W
hat kind of wildfire year will 2019 be?
There's no telling. We're watching the end of an unusually wet spring that, so far, has held down the number and size of fires statewide. But the weather is already heating up. The grasses, chaparral and forests that serve as fuel for our big fires will start drying out — fast.
That much is familiar. But there will be something different about the 2019 fire season, too, reflecting a campaign to try to limit the damage from blazes sparked by power lines. Statewide, fires caused by electrical facilities have killed more than 130 people and burned more than 20,000 homes over the past two years.
That campaign — enacted by the Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown last year and overseen by the California Public Utilities Commission — has resulted in a requirement for power providers to create plans detailing what measures they'll take to reduce the risk of more catastrophic fires this year. The CPUC signed off on the plans at a public meeting in San Francisco on Thursday.
First and foremost among the utilities submitting the newly mandated wildfire mitigation plans: PG&E.
The San Francisco-based company's equipment has been found responsible for starting the most devastating wildfire in California history — last November's Camp Fire in Butte County, which killed 85 people and destroyed nearly 14,000 homes. The potential legal liability for that blaze and others prompted the company to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January.
PG&E's wildfire plan — approved in a CPUC administrative law judge's decision in late April — is sweeping. It promises a vast effort to inspect and repair its network of power lines, poles and high-voltage transmission towers, remove thousands of hazardous trees and expand a network of weather stations to monitor fire conditions. PG&E's wildfire mitigation blueprint could cost as much as $2.3 billion by the company's latest estimate , a bill that customers could well wind up paying.
The plan also includes a dramatically expanded program of pre-emptive power shutoffs during periods of extreme fire danger — high winds, high temperatures and critically low humidity. The company says that in addition to turning off local distribution lines in such conditions, it will consider shutting down high-voltage transmission lines and that outages could affect large parts of its 70,000-square-mile service area.
Here are questions and answers about the new state-mandated wildfire mitigation plans and how they may affect utility customers this year.
1
Wildfire mitigation plans: What are they and how did they come about?
The plans are required under SB 901, a law sponsored by Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, largely in response to the devastating fires that swept Napa and Sonoma counties and other parts of Northern California in October 2017. The law's most frequently discussed and controversial provision was the creation of a system that would allow utilities to issue bonds to pay for wildfire expenses — including damages awarded in lawsuits — incurred in 2017 or after Jan. 1, 2019. Under the law, the utilities would be allowed to pass the cost of repaying the bonds on to customers.
But SB 901 also declared a need for each electric utility to run its business "in a manner that will minimize the risk of catastrophic wildfire posed by those electrical lines and equipment." To push PG&E and other utilities in that direction, the law requires each company to deliver an annual wildfire mitigation plan addressing 19 areas of operations, inspections, maintenance, planning and system improvements.
Among those areas: Plans for managing vegetation in areas adjacent to power lines; performing systemwide inspections and repairs where necessary; and updating equipment, for instance by replacing ordinary power lines with insulated lines less prone to sparking a fire if they come into contact with a tree branch.
2
What's in PG&E's plan?
PG&E's original plan details an accelerated program to remove dangerous trees; inspect power lines, power poles and transmission line towers in the state's highest-risk wildfire areas; install hundreds of new weather stations to improve the utility's assessment of conditions that could pose a wildfire threat; and launch an expanded "public safety power shutoff" program under which PG&E could shut down extensive parts of its power grid during times of extreme fire danger.
Some of the specifics of the plan, with initial estimated costs for each segment:
- An expanded vegetation management plan, in which the company says it will remove 375,000 potentially hazardous trees and clear brush and other potential fuels from 2,450 miles of power lines. The estimated cost: $338 million.
- Inspection and repair of 685,000 power poles and 50,000 transmission towers and other structures in areas subject to high fire threats. Estimated cost: $800 million to $1.3 billion.
- Installation of 150 miles of "tree wire" — essentially, insulated or covered power lines — in areas prone to high fire danger. The company says that's the beginning of a project to "harden" its power distribution system by installing 7,100 miles of covered line.
- Replacement of aging wooden distribution poles in high-fire-risk areas with poles made from fire-resistant composite materials such as fiberglass. Estimated cost of new lines and polls and related work: $240 million.
- Installation of 400 new weather stations and 70 back-country cameras to help improve fire-weather forecasting and early detection of blazes. Estimated cost: $13 million.
3
How will public safety power shutoffs work? How many people will be affected?
Preemptive power shutdowns are designed to reduce wildfire risk by halting the flow of current through electrical lines during times of forecast extreme fire danger. The shutdowns are a technique pioneered on a wide scale by San Diego Gas and Electric Co. after its power lines touched off 2007's Witch Fire, which killed two people and destroyed 1,100 homes.
With the CPUC's blessing, PG&E carried out its first public safety power shutoff during red-flag fire warnings last October — an event that affected about 60,000 customers in Napa, Sonoma, Lake, El Dorado, Placer, Amador and Calaveras counties. Power stayed off for more than two days in some areas as crews inspected weather-related damage to power lines and other equipment.
PG&E's power shutoff plan is fundamentally different this year.
It could affect much larger parts of its service area, which includes 16 million people, spread across 70,000 square miles of Northern and Central California.
Last year's power shutdowns targeted local distribution circuits — parts of the electrical grid that might serve anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand customers each. This year, PG&E says, it will consider shutting down transmission lines, which carry higher-voltage power from generating stations and serve much larger areas. As a result, PG&E says wildfire-related outages could affect any community in its service area — even if they're not in an area directly threatened by extreme fire danger. For example, the company said in its amended wildfire plan last month that even San Francisco faces the possibility of a blackout if "multiple East Bay transmission lines" were shut down preemptively due to extreme fire conditions.
