By Christen Smith

California officials hammered Pacific Gas and Electric executives on Monday over the utility’s mishandling of multiple public safety power shutoffs (PSPS) that left nearly 2.4 million residents in the dark last month.

PG&E, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric all implemented PSPS events in October after the National Weather Service issued multiple red flag alerts that predicted dry, windy conditions at the height of the state’s wildfire season.

It was PG&E’s dereliction of long-established protocols for public notification and emergency preparedness, however, that set the investor-owned utility apart from the rest, officials told the Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee during a six-hour hearing Monday.

“This was a world-class emergency response from the state of California,” California Public Utilities Commission President Marybel Batjer said. “I was also provided with insight into how a tool like PSPS intended to protect people and communities from harm can, when implemented haphazardly, generate the opposite effect.”

PG&E Response

California’s IOUs began using PSPS as a wildfire mitigation tool only within the last decade after damaged transmission lines sparked some of the deadliest blazes in state history, including last year’s Camp Fire that killed 85 people and leveled the town of Paradise.

Some officials, however, worry that utilities lean too much on the controversial practice to shield their companies from liability over faulty and neglected equipment. IOU shutoffs have nearly tripled since 2017, with 14 called so far this year.

PG&E CEO Bill Johnson rejected that perception and said the utility has spent $30 billion over the last decade upgrading its transmission system. He blamed some of the company’s reliance on PSPS on the growth of high-risk fire areas within its 75,000-square-mile service territory — up from 15% in 2012 to more than 50% in 2019 — and predicted that the utility will continue the practice for another 10 years while it completes system-hardening initiatives.

“Let me emphasize the basic fact that should be obvious … we don’t actually want to turn anybody’s power off,” he said. “We recognize that living without power is more than just an inconvenience. For many, it’s a hardship. None of us want to live in that world, but we are doing this to prevent the spread of deadly catastrophic fires we’ve experienced in the last few years.”

But officials said PG&E seemed ill-prepared to manage the strategic shutoffs, despite months of preparation in coordination with state agencies.

Mark Ghilarducci, director of the governor’s Office of Emergency Services, said despite his office’s outreach to PG&E, the utility’s response during last month’s events lacked consistency and generated widespread confusion. He said PG&E didn’t provide detailed and timely notification of planned outages to its affected customers and couldn’t offer enough support via backup generators to critical medical baseline ratepayers or oversee other essential infrastructure during the three dayslong shutoffs that occurred on Oct. 9, 26 and 29.

“This was quite frustrating to us, particularly when we started to roll into these bigger problems, which we anticipated in those meetings that we talked about and wanted to address then,” he said.

Some of those bigger problems included widespread communications outages that prevented customers from contacting emergency services or accessing updates about the shutoffs. Residents in Mendocino and Marin counties lost complete access — via landlines, cell phones or internet — after 1,600 cell sites failed.

Ghilarducci said the issues suggest that privately owned and managed telecommunications companies lack appropriate battery backups for extended power outages. Regulatory hurdles thwarted attempts to ship diesel generators from other states, further slowing the restoration process, he said.

“Given the utility’s sole notification strategy for the public was to drive customers to a website that they couldn’t get on because they couldn’t get through the wireline system, it was a very frustrating loop of cascading failures that really created a major threat to life and safety,” he said. “We have seen this scenario over and over now following one disaster after another.”

Approximately 750,000 of PG&E customers de-energized during the Oct. 26 event went without power for a week or more, Ghilarducci said, because of the overlapping shutoffs implemented before the utility could clear the lines for restoration.

“The details here matter,” he said. “A detail about how you’re going to put a community resource center in place and what’s going to be there and how long it’s going to be open and what kind of demographics are going to be served there … those details matter. You can’t hit that with a 30,000-foot overview and then expect to have the ability to respond.”

