“I hope, my dears, that this experience goes well for you and that you learn something,” I wrote to the Berkeley kids, my daughter and her young family, as the lights went out in her neighborhood. I was remembering lights out because of storms in mid-Missouri — the scramble to find candles, flashlights and extra blankets, the excitement of cooking on the grill in winter.
We were lucky — nobody had a medical condition that required, say, oxygen delivered by electric pump or medications requiring refrigeration. We just stayed put, maybe took a few walks, but our town didn’t have many stoplights or traffic signals that went on the blink.
And, yes, even now, for my kids in Berkeley, the blackout went well and they did learn something: They stockpiled batteries, charged flashlights and computers and filled the car with gas and the grill with propane. And then they waited for the lights to go out. And, as they waited, PG&E’s website went down.
Besides a bit of panic over being cut off from their major source of news about the utility, their neighborhood was fine. For the university campus, things went less well. Classes were cancelled and some science projects were ruined as temperatures rose or fell in the labs without generators or other ways to control their critical environments.
While there are conspiracy theories a-plenty about the PG&E blackouts, we don’t need to go there to find mysteries. Why, for example, has PG&E’s infrastructure gotten so bad that failing transmission lines can create fires? Answer: As a private company, PG&E’s management has had to create value for stockholders rather than safe service for consumers.
So, why is a private company in charge of gas and electricity for much of the state of California, for 16 million people “from Eureka to Bakersfield” as they say — a 70,000 square mile service area? Its public regulator, the California Utilities Commission, is basically helpless when it comes to controlling the stockholder-owned company. Why did citizens not, from the beginning, create a public utility?
The answer has to do with the history of the state. One of the oldest utility providers in the world, PG&E goes back to the Gold Rush, which brought a stream of explorers to the state, many of whom stayed. Government, then, was just a sketchy network of sheriffs with little central control or even the idea of a state. Nowadays, a few cities and towns are creating their own utility companies, but their scheme is generally to buy power from guess who? You got it: PG&E.
So, given that PG&E is a stockholder-owned company, why doesn’t it take the long view and bury cables underground? Wouldn’t that pay off in the long run, given the increasingly violent storms and droughts?
Well, we might think it would make sense, but the long view isn’t the view taken by corporate offices and the cost for burying lines is two to three times the cost of hanging them from poles. Ironically, the town of Paradise will be an exception as it rebuilds. That town was completely destroyed by the Camp Fire last summer, started by PG&E electrical transmission lines that sparked in two places, starting flames that caught in the dry timber after a drought. When it is re-built, the power lines will be buried.
Another question is: Why does PG&E think that rolling blackouts were the right call in October 2019? The utility commission says that utility companies can use blackouts as a preventive when vegetation is dried out, the humidity is low, and there are sustained winds of 25 mph and gusts of 45 or higher. At that time, the Weather Service issues a red-flag alert for wildfires and the utilities can issue their own warning to consumers.
The outages are targeted for problem areas where weather predictions seem most dangerous, and for places where the electricity has to pass to get to the problem areas. So, while targeted as precisely as possible, using knowledge of the grid and plenty of computer power, the decision is partly based on lucky guesses… translating between data from the weather service and maps of the grid.
The California experience may signal a new normal for the rest of the nation as weather becomes more and more violent. So, we need to learn as much as possible about how to cope. California is already leading the way by requiring solar panels on new construction. This might encourage folks to build completely off-grid buildings and to adapt old buildings for new technology. If creating self-contained units is too wasteful, smaller grids might provide an answer—neighborhood-sized systems rather than miles and miles of copper wire from a central location. Buried lines, of course, would help and the potential of electric cars with their own generators is, so far, barely explored.
So, if your neighborhood is next, my dears, I hope the experience goes well and you learn something!
Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. She also is a co-founder of CAFOZone.com, a website for people who are affected by concentrated animal feeding operations. Her latest book is “The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History.” Email: margotmcmillen@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2019
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