Of course they can. A failure is an unplanned shutdown, and I doubt that leads to better outcomes than a planned shutdown. Also this thread demonstrates that PG&E replaced _other_ parts of the same tower.
> I'm of the opinion that humans should not be living in areas that burn regularly.
I'm of the opinion that climate change makes this a moving target, and this is simply one of the obvious repercussions.
> is it PG&E's fault that tons of people moved into this fire prone area?
No, it's their fault that even though they made $550 million in profits in 2018, and made other improvements to these towers, they still failed to keep them in proper repair. Also, it's not always "fire-prone." California experienced a bit of drought in 2018.
> and cities should have paid to make them safer
Shouldn't the company making $550 million in profits pay to make them safer?
PG&E would love to spend more money on maintenance. It doesn't cut into their profits, because their expenses and profits are set by state government commission anyway. Of course, the government commission has some incentive to keep the rate low, to make citizens happy, which makes it limit how much money PG&E can make and spend.
The above is not meant to imply that if PG&E worked like any normal company, they'd maintain their shit better -- I have no idea if they would. However, in the current regime, where CPUC exercises so much control over what PG&E does and how much money it makes and spends, the blame cannot be solely placed on PG&E side.
At some point companies need to take responsibility and be held accountable for their (in)actions. I know this is an unpopular opinion for HN, given its venture funding roots, but companies shouldn’t be given a free pass every time they screw up due to placing greed above all else.
My point here is not to argue that with less regulation, PG&E would do better job when it comes to maintenance — I don’t know if it would. However, considering how deeply regulated it actually is, and how much the regulator controls everything it does, some blame must also be placed on the regulator’s side.
...and did they ask? It's their job to ask. You can't blame the oversight organization's interference if it didn't interfere.
Yeah, their series of felony convictions for violating the law regarding maintenance, and obstructing investigations into those failures, tells a very different story.
From the linked CPUC Decision Making in the above comment, there are multiple examples where PG&E have advocated for increased spending for safety purposes, but organisations such as the Division of Ratepayer Advocates and The Utility Reform Network were pushing back. Ultimately, however, it is the CPUC that weighs the arguments of the different parties and determines allowable spending.
As clarification, your statement makes it sound like CPUC makes unilateral decisions about what PG&E can or cannot do when, in fact, CPUC makes those decisions based on requests made by PG&E. While CPUC does have a certain level of decision making power, a lot of their decisions are made based on what PG&E says is the right/necessary thing to do.
Who makes decisions at the CPUC? It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is circular logic.
I'm not an infrastructure professional, I'm in automation and manufacturing, but all too often I come across equipment that must never be shut down and must be functional 100% of the time, but which has been run long past its service life. Windows 98 or XP computers on their 9th resurrection due to parts from eBay, castings full of helicoils, electrical cabinets with wires strung across like cobwebs... If the business was successful before the machine was built, downtime now costs tens of thousands of dollars per hour, and the whole machine cost 500,000 dollars 100,000 hours ago, maybe someone should start thinking about building a replacement (or, better, a pair of replacements) and phasing this one out?
I know the front office likes to write off machine depreciation as a tax deduction. With a 10 year useful life on a $500k machine, you get $50k in tax deductions. In the 11th year, you get no tax deduction, but the machine is still making money.
I feel strongly that there ought to be some kind of financial penalty for operating a machine that's depreciated beyond its claimed useful life - not a direct tax penalty, but some kind of non-cash-expense liability that subtracts from the big positive number on the front page of the quarterly financials which the CEO uses to claim they deserve a bonus.
PG&E's more regulated than just painting them as a for-profit business with $550M in the black would suggest. They have maintenance and capital expenditures that they need to make. But those regulated books didn't show the single-point-of-failure risks and long-past-useful-life liabilities, and they should!
A pedantically accurate retort, but ignores the real point.
Shutting down these lines for "inspection" is not feasible. These lines are the backbone of a grid that millions of people and services rely on 24/7/365, and there is zero redundancy. They are responsible for delivering power to hospitals, traffic lights, schools, airports, grocery stores, homes, businesses, and the list goes on.
Telling people "We need to turn off your power for a couple days every couple months for inspections" is going to create a lot of backlash, no matter how good the reason.
Also, the lines in question aren't like closing a two lane road in a small neighborhood for a couple hours where a few annoyed people can take alternate routes. It's more like shutting down all the freeways in a major city for a day just so that the DOT can finally get some street sweeping done. Good luck not starting a riot.
The problem is, these systems are old, too many people rely on them, and there is no redundancy.
If we want to take a step towards fixing the problem, the best start is to create redundancy for power supply to consumers, imo. Preferably more localized power generation via wind/solar/etc with some localized power storage.
