Plenty of people in both the public and private sectors had to look the other way for a long time to allow this to happen. How did California end up in this semi-apocalyptic situation? It is a confluence of several trends and pressures, some natural, some of human origin, all of which have been building steadily in the background. Soon the state’s electricity customers will be paying more for worse service. What’s worse, as blackouts increase, rates will increase alongside them, as utilities invest in long-delayed maintenance and safety measures. All of them have plans to address the growing danger of wildfires, and all of those plans involve recurring Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS). All of California’s utilities, in consultation with the CPUC, have decided that shutting power off to large swathes of customers is safer, all things considered, than leaving it on during high wildfire risk conditions. Large-scale, deliberate blackouts are a thing in California now And though their impact can be better mitigated and regulators and legislators are thundering at utilities to deal with them better, there is little prospect of eliminating them. Some areas of California could see 15 or more blackouts a year, lasting two to five days. PG&E Has Turned Off Power for Safety in Portions of 15 Counties in Sierra Foothills and North Bay /MsE8hhiuA6- PG&E October 24, 2019 On Wednesday and Thursday, PG&E and Southern California Edison were either shutting off power again or considering it: Indeed, blackouts like the ones in early October are likely to be a feature of life in the state for years to come. And above all, they don’t understand one of the most bonkers features of the whole situation: Everyone agrees it is going to happen again. If the rest of the country was vaguely aware that there were blackouts in California, what many don’t yet fully understand is how ugly it was and how pissed off people are. Until more data comes in, it won’t be possible to know how much the blackouts cost the state, but Stanford’s Michael Wara, an expert on electricity policy in California, estimates the total will come in somewhere between $1.8 billion and $2.6 billion. On top of everything else, PG&E’s website went down.Īs Elizaveta Malashenko of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) put it to the New York Times: “It’s pretty much safe in saying, this did not go well.” Food rotted in freezers, houses, and grocery stores. Highways, roads, and intersections went dark without notice and caused traffic accidents. People with powered medical equipment or refrigerated drugs scrambled to find care at understaffed community centers, and 1,370 public schools lost power 400 of them sent 135,000 students home to parents scrambling to cover jobs they had no way to get to. Nursing homes, emergency rooms, police stations, and fire stations scrambled for backup generators. Residents had little warning, in some cases less than 24 hours. There’s probably no pleasant way to do something like that, but still, PG&E did it very poorly. It was a planned, deliberate blackout unprecedented in the history of the nation’s electrical system. To avoid sparking wildfires during dry, windy weather conditions, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), the state’s largest utility, shut off electrical service to some 738,000 customer accounts, representing up to 2 million people. What California went through earlier this month was absolutely bonkers.
This post was first published on October 16 and updated on October 24.
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