The case in California is different. The fundamental resources are present: there is fuel (or, in many cases, hydroelectric, geothermal, nuclear, wind, or solar power) for generation. Distribution systems exist. There is no shortage of local labour. Systems aren't going offline due to direct failures of maintenance.
Rather: the outages are prompted by a consequence risk. Given the extreme fire danger throughout the state, the least source of ignition creates a fire hazard, and electrical transmission and distribution equipment is a high risk for such ignition.
Previous major wildfires have been sparked by: mower blades, rims of flat tires sparking on pavement, catalytic converters parked over dry grass, sparks from a hammer. And electrical equipment.
There's a case to be made that PG&E have neglected maintenance activies not related directly to continued operation of their plant, but to risk mitigation, and I'm not going to argue one way or the other.
But the fundamental problem California's electric utilities face is not that of most of the world, where means are insufficient, but that consequence is too great to ignore. I'm coming to see this generally as a late-stage dynamic in many technological areas, one in which the unintended consequences (sometimes unanticipated, often not) simply rise to a level of major significance. You might think of these generally as hygiene factors (the phrase I've been using).
Past examples would include:
- Basic personal and public hygiene factors for maintaining public health in cities.
- Pollution control laws affecting solid, liquid, and gas emissions of activities and plants.
- Environmental contamination as with lead, asbestos, pesticides, tobacco, sulfur dioxide ("acid rain"), and CO2.
- Individual psychological and widespread sociological negative impacts of information overload, media saturation and manipulation, and computer systems overexposure.
- Running extensive high-capacity electrical distribution systems through increasingly fire-prone landscapes.
Or put another way: this is increasingly our future.
Honestly, at that point, you have a fire, it's just not burning yet. The idea that we can prevent fires from happening by preventing all sources of ignition in hundreds and hundreds of square miles is completely absurd. Even though Man is responsible for a lot of ignition, he's not responsible for all of them. Even if you completely removed civilization, it's still going to be a fire.
I don't have a solution, or any good news here. Best thing I can think of at this point is spending a shit ton of money and creating some very large fire breaks around cities and then burning on purpose, but California probably can't do that either. By the time the eminent domain lawsuits and counterlawsuits happened, the environmental review happens ("we plan on killing lots of things, and then we're going to set the rest of the stuff we didn't kill on fire" isn't exactly going to sail through the review process), and everyone gets their beaks wetted, it'll just end up being a giant waste of money that gets ended with the fires occur anyhow. And the fire breaks would have to be huge; we're probably measuring the necessary widths with miles fairly reasonably. (Possibly <1 mile, but certainly multiple tenths of a mile.) And the liability. Nobody sane would take that job.
Actually, other than a one-in-a-billion naturally occurring compost pile that, by chance, falls into place and reaches burning temperature, internally, the only natural source of wildland fire ignition is lightning.
Which is interesting because in many parts of coastal Marin/Sonoma/Mendocino/Napa counties, there is, essentially, no lightning. I have lived in Marin for ten years and have seen lightning exactly one time - and that was during the rainy season when ignition would have very low consequence.
Wildland fires in the north bay / Sac Delta / Wine Country are ignited by people ...
Or, to put it another way, when we set off an explosive, the explosion isn't really "caused" by the electrical spark; the unusual thing that happened that primarily caused the detonation is the collection of a lot of explosives in one place. Explosives experts are careful around any concentration of explosives, because that's the real cause. By contrast you can play with the electrical detonation system in isolation all day long and at most you'll shock yourself a bit, and that only with extreme carelessness. The primary cause of these fires is the accumulation of huge amounts of easily-burnable material, not which of the thousands+ of ignition events was the unlucky one to set it off.
That still leaves 15% of ignitions from natural sources.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-29/how-do-w...
Removing the human ignition would likely mean that the blazes from natural sources would take up the slack, and become larger.
