SAN FRANCISCO — A day after PG&E filed for bankruptcy protection from what could be multi-billion dollar wildfire liability costs, a federal judge Wednesday declared the beleaguered utility in violation of its probation for the 2010 San Bruno gas pipeline explosion and spent three hours excoriating the company for its role in the blazes that have ravaged Northern California over the past two years.
“Does a judge turn a blind eye and let PG&E continue what you’re doing, let you keep killing people?” U.S. District Judge William Alsup said inside the San Francisco courtroom. “Can’t we have electricity that is delivered safely in this state?”
The finding sets the stage for the judge to add additional and costly terms to Pacific Gas & Electric’s criminal probation for the deadly pipeline blast — requirements such as inspections and tree trimming the utility says could cost billions of dollars and lead to customer rates rising five-fold. Alsup, who is monitoring the utility’s federal probation, did not make that decision at Wednesday’s hearing but said he would soon, as fire season begins in June. He said he would pay close attention to what PG&E submits as its newly required wildfire mitigation plan. That plan is due next week as part of a new state law.
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Alsup opened the hearing before a packed courtroom by comparing PG&E to a drug dealer who violates probation by committing a different crime. He noted that PG&E equipment was involved in starting 17 recent wildfires and dismissed the company’s claims that it warned its probation monitor that the Butte County District Attorney’s office was investigating criminal actions by the utility involving fires during 2017. That inadequate notification, Alsup ordered, was a probation violation.
“Those fires killed 22 people, burned alive in their cars and homes,” Alsup said. “There is one clear pattern here: PG&E is starting these fires. Global warming is not starting these fires.
Full story here
For some years, PG&E has been playing cozy with the environmentalists. As long as they can get their fanciful expenses to suit them into the rate base, they could care less about the customer. The environmental movement, however, is a Medusa head of many snakes. Some are keen on climate change, some don’t want you to clear cut under power lines, others don’t want you to bury anything underground, etc., etc., etc. You either fight the Medusa or you lose. Them that think they can live with it are fools….
When it suits . . .
Alsup recently declared Phil Jones (CRU East Anglia) a genius.
Alsup has the ability to understand ‘global warming’ but he won’t give too much thought or time to studying all the data because it contradicts the left’s dogma.
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For some reason, Enron comes to mind. Ah yes. link We’ve been here before.
commieBob. Enron came to mind for me also. The Wikipedia version of events makes deregulation and corporate “manipulation” the primary causes of the power crisis. Not necessarily. Way to much government forcing: Requiring the tradition utilities to sell their generating capacity and then in turn being required to buy electricity back from those buyers isn’t exactly allowing the “invisible hand of the market place” full function. Deregulation has worked well elsewhere but here in Disneyland it failed horribly. Blame the regulator for creating an unworkable market, not the corporations for doing what they’re supposed to do: make money for their investors. Rest assured that now that we have $billions more of worthless wind and solar and $ billions less of reliable nuclear in the mix – the next “solution” will be much worse (more expensive and less reliable). Having a greener governor and legislature this time around may have a contributing effect….
“now that we have $billions more of worthless wind and solar and $ billions less of reliable nuclear”
Typical highly generalised statement emanating out of the US sceptic community. This is supposed to be a science-based site that avoids B.S. like this.
Since wind and solar are always worthless and nuclear is reliable, what’s wrong with the statement?
Wake up Ivan and you should also know about the solar duck curve and nothing with moonlight-
https://anero.id/energy/wind-energy/2018/june
I don’t understand what happened very well. Is this an ongoing fiasco? Is this two separate things both of which happened in California?
It is very tempting to think the regulators in California had a big part in creating the necessary conditions for the whole thing. It looks like the problem was national in scope though. link What now comes to mind is Solyndra Oh my aching brain.
PG&E stock was $48/share last December, now it’s $13/share. PG&E bonds are now junk rated. Once that $ gets wiped out electric rates will soar to a non politically acceptable price. The Legislature will then rob the general fund to cushion the blow (and raise taxes). The renewable mandates and renewable grid priority will stay in-place and PG&E will still be required to purchase all the available wind and solar power (but at a post bankruptcy court ordered reduced price) even when it’s produced at the wrong time of day and they can’t use. They will have to dump it to Arizona (as usual) at a price much lower than what they are required by law to pay the renewable companies. Isn’t being Green wonderful? Germany ruined their tradition utilities with subsidized, mandated, grid priority renewable policies. California and most other USA states are following that same sterling business model. Why? Because wind and sunshine are free!!
Hey don’t forget South Australia in the pecking order or we’ll think you’re culturally ignorant here.
