If you were one of an
estimated two million customers of Pacific Gas & Electric in northern
California this week, your power went off for a day or more. There was no malfunction of the power
grid. Instead, the utility deliberately
shut off power in large regions where high winds were predicted, in order to
avoid sparking forest wildfires of the kind that have killed over a hundred
people in recent years. During the
outage, the utility's website crashed, making it difficult or impossible for
people to find out if they lived in an area targeted for an outage. According to an article about the blackouts
in the Wall Street Journal, California Governor Gavin Newsome reacted
with "outrage," blaming the precautionary outages on PG&E's
"greed and mismanagement over the course of decades." PG&E CEO Bill Johnson said he might have
some disagreements with Gov. Newsome, but that he was not ruling out similar
outages in the future.
Reliable electric power is
one of the mainstays of modern civilization.
Because most utilities outside large cities rely on above-ground
transmission and distribution lines, their power grids are subject to what the
lawyers call acts of God: windstorms and
ice storms that down power lines, lightning and floods that damage and destroy
equipment, and other natural occurrences that disrupt the smooth delivery of
power. As long as these interruptions
are rare and end promptly, no one blames the utility for them. But the deliberate large-scale blackouts
PG&E imposed simply as a precautionary measure are something new.
The Journal article
points out that California now has a law making utilities liable for any damage
caused by fires that are ignited by their lines, even if the utility was not
negligent. This law contributed to over
$30 billion in potential liability costs associated with power-line-sparked
wildfires and was a big reason why PG&E went into bankruptcy proceedings at
the beginning of this year. I don't know
the history of that particular law, but it's consistent with a blame-the-powerful
attitude that also seemed to inspire Gov. Newsome's comments.
Blaming the powerful is one
thing, especially if they're guilty, but crippling a vital utility through
excessively punitive laws is another thing.
The parties to this conflict include PG&E's management, workers, and
investors, who mainly just want to do their job and/or get paid for it;
PG&E's customers, who want reliable electric power without having their
houses burn down; and the rest of California, which includes its government,
along with the accompanying laws and regulatory environment. Each group has interests that potentially
conflict with the others, and these blackouts highlight the areas of conflict.
I lived in California for
the four years of my undergraduate degree outside of Los Angeles in the 1970s,
and I vividly recall waking up one day to see a dark cloud of smoke covering
the entire northern half of the sky as a wildfire burned out of control in the
San Gabriel Mountains. Even back then, I
thought people built houses in crazy places in California, on the edges of
cliffs and so on, and it's only gotten worse since then. Fires that used to damage nothing but wildlife
(which is bad enough) now threaten whole communities, and so the need to
control them by whatever means necessary has grown in recent years.
Part of that control is
making sure that no tree can come anywhere close to a high-voltage transmission
line. PG&E has a tree-trimming
program, but they admit they are behind in their scheduled trimming operations,
and they also lack the ability to monitor winds at many specific locations so
as to restrict the power outages to where they are really needed. And even if they had such monitoring
abilities, their older equipment doesn't allow them to be very selective in the
power lines they de-energize—hence the massive blackouts covering a wide
area.
From here, the outages look
like a desperate move by a utility company that is hamstrung by regulations and
unfavorable laws. If PG&E was a
human being and not a large corporation, it would strike me as unfair to make him
liable for damage even if negligence could not be proved. If a driver is in a situation where he is
obeying all the traffic laws, and a child suddenly runs out from a hidden place
and gets hit, the driver generally does not get penalized if there was nothing
he could have done to avoid the accident.
But if you have an attitude
that large private corporations are infinite money pots from which lawyers and
their clients can extract indefinite amounts of money, sooner or later you run
up against reality. If PG&E doesn't
have enough money or staff or freedom from regulations to cut away all their
trees from their lines, and they risk the corporate equivalent of death if
their lines cause a fire, then the precautionary blackouts look like the least bad
alternative.
Civilization is a huge mesh
of cooperation: buyers cooperating with
sellers, consumers cooperating with producers, and government, one hopes, encouraging
the virtuous kind of cooperation that leads to prosperous and flourishing societies. But when groups begin to view other groups
mainly as enemies and attribute malign motives to them, you can end up with a
kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. The
maligned group or entity may think, "Well, these folks believe I'm a bad
hombre no matter what I do, so I might as well act like it."
The precautionary wind
blackouts are a sign that maybe PG&E has been pushed too far. We can hope that a spirit of conciliation can
prevail so that more trees can be trimmed, more customers served more reliably,
and fewer fires lead to tragedy in the future.
But right now, the prospects for that don't look too bright. Especially if you're power's out.
Sources: The Wall
Street Journal article "PG&E's Big Blackout is Only the Beginning"
appeared on Oct. 12, 2019 at https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-es-big-blackout-is-only-the-beginning-11570909816. I also referred to a New York Times
article at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/09/us/pge-shut-off-power-outage.html.
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