by Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/25/2019 – 19:00
Earlier this week we joked that with PG&E now scrambling to enforce intentional blackouts every time there are powerful winds for fears the bankrupt company’s aged infrastructure could cause a new fire, “every time the wind blows California will become Venezuela.”
https://twitter.com/zerohedge/status/1186440507217588224
Turns out it wasn’t a joke.
On Friday, with its stock crashing to a new all time low amid speculation it may have been responsible for the latest California inferno, the Kincade Fire…
… PG&E warned it will shut off power again on Saturday to as many as 2.5 million people as violent winds batter the state, in what according to Bloomberg will be “California’s largest intentional blackout ever.”
According to a Friday statement, approximately 850,000 homes and businesses in Northern California, including much of the San Francisco Bay Area, may be impacted beginning Saturday evening. And with data models indicating the weather event could be the most powerful in California in decades, with widespread dry Northeast winds between 45-60 miles per hour (mph) and peak gusts of 60-70 mph in the higher elevations through Monday, large swaths of the region could be without power for days.
California Fire-Threat Maps, source: CPUC
“The upcoming wind event has the potential to be one of the strongest in the last several years. It’s also likely to be longer than recent wind events, which have lasted about 12 hours or less,” said Scott Strenfel, Principal Meteorologist with PG&E.
The potentially record outage will impact parts of Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose and Marin County. As usual, the city of San Francisco will not be affected, in order to make it easier for pedestrians to avoid stepping into the human faces covering the city’s sidewalks. The full list of affected counties can be found at the following page.
The hot and windy weather event is expected to begin impacting the service area Saturday between 6 and 10 p.m. and lasting until midday Monday, although as of late Friday, PG&E said it has not yet made a definite decision whether it will cut power.
As Bloomberg notes, this would be the third time this month alone that bankrupt PG&E – terrified of potentially sparking another multi-billion dollar blaze – has resorted to massive outages to prevent its power lines from sparking fires in high winds. The company’s aged equipment sparked blazes in 2017 and 2018, saddling the company with an estimated $30 billion in liabilities and forcing it into bankruptcy at the start of 2019. However, leaving millions in the dark has led to debate over how far California must go to prevent fires during windstorms. And despite the shutoffs, fires continue to burn.
Despite recent intentional outages, earlier on Friday California governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency as wildfires are now raging at both ends of California. Near Los Angeles, blazes have prompted authorities to order 40,000 evacuations. And north of San Francisco, a blaze is raging amid the vineyards of Sonoma County.
HT/Yooper
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Now turn off the natural gas and shut down the gasoline pumps and show the people of California ultimately what the real plan is.
” what the real pain is “
No problem…..when the power goes out, just jump in your electric vehicle and leave. Oh wait…..
Now that is funny and sad at the same time.
Didn’t I see an article saying that the mayor of San Jose was proposing that the state take over PG&E and run it? Yeah, right, that’ll sure fix things.
THIMK, ah 1
WE, US, have got to save the planet, ( diesel, Gasoline , coal; etc ) RENEWABLES Harrah,
Ops Thimking !
Tree branch vs. 11000 volt power line.
Good recording and good for Halloween.
[youtube https://youtu.be/aoeTTbgCIfY%5D
Broken link I guess ?
What am I doing wrong?
This is the link to the video:
https://youtu.be/aoeTTbgCIfY
But somehow WP does not like the closing bracket and rewrites it to HTML code.
Carl, perfect example of non-maintenance of line clearances. Bankrupting the responsible utility doesn’t help.
Black is the new green. That’s the black of despair.
People, developers and towns deliberately move / expand into fire-prone areas, then demand electric service. When the inevitable happens, they blame the power company. The utility may have stop expansion into high-risk zones, then begin denying/removing service from areas that previously had been off-grid.
One question. When will scumbag lawyers begin to sue the company for damages caused by the blackouts, if they haven’t already?
https://wildfiretoday.com/2019/10/24/kincade-fire-forces-evacuation-of-geyserville-california/
Gives decent map of Kincade fire. Evacuated Geyserville downtown but doesn’t seem to be any real action to mitigate fire load at the town itself which is a couple of kilometers away from east hills with agricultural firebreak of vineyards and natural fire break of the Russian River
California leading the way.
They have shut off the power companies power, lightning must be next.
Cal becomes Venezuela?
I’m shocked. This is my shocked face.
The results of Decades of voting D ….
Maybe it’ll be the wake up call that voters there need and make it Democrats Waterloo.
you know….liberals have made such a mess out of it….let them keep it
Didn’t I see an article recently saying that the mayor of San Jose was proposing that the state take over PG&E and run it? Yeah, right, that’ll sure fix things.
A state or municipally owned/run utility would just give the Predatort Shakedown Ambulance chasing lawyers access to the biggest pocketbook of them all…. the taxpayer.
This is actually a genius move. PG&E is prepping the good citizens of the People’s Republic of California for what life will be like when their lords and masters force a statewide “green new deal” down their throats.
‘Who benefits?’ Landowners who lose their homes and businesses to fire face draconian and expensive CA building regulations, via the climate change fraud, so many sell their land at a big loss. Whoever is buying up the land benefits from the fires. And a side effect is a mass exodus of the middle class. Land-grabbing globalist elites couldn’t plan it better.
One observation.
Most of the commentators to the various articles discussing the blackouts point their fingers at either PG&E or the State of California (depending upon political persuasion) … virtually no mentions it was a democrat appointed 9th circuit federal judge who ordered PG&E to shut down the transmission system during periods of high winds.