Also, their profit margin for one year is not a fair argument towards them being at fault. Economics of public companies are about a lot more than "We made extra money, so we should have just spent it on making our product better". If shareholders don't make money in a company, they pull their investments. You pull enough investments in PG&E, that means they have to cut costs. Meaning, less money for inspections and improvements to the grid.
Economics at scale is not a black-and-white, napkin math, solvable problem.
They were happy to tell people "We need to turn off your power for a couple of days because of wind." Granted, in this particular case, they weren't talking about the 115kV line that ultimately caused the fire.
To me, this just further highlights their "run it till it breaks" philosophy. This becomes a little more obvious when you read their plans for fixing this mess, and it involves a dual-circuit transmissions system. So, you can literally shut half of it down without completely stopping power.
It's also not impossible to serve one neighborhood with two power lines, in fact it's quite common.
> Also, the lines in question aren't like closing a two lane road in a small neighborhood
It is a single 115kV line. That's exactly like what it is. For the rest of the state your analogy falls apart because there is a significant amount of redundancy and additional capacity that can be used to route power. For example, lookup "Path 46" and the "Pacific DC Intertie." Which is interesting in it's own right because it can be run in two different modes, one for nearly double the power capacity in certain conditions.
> The problem is, these systems are old, too many people rely on them, and there is no redundancy.
The California regulator has been asleep at the switch here, and they do share some culpability, but again.. it's not impossible to design around this constraint. You're going to pay twice as much for aluminum and nearly twice as much for everything else, but it's not impossible to solve. Just no one wanted to and no one was going to make them.
> Also, their profit margin for one year is not a fair argument towards them being at fault.
They are a state granted monopoly. I think it's entirely fair.
> Economics at scale is not a black-and-white, napkin math, solvable problem.
Sure, but you can start on the napkin and see if you're even in the ballpark. I think if you put even $100 million down on a napkin, you'd be surprised at what can fit in your ballpark.
Maybe not every couple of mounts, but they could probably get away with doing them more frequently than a century... Also, you can do visual inspection even without having to shut down power.
No, stronger than that. The problems with these lines were noticed without shutting them down, at least by someone, but it didn't get acted on.
We don't even know if replacing these parts would have required shutdowns, but it would have been easy to justify shutdowns for such visible problems.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Wilson Wilson was the driving force behind the 1996 legislation that deregulated the state's energy market, which was the first energy utilities deregulation in the U.S. and aggressively pushed by companies such as Enron.[28]
The proof is in the thread. Barely 10 years ago, PG&E pleaded guilty to another felony, when its under-maintained gas pipeline in San Bruno exploded, killed 8 people, and leveled a neighborhood. That utility has a cultural problem going to the very top that prioritizes profit over safety, and I sincerely hope it emerges from bankruptcy reformed.
There is something seriously wrong with PGE and it's attitude towards it's infrastructure and public safety.
The state next to Victoria does, and did recently.
https://www.sapowernetworks.com.au/data/304387/catastrophic-...
(This is from memory, so if I got any specifics wrong, see replies for corrections.)
yes, they can.
>I doubt anyone was living near the lines when they were built 100 years ago.
Paradise, CA was on a railroad map ca 1900:
Along similar lines of thinking, humans should not be living in areas that flood regularly, or that have earthquakes regularly, or that have hurricanes regularly, or that have tornadoes regularly, or that have insufficient water, or that have excessive heat or cold regularly, or that have high rates of animal-transmitted disease.
This doesn't leave many places for people to live.
Yes an asteroid could hit anywhere but the notion that suburban sprawl out into every corner of the wilderness is justified by that is ludicrous.
But there’s got to be a higher resolution one out there.
But people like living near the oceans, mountains, and where weather is nice. That should be okay, but the government shouldn't be throwing money at them. Let them know the area is dangerous, and if they want to live there, they're on their own.
I get miffed when we bail these people out with federal funds for disaster relief. They should be required to have private insurance, with insurance free to set rates based on risk. If it's too expensive to get insured, don't live there
Replacing them every 30 years won't bancrupt anyone.
However unlike PG&E we take high resolution photographs of every major component on a transmission tower, and manually inspect and classify every image take. Images of this type would have identified this fault, at least once during inspections taken during the last couple of decades.
Source: Worked for a company that did these inspections.
Regulations should require sufficient redundancy for scheduled outages on individual lines for regularly scheduled service during non-critical times.
Communities should not be allowed to form, and should be actively wound down if they are within dangerous areas with seasonal problems. Fires, Floods, Extreme doubts, unsustainable water table use, etc. This should _begin_ at a federal level with a re-location act, and should involve planning and support at every stage of government to proceed in an orderly way for society.
