PG&E’s cunning wildfire plan – shut down the Grid
Power company PG&E has long been known as a company that puts its shareholders interests ahead of its customers – shady billing practices, low quality maintenance are just a couple of the company’s bad practices.
Now it has gone a step further with a plan to punish its 15 million Californian customers in the event of wildfires this summer.
When high winds arise this year, the utility says it will black out fire-prone areas that are home to 5.4 million people.
That’s right – instead of working 24/7 to prevent its power lines from sparking the kinds of wildfires that have killed scores of Californians. it plans to pull the plug on a giant swath of the state’s population.
No U.S. utility has ever blacked out so many people on purpose. PG&E says it could knock out power to as much as an eighth of the state’s population for as long as five days when dangerously high winds arise. Communities likely to get shut off worry PG&E will put people in danger, especially the sick and elderly, and cause financial losses with slim hope of compensation.
In October, in a test run of sorts, PG&E for the first time cut power to several small communities over wildfire concerns, including the small Napa Valley town of Calistoga, for about two days. Emergency officials raced door-to-door to check on elderly residents, some of whom relied on electric medical devices. Grocers dumped spoiling inventory. Hotels lost business.
PG&E is “essentially shifting all of the burden, all of the losses onto everyone else,” said Dylan Feik, who was Calistoga city manager until earlier this month.
By shutting off power in fire-prone parts of its service area, which are home to 5.4 million people, PG&E said in regulatory filings it hopes to prevent more deadly wildfires. The San Francisco-based company sought bankruptcy protection in January, citing more than $30 billion in potential damages from fires linked to its equipment.
This plan amounts to an admission by PG&E that it can’t always fulfill its basic job of delivering electricity both safely and reliably. Years of drought and a drying climate have turned the state’s northern forests into a tinderbox, and the utility has failed to make needed investments to make its grid sturdier.
During this year’s wildfire season, which typically starts around June, PG&E is preparing to make cutoffs to a far larger geographic region than it has targeted for blackouts in the past, increasing the number of potentially affected customers nearly 10-fold. While it is unlikely all areas would be affected at once, the outages may turn entire counties dark.
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