Potential PG&E power cuts to leave thousands in the dark
- by Marsha Munoz
- in Industry
- — Nov 21, 2019
It was just last month that hundreds of thousands of customers went without power due to preventative outages by PG&E.
PG&E said on Sunday that it was monitoring a potentially strong offshore wind event on November 20, which suggests a possible prevention measure of Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) that will cut power supply for some customers in North Valley, North Bay and the Sierra Foothills, reports Xinhua news agency.
Pacific Gas & Electric has begun shutting off power to people in the San Francisco Bay Area and portions of California's northern coast amid warm and windy weather that can help fan wildfires.
Within the meantime, individuals in Northern California have been bracing for a lot extra outages.
The utility also pledged to compensate customers for food and medicine spoilage if their power was shut off with less than 12 hours notice.
Johnson told lawmakers that PG&E has spent $30 billion over the last 10 years improving its electrical network. Also it said that other factors besides weather like location of power lines, the structure of the grid, and the condition of the equipment in an area contribute to the decision.
"We do not anticipate an yearly repeat of what we went by way of this Oct", Johnson claimed.
A lot of questions and complaints were directed PG&E's way: either that the utility is turning off the power needlessly to prevent fire or that it should have known conditions were ripe for fires like the Camp Fire previous year. Sen. "That just can not happen again".
However lawmakers had been skeptical.
Thousands of customers across those three counties, plus parts of Butte, Sierra, Plumas and Yuba counties and the Guerneville area in Sonoma, were initially expected to lose power starting between about 7 a.m. and 8 a.m., PG&E said in earlier statements.
PG&E, California's largest investor-owned utility, filed for bankruptcy in January, citing $30 billion in civil liability from major fires sparked by its equipment in 2017 and 2018.
California regulators have ordered PG&E to say why it should not be sanctioned for violating state rules regarding such shutoffs. The enterprise has much more than 5 million patrons in Northern California.
Lawmakers have set a June 30 deadline for PG&E to emerge from bankruptcy or else forfeit participation in a fund created to help cover damages from future wildfires.
A federal personal bankruptcy choose has appointed a mediator to consider to solve the case. However Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has threatened to intervene if the enterprise simply cannot attain an settlement by June 30, akin to a potential situation takeover.
