As tens of thousands of North State residents learned, being without electricity is more than an inconvenience. And as NSPR reports, sporadic, widespread outages will become just another facet of California’s lengthening fire season.
With its equipment linked to sparking deadly and catastrophic wildfires, PG&E started unplugging large parts of the state when conditions warranted.
The company says it will take an estimated eight to ten years to upgrade its transmission and distribution system until preventative outages are no longer necessary.
Jeff Dagle, Chief Electrical Engineer with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory said making PG&E’s electrical system less disaster-prone is mainly about preventing contact with vegetation.
“Generally, the steel towers and the conductors are just suspended from them are resilient to the normal wind loading and things like that, but you do need to make sure that the trees and the brush and whatnot are adequately cleared from the transmission line right of way.” Dagle said.
The other main task, Dagle said: more frequent replacement of wooden polls that lose strength over time.
“Under these extreme conditions where you have high wind and dry vegetation that it’s really a risk mitigation strategy.” he explained.
Dagle said transmission and distribution lines built in California and elsewhere are pretty much built to the same standards.
The other safety wrinkle? Small solar and wind systems feeding power back into the grid.
“It’s creating more complexity in the protection and control schemes.” Dagle said.
Later this morning in San Francisco, the state Public Utilities Commission is expected to launch an investigation into this year’s public safety power shutoffs.