Of course they can. A failure is an unplanned shutdown, and I doubt that leads to better outcomes than a planned shutdown. Also this thread demonstrates that PG&E replaced _other_ parts of the same tower.
> I'm of the opinion that humans should not be living in areas that burn regularly.
I'm of the opinion that climate change makes this a moving target, and this is simply one of the obvious repercussions.
> is it PG&E's fault that tons of people moved into this fire prone area?
No, it's their fault that even though they made $550 million in profits in 2018, and made other improvements to these towers, they still failed to keep them in proper repair. Also, it's not always "fire-prone." California experienced a bit of drought in 2018.
> and cities should have paid to make them safer
Shouldn't the company making $550 million in profits pay to make them safer?
If California doesn't like PG&E making $550M profit, and would like PG&E spend more on maintenance, it should set lower profit target, and allow PG&E spend more money on maintenance. PG&E operates based on decisions of California Public Utilities Commission, which decides, among other things, how much money PG&E is allowed to make, and how much it is allowed to spend on maintenance. Here's what it looks like: https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M102/K...
PG&E would love to spend more money on maintenance. It doesn't cut into their profits, because their expenses and profits are set by state government commission anyway. Of course, the government commission has some incentive to keep the rate low, to make citizens happy, which makes it limit how much money PG&E can make and spend.
The above is not meant to imply that if PG&E worked like any normal company, they'd maintain their shit better -- I have no idea if they would. However, in the current regime, where CPUC exercises so much control over what PG&E does and how much money it makes and spends, the blame cannot be solely placed on PG&E side.
Why is it people will argue that there should be fewer regulations to allow companies more freedom to operate but when those companies, unsurprisingly, put money ahead of safety, it’s then the government’s fault for not regulating those companies?
At some point companies need to take responsibility and be held accountable for their (in)actions. I know this is an unpopular opinion for HN, given its venture funding roots, but companies shouldn’t be given a free pass every time they screw up due to placing greed above all else.
I don’t think you understood my comment. PG&E is as regulated as you can possibly get without literally being part of government. When PG&E wants to spend $100M on maintenance, it has to ask government for permission, and CPUC needs to approve this expense.
My point here is not to argue that with less regulation, PG&E would do better job when it comes to maintenance — I don’t know if it would. However, considering how deeply regulated it actually is, and how much the regulator controls everything it does, some blame must also be placed on the regulator’s side.
There's definitely an observable issue with Californian electricity supplies being significantly worse than in other parts of the world, which have more liberalised transmission operator firms.
Is it more liberalised in other parts of the world though? That’s not usually the case for Europe and China (the next two biggest global economies). Perhaps it might be true specifically with regards to electricity supply but I would be very surprised if that were the case knowing how the U.K. likes to regulate similar services which I have directly been employed by.
> PG&E would love to spend more money on maintenance
Yeah, their series of felony convictions for violating the law regarding maintenance, and obstructing investigations into those failures, tells a very different story.
IMO, this is the most important comment here (so far) in understanding the investment & maintenance decision making and constaints of PG&E.
From the linked CPUC Decision Making in the above comment, there are multiple examples where PG&E have advocated for increased spending for safety purposes, but organisations such as the Division of Ratepayer Advocates and The Utility Reform Network were pushing back. Ultimately, however, it is the CPUC that weighs the arguments of the different parties and determines allowable spending.
> PG&E operates based on decisions of California Public Utilities Commission...
As clarification, your statement makes it sound like CPUC makes unilateral decisions about what PG&E can or cannot do when, in fact, CPUC makes those decisions based on requests made by PG&E.
While CPUC does have a certain level of decision making power, a lot of their decisions are made based on what PG&E says is the right/necessary thing to do.
I wish this attitude towards planned and unplanned shutdowns was more common.
I'm not an infrastructure professional, I'm in automation and manufacturing, but all too often I come across equipment that must never be shut down and must be functional 100% of the time, but which has been run long past its service life. Windows 98 or XP computers on their 9th resurrection due to parts from eBay, castings full of helicoils, electrical cabinets with wires strung across like cobwebs... If the business was successful before the machine was built, downtime now costs tens of thousands of dollars per hour, and the whole machine cost 500,000 dollars 100,000 hours ago, maybe someone should start thinking about building a replacement (or, better, a pair of replacements) and phasing this one out?
I know the front office likes to write off machine depreciation as a tax deduction. With a 10 year useful life on a $500k machine, you get $50k in tax deductions. In the 11th year, you get no tax deduction, but the machine is still making money.
I feel strongly that there ought to be some kind of financial penalty for operating a machine that's depreciated beyond its claimed useful life - not a direct tax penalty, but some kind of non-cash-expense liability that subtracts from the big positive number on the front page of the quarterly financials which the CEO uses to claim they deserve a bonus.
PG&E's more regulated than just painting them as a for-profit business with $550M in the black would suggest. They have maintenance and capital expenditures that they need to make. But those regulated books didn't show the single-point-of-failure risks and long-past-useful-life liabilities, and they should!