I mean, if your going to point fingers, you might as point at the full circus. No point in leaving clowns in the 9th circuit unscathed.
This took 40 years to make. In 1978 Jerry Brown became California’s governor. He began the current subservience to:
* renewables,
* decentralization,
* small-scale generation, and
* wide distributed
That describes Californian’s electricity grid. 40 years of ideology dressed up as policy.
Can PG&E harden the grid? Being decentralized, there’s just too much grid. It’d take a long time. It’ll be very expensive. What are they to do? Will they have to bury grid wires under the ground?
Mark Pawelek
In the mountainous areas, there isn’t much soil to dig in. It will require blasting to dig trenches or tunnels in the bedrock. That will be very expensive and time consuming!
“Climate Change” is both the excuse for past Progress policy failure and the excuse for more Progressive policy.
Could the “Agenda 21” conspiracy theorists be on to something and this is all just a scam to flush the extra-urban dwellers out of the hinterlands and into the cities where the central planners think they belong?
“Will they have to bury grid wires under the ground?”
Nope, can’t be done, it’d be too expensive. I got quoted $60K for a 6000 foot buried feed for my house in the Upper Peninsula, 10 years ago. On site 3Kw solar was 1/3 that. Imagine what it would cost to bury hundreds of miles of high voltage main lines.
They also need to be cooled.
The blackouts are from a judge’s order. PG&E are damned if the do and damned by violating a judge’s order if they don’t.
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-pge-judge-wildfires-20190109-story.html
My thoughts are that CO2 also has a role in it. Higher CO2 has allowed more drought resistant trees, which made more dense forests with fewer large trees that were required to survive from the need for CO2 battled the need for water. More dense with fewer large trees are some of the kinds of changes in fires we see today.
Keith Rowe – you wrote the following:
“My thoughts are that CO2 also has a role in it. Higher CO2 has allowed more drought resistant trees, which made more dense forests with fewer large trees that were required to survive from the need for CO2 battled the need for water. More dense with fewer large trees are some of the kinds of changes in fires we see today.”
Ummmmm…no. Forests, primarily in the west where the vast majority are “managed” by public agencies, mostly federal….are overstocked with small trees primarily because of a failure to properly manage said forests, and because of a long history of fire suppression. There, fixed it for you.
I am a retired forester with more than 35 years experience.
The forests are changing. CO2 was low and it forced the plants to keep more stoma open to allow enough CO2 in this also allowed more H20 to leave as they are open longer/more. More CO2 has allowed them to use water more conservatively, also allowing different kinds of trees. I think larger trees with their deep roots and area to mass was a winning formula when CO2 was low but as trees grow in increasing CO2, denser trees are the winning formula.
https://www.pnas.org/content/112/5/1458
Again…no.
You completely ignore the reason why the forests of the west are overly dense, and fire prone. Go back and re-read my response. Those are the reasons.
These winds have been blowing in CA for millions of years. It is not a mystery why it happens and where it happens.
It is a mystery why it is IGNORED until it is a problem.
Controlled burns and avoiding those zones when putting up power lines is the simple solution.
There are many smart people in CA. It is too bad they are such a minority, and the majority is too stubborn to listen to reason.
Cutting a fire break along all power line routes would not seem to be that expensive or take long to do.
That would also enhance fire safety and make for easier access for line maintenance.
Greg
You have apparently never seen the terrain around Pulga on the Feather River where the Paradise fire started. Where do you live? Kansas?
It is very difficult terrain. That is why you burn it when the prevailing winds come off the ocean, and are cool and damp. If you don’t you will be fighting a wild fire when the compression winds are hot and dry.
This is not rocket science. You either burn it when the conditions are favorable for containment, or run for your life when the winds are a blow torch looking for any spark.
Well done Progressives! This is entirely your doing.
California is now well on its way to a Third World country.
But it is the most developed Third World country! Also the second most progressive (after Venezuela).
Interesting to do the statistics on any change in frequency of fires if cutting off power is an extended steategy. A good, although unpleasant experiment for many. If the number of fires does decline significantly, then the blame fo r a good number of past fires certainly takes “climate change” off the attribution list. Hopefully, the big experiment, cleaning up the forests, will be done and significant fire reduction would put the government/gang green/industrial complex on the attribution list big time.
Surely the voters of Berkley are on board with the shut down of power? They’re saving the planet, (sarc) so this is a good start. The GND will ensure non reliable, intermittent or zero power to some. That’s the plan right ?
Needs to be posted on every one of these threads…
https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/11/wine-country-fires-gov-brown-vetoed-2016-bill-aimed-at-power-line-wildfire-safety/
“…The author of the measure — passed unanimously by both houses of the Legislature — now says the governor missed out on a chance to tackle one of his state’s longstanding vulnerabilities: massive wildfires endangering residential communities. But the governor’s office and the California Public Utilities Commission say the bill duplicated efforts already underway among the CPUC, Cal Fire and utilities like PG&E…”
PG&E is only NorCal. SCE (Los Angeles area) and SDG&E are also doing their own blackouts.
Just looking at the fire map. Do wildfires magically stop at the Oregon and Mexico borders or do they have wildfires?
Maybe an opportunity for somebody with deep pockets ?
The worlds largest aircraft is the Antonov AN 225 Takeoff weight 645 tonnes
One (1) has been in service since 1988 ( well done Ukraine )
3 ( three) complete aircraft remain in the warehouse disassembled
water water everywhere
Yes, well done Ukraine for breaking ties with RF and shutting down the entire Antonov business.
BTW the design was Russian, the factory was in Ukraine.