Another fact that I'm reminded of was that native Americans would themselves set deliberate blazes which would burn over lands fairly frequently. This would mean that there was a history dating back over centuries, possibly several thousands of years, in which large-scale burns were relatively frequent. This would have phased out beginning with the first European settlements in 1769. By 1900, there had been up to 130 years of diminished fire activity already, not from suppression, but from reduced ignition (though intentional burns by early Europeans were also practiced). Reference with multiple further citations: http://www.californiachaparral.com/enativeamericans.html
The big change seems to be with the 20th century belief that fire is an invader, undesirable, and should be massively suppressed.
That's true, but PG&E equipment has started more than 1500 fires between 2014 and 2017. That's over one fire per day. 17 out of the 22 biggest California wildfires in the last 5 years have been started by PG&E:
Arguably the power shutoff was the right short-term move here: during this wind event 4 fires have been traced back to PG&E (so far), but they had 50 incidents of damaged or downed power lines. It could've been a lot worse.
Think of it like buffer overflows in C. It's naive to think that you're going to eliminate all security bugs by any one intervention. However, if one class of bugs is responsible for 80% of breaches, isn't it worth investigating to see what you can do about that one class of bug? Here we have an organization that's responsible for 80% of forest fires: you're not going to eliminate all forest fires by firing its management, but shouldn't you at least investigate and see what they might be doing wrong?
Fires become bigger and bigger the more fuel they accumulate. Security vulnerabilities lack this attribute.
Arguably, the best solution wouldn't be to try to extinguish the sources of ignition, but greatly increase them so that it's just something that happens all the time. (Another thing they definitely don't share in common with security vulnerabilities.) Of course, the best solution is to hop in a suitably tricked-out De Lorean and start that policy a hundred years ago.
The steady-state of this plan is probably pretty nice. However, getting there from here is a real problem. But I'm not sure there's any way around that problem anymore. That's another part of what I mean by "there's already a fire, it just isn't burning yet"; trying to pretend that there's some solution that doesn't involve fire is just fooling oneself. It's only a question of when, not if.
If California could be trusted to do something useful with the time, enough so that they get meaningfully ahead of the still-accumulating fuel, "buying time" would be a viable option, but I see very little evidence that anything useful is being done. Links solicited to the contrary; I haven't gone looking. But if the solution is just "try to never ever spark anything and thus The Problem Is Solved!", yeah, that's not a solution. It does nothing to stop the fire-in-waiting from getting bigger.
Fires become bigger and bigger the more fuel they accumulate. Security vulnerabilities lack this attribute.
I'd argue that this isn't the case. The threats of Big Data and Big Data Breaches is directly analagous to fuel-load accumulation, with the added bonus of attractive nuisance / induced risk.
That is, we're seeing the same class of bugs we've always seen (ignition sources), but the consequences are vastly higher (international finance, national security, organised crime, personal details and blackmail on billions of souls, greatly expanded venues for long-standing frauds).
Buffer overflows, viruses, worms, trojans, social engineering, phishing, and MITM all predated the past decade. Advanced-fee fraud, impersonation, Ponzi schemes, etc., all existed previously. Married through high-speed, high-capacity data networks, tied to comprehensive and deep data stores, the whole system is weaponised. And the stakes and consequences are huge.
Rather like wildfires in California.
By the way, I've got a Mr. Fusion cannister sitting in the garage, interested?
Security vulnerabilities do have that property: if you find that buffer overflow, you can usually get an RCE, which will let you get root, which will let you compromise the network that the box is on, which will let you find additional vulnerabilities (human or otherwise) to compromise other systems. That's why competent security teams practice defense in depth, and have internal trip-wires and firewalls to limit the damage of any intrusion. That doesn't absolve you from trying to stop the intrusion in the first place.
Similarly, getting PG&E to maintain their equipment is not mutually exclusive with other fire mitigation strategies like controlled burns, defensible space, homeowner education, etc. If anything it'll free up resources for those interventions by switching fire departments out of, well, firefighting mode and giving them some breathing space to focus on more long-term practices.