That depends on how you look at it. In the case of this thread, is it better for the environment that PGE continues using 100 year old electricity towers and saves the resources (metals, fuel, labor) necessary to replace them? Or is it better that such massive fires are reduced in frequency?
I think it's hard to take the example of a poorly maintained electric tower in the middle of a poorly managed forest and extend that to all electronics a company uses. The comment I was replying to talks about windows computers, castings, and standard electrical panels.
>Of course they can. A failure is an unplanned shutdown
A pedantically accurate retort, but ignores the real point.
Shutting down these lines for "inspection" is not feasible. These lines are the backbone of a grid that millions of people and services rely on 24/7/365, and there is zero redundancy. They are responsible for delivering power to hospitals, traffic lights, schools, airports, grocery stores, homes, businesses, and the list goes on.
Telling people "We need to turn off your power for a couple days every couple months for inspections" is going to create a lot of backlash, no matter how good the reason.
Also, the lines in question aren't like closing a two lane road in a small neighborhood for a couple hours where a few annoyed people can take alternate routes. It's more like shutting down all the freeways in a major city for a day just so that the DOT can finally get some street sweeping done. Good luck not starting a riot.
The problem is, these systems are old, too many people rely on them, and there is no redundancy.
If we want to take a step towards fixing the problem, the best start is to create redundancy for power supply to consumers, imo. Preferably more localized power generation via wind/solar/etc with some localized power storage.
Also, their profit margin for one year is not a fair argument towards them being at fault. Economics of public companies are about a lot more than "We made extra money, so we should have just spent it on making our product better". If shareholders don't make money in a company, they pull their investments. You pull enough investments in PG&E, that means they have to cut costs. Meaning, less money for inspections and improvements to the grid.
Economics at scale is not a black-and-white, napkin math, solvable problem.
> Telling people "We need to turn off your power for a couple days every couple months for inspections" is going to create a lot of backlash, no matter how good the reason.
They were happy to tell people "We need to turn off your power for a couple of days because of wind." Granted, in this particular case, they weren't talking about the 115kV line that ultimately caused the fire.
To me, this just further highlights their "run it till it breaks" philosophy. This becomes a little more obvious when you read their plans for fixing this mess, and it involves a dual-circuit transmissions system. So, you can literally shut half of it down without completely stopping power.
It's also not impossible to serve one neighborhood with two power lines, in fact it's quite common.
> Also, the lines in question aren't like closing a two lane road in a small neighborhood
It is a single 115kV line. That's exactly like what it is. For the rest of the state your analogy falls apart because there is a significant amount of redundancy and additional capacity that can be used to route power. For example, lookup "Path 46" and the "Pacific DC Intertie." Which is interesting in it's own right because it can be run in two different modes, one for nearly double the power capacity in certain conditions.
> The problem is, these systems are old, too many people rely on them, and there is no redundancy.
The California regulator has been asleep at the switch here, and they do share some culpability, but again.. it's not impossible to design around this constraint. You're going to pay twice as much for aluminum and nearly twice as much for everything else, but it's not impossible to solve. Just no one wanted to and no one was going to make them.
> Also, their profit margin for one year is not a fair argument towards them being at fault.
They are a state granted monopoly. I think it's entirely fair.
> Economics at scale is not a black-and-white, napkin math, solvable problem.
Sure, but you can start on the napkin and see if you're even in the ballpark. I think if you put even $100 million down on a napkin, you'd be surprised at what can fit in your ballpark.
> Telling people "We need to turn off your power for a couple days every couple months for inspections" is going to create a lot of backlash, no matter how good the reason.
Maybe not every couple of mounts, but they could probably get away with doing them more frequently than a century...
Also, you can do visual inspection even without having to shut down power.
This is PG&E in California we are talking about? The one that already has rolling blackouts? California is just a failed state - an embarrassment for an economy so large it rivals most countries.
The Republicans have a little more blame for the deregulation driven blackouts of 2000.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Wilson
Wilson was the driving force behind the 1996 legislation that deregulated the state's energy market, which was the first energy utilities deregulation in the U.S. and aggressively pushed by companies such as Enron.[28]
Of course they can. A failure is an unplanned shutdown, and I doubt that leads to better outcomes than a planned shutdown. Also this thread demonstrates that PG&E replaced _other_ parts of the same tower.
> I'm of the opinion that humans should not be living in areas that burn regularly.
I'm of the opinion that climate change makes this a moving target, and this is simply one of the obvious repercussions.
> is it PG&E's fault that tons of people moved into this fire prone area?
No, it's their fault that even though they made $550 million in profits in 2018, and made other improvements to these towers, they still failed to keep them in proper repair. Also, it's not always "fire-prone." California experienced a bit of drought in 2018.
> and cities should have paid to make them safer
Shouldn't the company making $550 million in profits pay to make them safer?