UPPER LAKE — Imminent public safety power shutoffs would be cancelled in the event of an active wildfire, said Pacific Gas & Electric Company representatives during a presentation at a town hall meeting in Upper Lake Tuesday.
“If there is an active fire anywhere near Lake County, there would be no public safety power shutoff,” said PG&E Public Affairs Representative for Sonoma and Lake Counties Herman Hernandez.
The PSPS program, Hernandez said, “is a practice that only applies to preventing fires from happening. If there were a live fire in Lake County during that 48-hour period…we wouldn’t shut the power off. We would cancel the PSPS and deal with the live fire.”
The 48-hour period to which Hernandez referred is PG&E’s target timeframe for notifying its customers prior to their power being shut off during a PSPS. The utility has said it will expand its PSPS program, which began in 2018, to include potentially all of its roughly 5.4 million electrical customers. Those shutoffs, Hernandez and others with PG&E have warned, could last for as long as five days and could see large swaths of customers without power at once.
“There’s nobody that’s safe from this,” Hernandez said Tuesday.
Public safety power shutoffs are a way for utilities like PG&E to reduce the risk of their electrical equipment starting wildfires. PG&E’s use of the shutoffs began after its infrastructure was found to be the cause of numerous destructive fires in California in recent years.
If a PSPS were canceled due to a fire breaking out nearby, Hernandez explained, some electrical lines might still be powered down, but the large-scale PSPS strategy would not be used.
“Only certain areas where they’re fighting the fire” would be shut down, Hernandez said.
Kelseyville-based PG&E troubleman Ken Stockton said power shutoff decisions during an active fire are usually a cooperative effort between the utility and Cal Fire.
During a wildfire “we’re working with Cal Fire,” Stockton said, describing the process. “And they’re giving us direction on which way the fire’s going and which way we’re shutting the power off.”
PG&E is also testing “resiliency zones,” a designation that would keep some areas within an actively shut down PSPS zone powered up during the shutoff, Hernandez said.
“Basically it will allow a small community or a small part of a city to stay in power and provide energy to their critical and essential facilities,” Hernandez explained.
Over the course of the meeting on Tuesday, Hernandez, Stockton and PG&E tribal liaison and Kashia Pomo Chairman Reno Franklin described the utility’s increased efforts following a court ruling this year to ramp up inspections and repairs of its infrastructure, and fielded questions from the roughly 40 members of the public in attendance.
With its Wildfire Safety Inspection Program complete, Hernandez stated, repairs are now being performed, with “urgent needs” being prioritized.
The company inspected roughly 750,000 power structures as part of the WSIP, covering more than 25,000 miles of distribution lines and roughly 6,000 miles of transmission lines. The utility has been installing new poles and making other repairs to the infrastructure problems it found during these inspections.
Lakeport resident Nancy Harby asked Hernandez whether the cost PG&E would incur over the years to do this kind of work would be comparable to the cost of putting its power lines underground—an option that has been raised as a potential solution to the wildfire risk posed by above-ground lines.
“I’m not sure what you’re doing is money well spent when really the answer is to put the lines underground,” Harby said.
Hernandez replied that he was not sure how the numbers compared.
PG&E estimates that it costs about $3 million “to convert underground electric distribution lines from overhead” for one mile of line.
In June, PG&E Vice President of Community Wildfire Safety Sumeet Singh said the utility had spent upwards of $2.3 billion on its wildfire safety inspections in 2019. To underground the same number of miles of distribution line—estimated at 25,000—would cost $75 billion based on PG&E’s per mile estimate.
PG&E operates a total of about 107,000 miles of electrical distribution lines. By the same metric, taking all those lines underground would cost more than $300 billion. Price-per-mile estimates vary widely, however—from roughly $1 million to as much as $5 million. Accordingly, a 2017 San Francisco Chronicle report predicted it would cost PG&E over $100 billion to underground its lines.