As to clearing and preemptively burning regions ... one of the more terrifying items that I ran across in the past day was that the Kinkaid fire was burning through areas in which a prior burn, 2017's Tubbs fire, had already burned out:
https://sfist.com/2019/10/28/kincade-fire-doubles-in-size-tu...
It's not clear how thorough the Tubbs fire was in those areas, or if spread of the Kinkaid fire was moderated. But the fact that two major wildfires can burn through the same area only two years apart is ... sobering.
What's effectively NIMBY opposition to wider prescribed burns, firebreaks, expanded evacuation routes, evacuee housing/facilities, structure code and inspection requirements, etc., does seem to be a major factor.
But that's still not addressing the fact that fires are simply bigger, hotter, faster, and more unpredictable than they were even just 20 years ago.
A citation:
* https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-29/how-do-w...
Another one:
> Fear of insects. A rancher tried to plug a wasp’s nest in the ground by jamming a stake into the ground. That unleashed a spark that began burning waist-high grass. He tried to smother the flames by tossing a trampoline on it, but that just worsened the flames. It caused the start of the largest of two fires that merged to become California’s largest wildfire on record, the Mendocino Complex fire, which burned more than 450,000 acres in four Northern California counties — Colusa, Lake, Mendocino and Glenn.
The above was Mendocino:
About three weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21218868
Citing: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/us/california-wildfires-h...
You mean like externalities? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
> Or put another way: this is increasingly our future.
This seems like a situation that might not be best served by a startup... So yes, this is probably what California's future looks like.
Resources devoted to firefighting have increased by any possible measure.
This State of affairs in particular is because PG&E has been held liable for fires caused by their equipment, to which they flipped off the courts and filed for bankruptcy. Should they be held liable? I don’t know, but effectively an entire town was wiped off the map and we experienced a couple weeks of continuous smog as far south as Santa Cruz from what I heard, San Francisco was just filled with smoke and pollution and face masks became part of the uniform around here along with Apple Watches, AirPods and messenger bags or backpacks.
Long term, power generation will become more decentralized anyway, because if there’s one thing we have in abundance it is sunshine. Most houses even with solar panels could not disconnect themselves from the grid and not lose their power, but this will likely incentivize people to look into being able to run their homes off-the-grid for at least a few days at a time.
As for tech companies? For any datacenter, or company running enough equipment to qualify as more or less a datacenter, power outages are a risk factor that you plan for and you try to mitigate. Doesn’t matter where in the world you are or what the capriciousness of the local electrical utility is like, even if you’re running your own source of power.
From what I’ve read here on HN, a self-sufficient solar setup is expensive enough that it will cost more than being on the grid, even when amortized over the lifespan of the setup.
My house is mostly in the shade, and most of my roof faces north and is steeply sloped, so all I could do is a small solar array of about 2.5kW, which now, at the end of october, is producing about 7kWh per day. This solar array cost about $8000. This feeds into a Tesla PowerWall, which is the cheapest such system available. It can store 13kWh with 89% round trip efficiency. This cost $19,000 installed. Tesla advertises $7,000, but you need a whole lot more ancillary equipment and a lot of wiring complexity. So, we're at $27,000 for something that can produce 260W continuously 24/7 if the grid is out. This isn't very much. It's enough to run the fridge and a LED light or two. I realize I'm limited by my solar panels, and if I had the roof space, I could double my available power for roughly another $3,000. (these prices are pre-30% tax incentive).
A tri-fuel (natural gas, propane, gasoline) hardwired generator would have been a better way to go. I wasn't expecting multi-day outages.
So long as you're in a climate where furnace/air conditioning isn't critical, not having electricity for a few days isn't really that big a deal modulo having young kids, elderly, medical issues, etc.