Speaking of things going up in smoke it was the demise of our State Bank that ultimately led to the sell-off of the Electricity Trust of South Australia and the privatisation of electricity supply. The villain of the piece was one Marcus Clark although he was appointed by the Bannon Labor Govt to get a bit more entrepreneurial with the little people’s savings no doubt to pay more dividends for the usual taxeaters-
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-24/former-state-bank-director-tim-marcus-clark-dies/7110278
So with that sort of debt hanging over State coffers it was left to the incoming Liberal Govt to flog off the family silver although there was another nuance to it. Publicly run ETSA like the Engineering and Water Supply largely had capital works sweated for and paid for by returning war time 1920s baby boomers who went without much to provide these modern joys of life. However their voluminous offspring would take it all for granted and in the early 70s grow the public service and its largesse exponentially and it was the dividends of their parents they were squandering without putting away for depreciation of those assets.
So with the planets aligning in SA it was an easy decision to sell off ETSA to ameliorate the State Bank debt and to privatise the E&Ws for SAWater later, particularly given the largesse the public sector was enjoying by then. If you think ahh but SA was in a debt crisis which explains that then it was exactly the same with many publicly owned assets in other States and even the Feds with Snowy Hydro built and paid for by a more industrious generation in record time and on budget (compare that with today’s infrastructure projects). Basically the taxeaters had found another cash cow to fund their burgeoning peccadillos but alas that small matter of depreciable assets was ticking away. No matter as private enterprise could become the bearer of bad tidings with rapidly rising bills to eventually pay the piper.
So that’s the story here and now and you can see how watermelons take the slant they do with it that it’s Big Biz screwing the little guy when there had to be a catch up with the poles and wires although with separation of that from the private generators naturally some gold plating went on. Also with bushfire liability and compensation like the tragic Victorian Bushfires there was even more impetus for that.
Defenders of the cost of unreliables will point out that 42% of the dramatic rise in power prices is down to poles and wires and not their precious wind and solar. However locked up in that fixed cost is the extra transmission lines to large scale wind and solar farms as well as the frequency and voltage control equipment necessary for so many disperse generators and nobody does the sums on it. Some questions you simply don’t ask because there’s ugly answers.
Nevertheless with fickle solar and wind dumping whatever they can whenever they can into the grid the large scale coal generators are now being run on stickytape and string to extract the last drop of revenue out of them before they close one by one depending on age. That largely leaves the field to expensive gas peaking plants and now paying big industrial users to shut down in peak summer. Slowly but surely wind and solar are being exposed for what they are and it’s anyone’s guess as to what battery backup would cost to level the playing field but you can only blame Big Biz for so long before the obvious sinks in.
The thought of todays bloated public servants taking it all over and back to the good old days with cheap power again is laughable. As for the promise of either public or private owners extracting cheap reliable power from Gaia even more so. Simply put you can have somewhat cheap and fickle renewables power or dispatchable and extremely expensive contrary to the popular mantra. It’s the same gullibility that believes penalising poles and wires providers for not gold plating enough with events like bushfires isn’t ultimately a zero sum game for consumers.
Electric rates are going to rise 5-fold?! The top tier is already 30 cents per kWh, and the amount of usage to get to that tier is ridiculously low. We haven’t run the electric heaters even once for over a year, we have a 2 year old high-efficiency refrigerator, we use gas to heat the hot water, we have all LED lights (9 watts per bulb), we haven’t turned on the TV in years, we don’t use the dishwasher, our clothes washer and dryer are new high-efficiency units, and our computers are all efficient laptops and tablets… and we regularly hit that top tier.
At $1.50/kWh, people (and businesses) will be fleeing California in even bigger droves.
PG&E deferred maintenance of their medium voltage lines (they were cited by CPUC regulators for deferred maintenance more than any other utility in the state… 3527 deferred maintenance items in 2015 (latest audit), 9520 deferred maintenance items in 2013… while they claimed it didn’t reflect their deferring maintenance, just that they were working hard to catch up on a ‘backlog’ of maintenance… which is the DEFINITION of deferred maintenance!) while they spent $10,550,000 on lobbying in 2018, then attempted to blame the Paradise fire on global warming. And now they (and their political buttbuddies) want the ratepayers to pay for their criminal behavior. Sickening.
Wind Turbine Power Quality Issues
Utility companies shouldn’t be penalized when they are forced by political mandates to contend with “off spec” poor quality power from a dozen wind farms with a dozen turbines all operating at different times and producing different quantities and qualities of electricity. With this junk power being dumped on the grid is it any surprise that a transformer overheats?
Wind power causes problems with:
Voltage regulation (magnitude and frequency)
Voltage sags and swells
Harmonics and inter harmonics
Real and reactive power
Sub synchronous resonance issues due to interaction of the electric network
and the complex shaft/gear system of the wind turbine.
AGW leading to extreme temperatures – there is no doubt about it: https://mankindsdegradationofplanetearth.com/2019/02/01/australia-is-sweltering-through-record-breaking-heat-and-the-worst-is-yet-to-come-cnn/
Ivan: “AGW leading to extreme temperatures….”what was that you were saying about general statements….OK if from the alarmist community maybe?
Dennis – what is it that you don’t get about the word ‘extreme’?
