Free Republic

SAN FRANCISCO—Californians are facing a potential second round of pre-emptive power outages, with the state’s largest utility working to prevent its equipment from sparking wildfires as hot, gusty winds are forecast later this week. PG&E Corp. said Monday it might cut electricity to parts of 16 counties in the Sierra Foothills and north of San Francisco. About 200,000 households and businesses were notified that they might lose power starting late Wednesday, the bankrupt utility said. At a press conference, PG&E Chief Executive Bill Johnson said shutting off power to hundreds of thousands of customers again might be necessary, given how...

PG&E Corp.’s chief executive said Friday that it could take as long as 10 years for the company to improve its electric system enough to significantly diminish the need to pull the plug on customers to reduce the risk of sparking fires. Bill Johnson, who joined the company in May, made the disclosure at a California Public Utilities Commission hearing where the panel’s president, Marybel Batjer, sharply criticized the company’s “inadequate execution” of a shut-off in which it turned off power to large portions of Northern California for more than two days last week. The commission convened an emergency meeting...

... California residents have come face-to-face with an uncomfortable new reality: Large swaths of the state—by itself the fifth-largest economy in the world, and home to the globe’s most technologically advanced companies—may be subject to the sort of abrupt blackouts normally associated with underdeveloped countries. The state’s three big investor-owned utilities now have regulatory permission to cut off power to parts of their service territories during strong winds to reduce the risk of their electric lines causing wildfires, after at least 21 blazes linked to utility equipment killed more than 100 people and burned tens of thousands of homes in...

... [PG&E] told its bankruptcy judge that eliminating trees and vegetation from around its power lines would cost up to $150 billion and require 650,000 employees. PG&E’s customers already pay twice the national average for electricity. An alternative plan would be to radically decentralize its system so power cutoffs could be more “surgical.” This would also be expensive and, in PG&E’s sprawling territory, would still mean widespread blackouts. More equitable solutions are easy to envision, if only they were politically acceptable. Utilities could be relieved of their blanket fire liability, transferring the risk to homeowners and insurance markets. Utilities could...