Edit: Also, of course, the company is still at fault, I forgot to point that out while going over other aspects of the systemic failure of society (people and organizations of people) as a whole.
But when we abandon most of the West (earthquake, fire, drought), midwest (flooding, tornados, east and particularly gulf coast (hurricanes), there's a whole lot of economic output lost from working land (farming, mineral extraction, etc.) that won't be replaceable when you crowd the remaining population into whatever safe bubble you have left.
The reason people live in dangerous areas is because they are often inherently economically productive, and in fact many of the things that make land suitable to human habitation are associated with periodic risk (freshwater supply and flood risk tend to go together, for instance.)
PGE demonstrates neglectful behaviours towards all of its infrastructure. It has transmission lines everywhere and has the same general attitude to maintenance and safety. Ask the people of San Mateo how safe they feel with PGEs gas lines. There are serious long term problems inside PGE and it's doubtful they are going to change.
PGE presents a serious risk to Californians everywhere.
Is the local government dissolved, so the county or state pays for this?
Any info is appreciated, I am very curious of how this works in practice.
Instead, the approach is they will simply shut off the power during these high risk days.
Interesting that they actually warned that they could shut off power in the days leading up to the fire, but never actually did. To me, those are the meetings to zero in on when it comes time to lay the blame. I wonder, what was the calculus to cutting power (which itself can have health & safety impacts to the populace) and how much of it was political?
PG&E has 100,000 miles of transmission lines, so perhaps about a million of these towers. To put that in perspective, historically they spend billions of dollars a year on maintenance and upgrade on the order of 100-200 miles of transmission lines per year.
You don't need to physically inspect every item to be safe, here. You rely on precaution, standard shelf life, and operational procedures.
If that's difficult, so be it. That's the price people pay for choosing to live in the sticks. This should all be accounted for.
You think that hospitals inspect every item every 3 months? Hell no. A lot of things have lifecycles and it's just replaced because that's the tolerance, and it's safer in the long run. PG&E should be the same.
PGE took this information and did nothing.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EiErOkaUMAA178t?format=png&name=...
This is not how you maintain critical infrastructure. This is embracing failure and simply not caring about the consequences.
I’m not sure a single person at any one time has ever knowingly caused this much damage through negligence. I mean ever in human history. Failures this large due to negligence tend to be systemic. But it would be a very interesting to hear an example.
The closest I can think of could be some of the famous bridge design failures, where people died, and people did go to jail, but not forever.
Because ensuring safety of the lines during very high risk days is impossible, a big part of the strategy was to add local generation redundancy so that they can switch off the transmission lines during high risk events but still keep the power on. These redundant stations would have to be natural-gas plants though, and CA has carbon-free mandates that prohibit them, so they have been prevented from implementing this strategy.
Frankly, it’s not clear that demand for this unreliable grid electricity can support the growth of the ratebase (the property being maintained).
At some point the ROI on switching to solar and batteries is net positive in the first month (based on financing the cost at a reasonable rate), and I’m not sure that point is much higher than $0.50/kWh for a household using 600kWh+ per month.
The more people that just opt-out of a grid connection entirely, the fewer people the ratebase is divided across, the higher rates must be set for those that remain.
Luckily the lithium-ion supply is fairly limited right now, but over the next 10-20 years that won’t remain the case.
PG&E currently has about $40 billion of debt, and recently issued $5 billion of debt at a B1 rating (junk). These issues also drive up their borrowing costs, which further shows up in the rates.
This is a good overview of the challenges they face;
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/four-hurdles-pg...
I predict that in 10-15 years we could hear calls to outlaw or prohibitively tax any new battery/solar systems that take new houses in CA off-grid, because the grid will be in “solar death spiral”.
What makes it bad is how fire-prone California is. I'm of the opinion that humans should not be living in areas that burn regularly. And in PG&E's defense I doubt anyone was living near the lines when they were built 100 years ago.
If forest fire was an acceptable outcome of line failure 100 years ago when the lines were built, is it PG&E's fault that tons of people moved into this fire prone area? In my mind the cities nearby should have paid them to make the lines safer. To me this is like the people that move near a concert hall then complain that it's loud. Or move to a floodplain and complain when it floods...
It seems like it's been known that these lines were a fire risk for a very long time, and cities should have paid to make them safer before zoning so much land for residential. I assume, but cannot prove, that PG&E probably enumerated the risks when the land was sold or rezoned but their concerns were ignored. Having done a study on the wear of the hooks themselves, it seems unlikely they would not have notified communities nearby of the risk. My prediction is that they start to point fingers at the government, but people continue to sue the power company because sueing the government is hard.