Pacific Gas & Electric filed its state-mandated 2021 wildfire safety plan in February. The extensive plan proposes to clear vegetation, inspect power lines, install sensors and cameras, and otherwise invest in efforts to prevent a recurrence of the deadly wildfires that pushed the Northern California utility into bankruptcy.

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But perhaps the most controversial part of PG&E’s plan is to dramatically expand the scope of planned grid outages, which are intended to preempt the risk of its grid sparking more deadly wildfires this summer, and the disruptions and dangers those blackouts could cause.

Why Power Outages Will Be Common Across Northern California Again in 2021

In PG&E’s extensive  2021 wildfire mitigation plan they confirm what we’ve all been noticing — that “The last few years have demonstrated how California’s wildfire season continues to grow longer and more devastating.”

PGE wants to use PSPS events as a last resort, but recognize it is still an important tool. With many lessons learned from 2020, they are focusing on 3 key strategies:

1) Reducing wildfire potential by inspecting and repairing equipment, conducting enhanced vegetation management, and investing in grid technology and system hardening;

2) Improving situational awareness by installing weather stations and high-definition cameras throughout PG&E’s service area, investing in PG&E’s Wildfire Safety Operations Center that monitors high-fire threat areas in real time, and investing in meteorology to monitor weather conditions; and

3) Continuing to make the PSPS program better and build on the improvements from the 2020 program by upgrading the electric system to ensure PSPS is a last resort and improving support for impacted customers and communities when PSPS is necessary.

PG&E didn’t specify how many customers could go without power this summer under the expanded “public safety power shutoff” (PSPS) authority  it received from the California Public Utilities Commission. But in its filing, the utility warned that while it is planning them only as a “last resort,” it will be “alerting 5.4 million PG&E electric customer premises,” or its entire customer base, that they might be facing power outages due to public safety power shutoffs this summer.

To mitigate these effects, the utility has laid out a raft of proposals in addition to the ones above; from building “resilience zones” — community centers or critical facilities in high-risk areas that can be equipped with grid interconnection hubs to support fast deployment of backup generators – to working with non-utility partners to install or utilize on-site generation or distributed energy resources for continuous power during safety outages and exploring the potential for true microgrid systems that are more targeted in scale.  [ read more ]