PG&E will shut off power for nearly 800,000 customers starting Wednesday

[Black Aeronaut]

I think we're getting away from the main point of this thread, which is that PG&E is chock full of utter assholes.

There was a software glitch in the recent shutdowns, too.  They told people to check the website for notification on when power would be shut down, then the website crashed.  For a long time.  The state government was forced to call in their own IT workers to get the website back up.  An hour after they left, it crashed again.  So no one knew when, or for how long, the outage would occur.

The second point in Southern California, we had some fires start too.  Edison shut off a few neighborhoods, no big deal, but were able to communicate clearly when, and for how long.  PG&E, well, they shut down whole counties at a time.  California only has 58 counties.  Why so unsubtle?  Well it turns out that they don't really have an electric grid, so much as a hub and spoke system.  SDG&E has the same problem in the late nineties when they were responsible for a fire, and started building redundant systems and burying their lines.

Anyone in the industry should have seen this coming.  It was obvious how to defend against wildfire conditions.  But what did PG&E do?  Nothing, because they're assholes.  Why spend on infrastructure now, when we can retire with more money in our pockets and leave it to the next generation to fix.  Instead, they banked on administrative capture and the government bailing them out, because they were too big to fail.  And when that didn't happen, there was nothing left to be done but inflict pain on the customers until they get the bailout they so obviously deserve.

This led to enough pain for the state to activate its emergency center at level 2, the same level as after the Ridgecrest quake.

Microgrids for redundancy is a really good idea, as it's also more efficient.  It would also be a good idea to connect across different U.S. grids at a few sites, something like Japan does at the frequency meridian, so that emergency power can be transferred.  But this latest thing is a man-made disaster from beginning to end.  And although we can blame climate change on all of us, the real monsters were PG&E all along, profiteering instead of investing in a stable utility for the future.  Supply-side economics only works when businesses invest in infrastructure, not just extract all the value out of the people for their own yachts.  Seriously, total assholes.

What really sucks is that once the polar icecaps do go away and the sea levels rise, it probably won't take PG&E out of the running.  Though SMUD will go bye-bye as the entire Central Valley becomes an inland sea by way of the California Delta.