A 2.5kW array will produce 2500W of power when the sun is at 90 degrees to it. This never happens to me, so I get less, 1,200-2,000W output depending on season and time of day. Now, in october, the array at best produces 1,400W, but the graph itself is sinusoidal, so the net power produced is 7kWh. Different units here - kW (which is specific power) verus kWh, which is power used.
You’re probably giving up AC, you’re probably going to want something like Tesla’s Powerwall. You’re probably not going to be running your washer and dryer during that time. You probably want any desktop computers you have on UPS. You probably want your appliances using as little electricity as possible even during normal operation. You probably don’t want to leave all the lights on.
And I forget the name of this one, but you will need an extra piece of equipment beyond the panels and batteries to actually take your house off the grid. Personally I’m also excited for the possibility of miniature hydrogen generators as a store of power.
> From what I’ve read here on HN, a self-sufficient solar setup is expensive enough that it will cost more than being on the grid, even when amortized over the lifespan of the setup.
That’s true today and I will not dispute it, but expect prices to come down , and with PG&E’s capriciousness, the cost of doing nothing to rise, and installation opportunities to increase. If the utility is going to behave in a capricious manner, then people will respond over time. This can be on a personal level by trying to insulate their own homes from power failures as much as possible, or even at the municipal level where cities allow new utilities to come in and replace or compete with PG&E.
We don’t need PG&E, we just need electricity. People are creative, we’ll find ways to make that happen, even with PG&E fighting tooth and nail against their own marginalization.
Wouldn't it be easier to build several large scale nuclear plants and offset it with a small amount of renewables than try to make all of our power run off of rechargeable batteries?
In the US, the lowest average home consumes around 17 kWh of electricity a day; the highest uses 42. This usage does not correlate with the hose usage, meaning that most of the power is consumed when the sun is low in the sky or during the night - putting the majority of the load on the Tesla Powerwall.
You'd need at least two Powerwalls to avoid a significant change in lifestyle, plus ~5kW of solar cells to fill those batteries every day (not accounting for cloudy days).
And a change in lifestyle may not even be practical, since most housing constructed in the last few decades was built with the assumption that AC and electric heating are available.
https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/how-many-solar-panels-do-i...
I repeatedly emphasized that there wouldn’t be no change in lifestyle or quality of life for the duration of an outage, but it would be doable and will likely become less burdensome in the long term.
Allow me to re-emphasize: people are creative and adaptable. Given the necessity to adapt, people will find ways. People are or have been without power for a couple of days now, they’re angry about it. Very angry, and justifiably so, and I feel confident in saying that the market response to this state of affairs will not be zero.
Ask yourself, which is more reasonable - a couple thousand dollars (or tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars) for an off-grid capable solar setup or a gas generator to account for the dozen or so days of inconvenience? Several cities in the north east suffered almost a month without power (in a much harsher season), and most of their solutions involved purchasing a small gas generator and moving on with their lives.
It's much more likely that the response will be political. PG&E out and install a better caretaker.
Depends where you live. In the northern US, you're absolutely dependent on heat requiring electricity for a number of months during the year. In the south, things get pretty bad, even life threatening, without AC during a number a year. I'll go out on a limb though and say that Northern California (except at higher elevations) does not fall into either of those categories.
Added: I do agree that many newer houses don't optimize well for making effective use of natural light, airflow, etc.
Massive public safety outages due to failure to safely maintain power infrastructure are, in fact, a new thing that started only after two years of massive fire liability close on the heels of a criminal conviction for a major gas explosion bankrupted the utility in question.
So it is 100% false to say that “PG&E was avoiding maintenance to pay out dividends.” If PG&E didn’t spend money on safety and maintenance, then the rates, and PG&E’s profit, would go down. Conversely, if PG&E wanted to spend the money on safety, that wouldn’t cut into profits. It would submit a rate case to the CPUC with that proposed spending. CPUC would authorize raising rates, and award PG&E a larger profit (in absolute terms) because PG&E was spending more.