Temperatures have hit 47C (117F) in southern Australia where an extraordinary heatwave has come amid one of the worst droughts in the country’s recorded history. In large parts of the Murray-Darling basin – an area of land the size of Egypt – little rain is expected for months. Fish are dying in their hundreds of thousands at Menindee and people living in towns and on properties along the Barwon-Darling river system are battling to secure water fit for drinking and washing and to feed their stock.
Ivan what don’t you get about *HISTORY*. “extreme” weather events happen. They always have, they always will. Just look through history and you’ll find plenty of examples of “extreme” weather events of the past.
heatwaves – happened before, will happen again.
droughts – happened before, will happen again.
heatwaves during droughts – happened before, will happen again.
Ivan: Hey you’re right it is extreme. Nice that. you’ve moved on from global warming and climate change. But the fossil fuels must have had more CO2 in 1902: According to The Guardian, the farmers in the affected region of central and western New South Wales continue to battle a crippling drought that many locals are calling the worst since 1902. /save
Anything that is different than it was yesterday is caused by CO2.
Anyone who says otherwise is an anti-scientific denier.
“There is one clear pattern here: PG&E is starting these fires. Global warming is not starting these fires.”
That quote from Alsup was omitted from our local newspaper, and instead stated mantra, “…climate scientists are in general agreement that climate change is…” (the usual blah, blah, blah).
Which newspaper is that?
“Perhaps that is what it will take to disavow the citizens of California who have voted for these policies to actually experience the consequences before sanity can be restored.”
Exactly… energy costs will skyrocket when PG&E has to maintain equipment and cut trees? Good. We’ll see just how far California will go in it’s love of “saving the world.” After all, another rate hike is a small price to pay to save the world, right?
One option for California is for their state government to acquire all the assets of the privately held utilities in the state and then to either assume direct responsibility for all day-to-day utility operations, or else to subcontract those day-to-day operations to some combination of publicly-held and privately-held corporations in a GOCO type of contracting arrangement.
The other question which now arises concerns whether or not the foolish decision to close Diablo Canyon by 2025 will stand firm under the pressure of these Category 5 political/legal hurricane force winds.
My prediction is that the decision to close Diablo Canyon will stand firm, simply for the reason that reversing course would constitute an admission by state authorities that their ambitious plans for a carbon-free power grid can’t be fulfilled without a strong commitment to nuclear.
Beta: Well said, Diablo has the same chance as Germany’s nukes – none. Liberal think disease is the same worldwide. Wrong everytime, everywhere. Germany appears to be the only place with worse energy management than Cali but we’re catching up…..Quickly.
Dennis, I suspect that over the next twenty to thirty years, substantial profit making opportunities will be developing in Europe for suppliers and operators of LNG-fired and gas-fired peaker plants, and also for those nations which choose to invest in the small modular reactors (SMR’s).
A nuclear free, coal free Germany might become an excellent power marketing opportunity for nations such as Poland and Slovakia who are considering an expansion of nuclear power inside their borders.
NuScale is well on the way towards getting its 50 Mw SMR design approved by the NRC. With support from the Department of Energy, from Fluor, and a from a consortium of Utah power companies, NuScale will be constructing a full scale first-of-fleet demonstration plant in eastern Idaho.
Ten or twelve of these 50 Mw NuScale SMR’s will eventually be ganged together at the Idaho site to create a 600 Mw power generation facility.
The advantage of the NuScale design is that the SMR units can do load following, they can support an isolated grid, the individual SMR units can be refueled while others located on the same site are still in operation, they can’t melt down, and they can be black started without outside assistance from the grid.
The SMR’s have the additional advantage that one can start out installing just a few SMR units to fulfill the initial demand. You don’t need to install another 50 Mw unit on the same site unless and until customer power demand for the added output is firm enough to justify the incremental investment.
Once their own reactors have been shuttered, neither Germany nor California will ever again allow a nuclear reactor to be constructed on their soil. Both Germany and California will eventually be forced to install LNG or gas-fired backup generation to keep their wind and solar grids from collapsing.
But that doesn’t mean surrounding nations in the case of Germany, or private investors working in adjacent states in the case of California, wouldn’t consider buying NuScale’s SMR’s and then selling the nuclear generated power at a premium price.
Beta, I’ve followed NuScale for years and agree that it has tremendous potential. I like your idea about power investment opportunities in Poland. They appear to be positioned to go from coal to nukes without the interim hopeless renewable folly. I’ve read that Germany has commercially available shale deposits but that they have no interest in developing them. Let’s hope we can sell them some LNG! I love it here in Cali but it’s a shame that my power bill will almost certainly double over the next several years. Can you see any chance that I’m wrong about that?
Dennis, I couldn’t predict with any precision just how much California’s power bills will rise over the next four or five years.
But I would observe that aggressive efforts at energy conservation are a necessity if a firm decision has been made by California’s politicians to move quickly towards wind and solar and to eliminate nuclear altogether.
Raising the price of electricity to almost unaffordable levels is one way to guarantee that strict energy conservation measures will be practiced everywhere in California.