than half of PG&E’s 70,000-square-mile service area in Northern and Central California is considered by state officials to be at high risk of wildfire. In 2012, that designation applied to just 15% of our service area."
By the end of October, PG&E officials told a federal judge that the power shutoffs so far helped prevent up to 56 wildfires; 44 from contact with vegetation and 12 cases of wind-caused equipment damage.