If you want to blame the state for PG&E management decisions, you are essentially saying that PG&E’s shareholder ownership and its own management are irrelevant, in which case they are at best a superfluous expense that should be avoided by making PG&E’s functions the domain of a publicly-operated utility.
Well the second part hardly follows from the first part. PG&E provides private capital for investments the State may not be willing or able to provide. PG&E provides the expertise in building and maintaining a power grid, and manages the day to day operations. For that they get a reasonable margin of profit.
But the State sets prices, and decides what is a “prudent investment” that can be recovered from rate payers. As a result, it is the State that is responsible for the trade off between keeping retail rates low and investing in infrastructure upgrades such as enhanced fire safety. The State is also responsible for setting big picture policy goals, and has done so for example by imposing requirements with respect to purchasing renewable energy. (Which I think are a good thing by the way.) When the State is the one making those decisions, then yes, it should be held accountable.
As to publicly operated utilities—they have the same problem, because their rates are regulated by agencies like the CPUC. Underinvestment in utility infrastructure is a chronic investment around the country, and there seems to be no difference between public and investor owned utilities in that regard. The problem is utility boards.
It isn’t necessarily fair to single out California because many other public utilities are in a similar situation, California just has added significant natural disaster risks. Regulated utilities have been considered a safe investment for so long that many shareholders and probably management have been asleep at the wheel for years. The regulatory aspect means there isn’t much those parties can do without state/voter approval.
I’m hardly an expert in capital markets, so I’m not going to claim if PG&E did or didn’t pay dividends X would happen. I don’t know. What I do know is PG&E probably needed 3-4x the revenue they had, either by increased rates or borrowing which would lead to even greater rate increases eventually.
I would say in general this is a good thing. California’s residents are now extremely incentivized to move to home solar + battery storage. California may even hit their renewable energy goals ahead of schedule.
Welcome to the climate crisis.
The issues around PG&E were largely self-reinforcing (I'm either oversimplifying and/or just plain wrong, but this is my understanding from someone who's probably not authorized to speak on the matter):
* PG&E devised fairly minimal maintenance schedules because money.
* Regulators approved said minimal maintenance schedules because it minimized disruption to residents.
* Residents largely perpetuated this by sponsoring politicians and policies that enabled the lack of upkeep.
with the inevitable conclusion being egregious levels of maintenance debt enabling or even causing disasters on massive scales.
Where climate change probably contributed to this entire circle is the "on massive scales" part.
---
Disclosure: This is not my field. I'm parroting something I don't quite fully understand. Someone with more direct experience or exposure to the matter can probably clarify or correct me where needed, to include possibly all of this comment.
Fire records have been kept reliably since 1932. Of the 20 largest fires in state history, one dates to the 1930s. None have occurred in the 1940s, 50s, or 60s. Two occurred in the 1970s, 1 in the 1980s, and sixteen since 1999.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires
This is independent of structures or urban-rural interface. The measurement here is area burnt. And despite advances in detection and firefighting methods, the situation has been deteriorating rapidly. All of this is independent of PG&E.
That the utility's equipment has been directly responsible for multiple blaze ignitions is absolutely true. But this doesn't seem to me to be the biggest factor, and a focus on ignition rather than increasing latent fire risk seems to me absurdly myopic.
(The power curtailments themselves seem fairly prudent. Though horribly disruptive.)
Looking to wildfire incidence elsewhere might help give a clearer picture. I suspect, say, that total suppression policies haven't been widespread in Siberia.
The Australian wildfire experience, and fatal blazes in recent years in Portugal and Greece also come to mind.
Seems to me suppression has been a partial, but not complete, contributing factor.
I've made numerous trips through the areas, frequently noting either the previous fire scars visible when doing so, or hearing reports of major wildfires and being able to identify specific areas I've been through or stayed.
California has more people and houses. By percentage of affected housing, it's dwarfed by Montana (29%) and Idaho (26%), as opposed to 15% for California.