Indeed, the state’s Government Operations Agency scrambled during the PSPS events called Oct. 26 and 29 to get PG&E’s website running again after it crashed following an uptick in traffic — an issue acting Secretary Julie Lee said the state warned the utility about in advance. Other officials said the number and availability of PG&E’s resource centers — where de-energized customers sought water, ice, blankets and power generation — fell short of best practices.

“These are fairly easy things that you think about ahead of time and you do well ahead of time and not at the moment of crisis,” Batjer said. “That was well pointed out to PG&E’s [officials], and they admitted it.”

Johnson painted a different picture of PG&E’s preparations, noting that the utility completed 18 months’ worth of line inspections within four months, trimmed 7 million trees and cleared vegetation — including 500,000 dead trees — from its lines. Although he admitted removing brush and debris does nothing to protect transmission lines against high winds, he said it’s a good start.

“Turning off power for safety is an effective tool and really only one of the many tools we are using,” he said. “We will get better at using it.”

Sumeet Singh, vice president of asset and risk management for PG&E’s Community Wildfire Safety Program, told the committee that the utility is indeed getting better at managing PSPS events. During the Oct. 26 shutoff, PG&E restored service to 970,000 customer accounts within 12 hours — a far cry from the 51 hours spent resupplying 60,000 customers during a shutoff last year.

He also said the grid’s design with long radial lines traversing high fire-risk areas presents challenges not faced in other service territories with higher customer densities. The structure means PG&E is focused on de-energizing lines with surgical precision and restoring power quickly to prevent more widespread impacts.

Still, officials insisted the utility should have done more.

“While PG&E spent significant resources warning the public about the risks of the power shutoff events and what the public should do to prepare for an event, it is not clear that PG&E spent the time it should have to make sure the utility was prepared,” Batjer said.

The SDG&E Model

Power shutoffs in SDG&E’s service territory carried far less impacts last month compared to outages in IOUs to the north thanks to years of planning and investment, COO Caroline Winn told the committee.

“I think what’s needed in California is to think beyond ourselves,” she said. “PSPS is the right solution for now, but what’s next? I’ve set that as an aspirational goal for our organization … how do we eliminate it? [At] SDG&E, that is our North Star.”

Winn said a devastating rash of wildfires in 2007 that “hit home” for the utility’s staff resulted in a cultural shift from reliability to public safety.

“Having gone through those experiences and saw those changes happen before my eyes, those were the fires that really changed the DNA of our company,” she said. “Back at that time, there was really no proscriptive plan of how we should engineer our system to protect our infrastructure from the increasing threat of violent wildfires.”

So, piece by piece, Winn said, SDG&E hardened its infrastructure: replacing bare wire and wooden poles with covered conductor and steel poles; hiring scientists and meteorologists to improve fire-risk forecasting; installing sectionalizing switches and weather stations on lines to monitor conditions; bolstering patrols of de-energized lines to ensure damage is mitigated before restoring power; and investing in falling conductor technology that will prevent broken wires from igniting.

“We have been very thoughtful about installing sectionalizing switches, which only limits shut offs to the most endangered communities,” Winn said.

The utility also turned community engagement into a year-round event, she said, noting that SDG&E hosts open houses and town halls to share information about how to prepare for a power outage. TV stations start broadcasting PSPS notices during red flag warnings, while the utility itself notifies customers at 48, 24, and one to four hours before a shutoff.

“Our goal is that no customer is surprised,” Winn said. “We want our customers to be able to plan around this.”

So, when Santa Anna winds triggered four red flag warning in SDG&E’s territory last month, the utility managed to de-energize just 25,000 customers, with outages resolved in less than 24 hours. Winn clarified that winds topped 80 mph in some areas, but no “major” fires tore through the territory either. For comparison, PG&E territory saw wind speeds exceed 100 mph.

Winn said the company’s PSPS wasn’t perfect: The event underscored the need for more backup generators and stronger coordination with nonprofit partners to speed up response time in vulnerable communities.