See: https://www.iii.org/article/background-on-wildfires
(Submitted to HN recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21400931)
The above is historic, modern housing needs to work with it. I'm not sure how you can do that in California.
https://www.shraboise.com/2017/09/91317-10-m-policy-u-s-fore...
Other factors are compounding this:
- Diseased forests. Largely beatle infestations and factors such as oak blight. These and similar affect much of the West.
- Monsoon/drought cycles. These both lead to more fuel (monsoon) and drier fuel (drought).
- Weather is a factor. Low humidities (in the past week, down into the teens) and high winds. Disruption of the Jet Stream may be exacerbating this.
- Climate: Shorter wet seasons, longer dry seasons, and more variable weather cycles (heavier rains, stronger winds, lower humidities) don't help.
- Human factors: encroachment on the wilderness interface, ignition sources, building codes, transport routes, etc., effect both frequency and impacts. Many fires are of natural origin, thought that's only about 15%. How much that percentage has changed since 1930 I don't know.
NB: general information and perceptions, though they should stand up.
LA Times lists several of these factors: https://www.latimes.com/local/wildfires/la-me-g-california-f...
This wildfire fighter veteran gives fuel and weather principally: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j5nde4/a-veteran-firefigh...
That's similar to a long conversation I'd had with a retired forestry worker in 2007. Chance encounter on a road trip, he talked about the idiocy of total suppression policy at the time. Unfortunately, not citable, though it was a very memorable discussion.
Ignition sources: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-29/how-do-w...
See: https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/uploadedFiles/CPUCWebsite/Content/Ab...
On the other hand, operational expenses are frowned upon because that effects the rate payer bill, which the rate payer advocate tends to lean on. Do the math.
[1] [https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/06/11/pge-wins-court-case-a...]
The governor, Gavin Newsom, does have principal residence at his wife's family's house in the North Bay, which lost power, but since becoming governor he's there less frequently.
So the issue is that the power outages and fires really haven't affected the wealthy or tech elite. There's a lot of California outside of those circles.
If you want your experience to be known, consider writing Gavin Newsom to tell him what you think about PG&E's failing infrastructure, or about what it's like to have a zombie hiding behind bankruptcy power your home: https://govapps.gov.ca.gov/gov40mail/
The point is that the vocal "tech elite," in particular those who live and/or work in SF City and County, had no outage and thus have no incentive to pressure positive change. Those affected the most have essentially no leverage against PG&E's negligence.
While I certainly respect your claim of personal liberty, the reality is that the State’s power infrastructure isn’t going to get any better without a major outside influence. The “tech elite” have the disposable time, income, and, well, technological knowledge to make that happen. (PG&E’s bankruptcy has also essentially stonewalled any sort of democratic effort). But the majority aren’t going to get up and do something unless it’s a conspicuous piece of the puzzle they’ve laid out before them. Especially not the new grads doing coke, making $300k per year, and spending two hours a day in a bus on the 101.
And this is always the problem! As soon as someone rich/techie gets burnt there'll be a social media outburst and something will happen. While it's just happening to the "little people" and money's still coming into the company coffers it's no big deal.
Forecasted and actual winds during this entire period, in Marin, did not exceed normal, seasonal winds and I don't believe the populated areas of Marin (San Rafael, Mill Valley, Ross Valley, etc.) get their transmission through the wildland.
I will be interested to learn the rationale for the Marin shutoff when I call my county supervisor and state reps, etc., next week.
While I don't support the outage or PG&E's analysis, their argument is likely that they had to shut down a few key sites in Central / Eastern CA, and thus they couldn't figure out how to power the Bay Area. "Stupid isn't illegal."
Props to contacting the State. This situation won't get any better if there's no pressure on them. Marin has independence with respect to water, perhaps they'll get power, too, somehow.
Between that and the favel... homeless camps, California is really looking foreign. Perhaps they can secede and join the BRICS club. /s