Ana Matosantos, California’s cabinet secretary and energy czar, said the utility’s actions — despite operating within the same regulatory scheme as PG&E — produced better outcomes for its customers.

“San Diego has made great strides in a much narrower way, for a much shorter period of time, impacting far fewer communities,” she said. “When you look at all three utilities, the use of PSPS in terms of size of event, the duration, the back-to-back outages, it’s a different story from all three.”

Southern California Edison

Like its IOU counterparts, Southern California Edison said its PSPS events only cut off power to a tiny fraction of its service area — less than 2% of its 5 million customers.

Phil Herrington, SCE’s vice president of transmission and distribution, said the utility develops its own fire-risk forecasts and uses high-definition cameras to monitor line conditions. Field workers will also install some 6,000 miles of covered conductor by 2023, three years ahead of schedule.

“We used granular real-time weather [information] to de-energize sections rather than entire lengths [of transmission line],” he said. “The ability to use the weather to make de-energization decisions and having the technology to do so, it serves a vital purpose.”

Both SCE and SDG&E said they deployed these more cost-effective mitigation tools to prioritize “undergrounding” where it’s most effective. The technique, which trenches electricity infrastructure below ground, costs approximately $3 million per mile — a pricey solution that IOUs say takes longer to build — and to troubleshoot during outages.

“It’s over eight times more expensive than covered conductor,” Herrington said. “There will be areas that are so consequential in the event of a wildfire that undergrounding is the best option and we will deploy it when necessary.”

Officials pushed Herrington on the utility’s responsiveness to cell tower outages during the shutoffs and pointed out that its process for registering medical baseline customers leaves out residents who aren’t account holders. He said the company offers zip code-based PSPS alerts to residents’ cell phones as a backstop — though such messages failed in some parts of the utility’s territory last month because of the outages.

“We do look at lines and if they have telecommunications; that is one of the many factors we consider in the restoration sequence,” he said. “PSPSes are just one of the many ways customers could lose power, so that is why we are encouraging customers to register as medical baseline customers. It could be an earthquake, it could be a major storm, where there won’t be warning.”

It’s not enough for Ghilarducci, who said bolstering cell sites will help assure a resilient system — something utilities have a stake in too.

“That means cell sites need to be hardened with battery or fuel backup beyond four hours to know they will sustain for multiple days,” he said. “Protecting the backline from fires or earthquake damage. It’s a simple request that we are asking and it’s a priority on the part of the utilities to do that.”

CPUC Action

Batjer said PG&E’s response provided a “sharper understanding” of how “one entity’s decisions can result in broad societal costs,” admitting that it’s her agency’s responsibility to prevent it from happening again.

“Although the utilities are ultimately responsible for managing their electric systems, the CPUC cannot and should not stop demanding better ways to reduce the scope and impacts of power shutoffs without compromising public safety,” she said. “This cannot and should not be repeated.”

The CPUC launched an investigation into PG&E’s shutoffs last week to determine if the utility followed state law. (See Calif. PUC Orders Investigation of Power Shutoffs.) Batjer also issued a show-cause order and said a preconference hearing scheduled for Dec. 4 will give the utility a chance to convince the commission why it shouldn’t be sanctioned for its actions, though she doesn’t expect much in the way of changed behavior.

The commission will also work with utilities to expand their wildfire mitigation plans and create a Safety Policy Division dedicated to the enforcement of public safety during emergency events. It’s a conversation that must include telecommunications companies too, Batjer concluded.

“Despite the importance of the regulatory processes and actions we have put in motion, they are meaningless to the public unless they translate into real-world demonstrations that utilities are truly taking actions that prioritize the safety of the public,” she said.

State officials also won’t give PG&E another decade to harden its grid and discontinue power shutoffs. Matosantos said the state’s timeline “has been very clear.”

“We cannot have another year like this year,” she said. “We have to be looking at our goals and progress in a matter of days, weeks and months and what has to happen at every point in time before next fire season.”