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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My heart goes out to all of the folks that didn’t vote for California’s socialist environmental stupidity. Like those of us residing in Washington state ‘We’re screwed.’ As for those that did vote for this socialist environmental stupidity “You made this 3rd world mess. Now lie in it!”
I’ll share my generator if you first renounce the climate crusades and sign the petition for the climate truth and reconciliation courts. You can move to the head of the line by demonstrating knowledge of climate cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic and solar cycles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=nwup6tA_OzQ
Camp fire and Paradise destruction video. At minute 10 it begins to explore the political ramifications and is likely the future of Rural CA power.
No drought though.
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/
I hate to be a climate change catastrophe wet blanket, but…..
Whatever happened to the ‘climate change’ induced California ‘permadrought’?
Oh… and the ‘climate change’ induced permadrought in Texas n Oklahoma also??
Griff? Mosh? Kristi? Buehler? Buehler??
It’s the fuels. And not just forest fuels, but also various brush, scrub oak, chaparral, and even residential ornamental fuels.
It’s the volume of fuels (their height) and their continuity. It’s their moisture content, which is always seasonally low in Mediterranean climates. California’s climate is similar to Greece or Portugal where a spate megafires have burned in recent years.
“Controlled burns” is a general term for a variety of techniques, but they do not by themselves reduce fuels very much. Furthermore, powerline easements and housing tracts cannot be controlled burned. Logging, mowing, mulching, grazing, and other similar techniques get the fuel onto the ground and work best if coupled with removal to safe disposal areas. Disposal may be by incineration, composting, or other processing. Breaking up the continuity of fuels can reduce the hazard without total landscape fuel removal.
Fuel management is not a one-time event. Fuels are biological, they grow, and so must be managed annually — it is a repetitious process (like mowing your lawn).
Downed powerlines can start fires, but so can a host of other ignition sources or events. Managing the fuels (across the landscape) is the ONLY way to prevent large (landscape) fires.
Well stated Mike.
First of all whoever’s commenting that the forests are too dense because of CO2 is absolutely wrong! The problem is is that California is so full of tree-huggers that they don’t even let you cut down a weed anymore because of Regulation! Thus the fires I know what I’m talking about I lived there for 32 years I got out just in time! I think it’s the funniest thing on the face of the planet the idiot liberals become victims of their own idiotic retarded policies! I get so much pleasure out of it you have no idea!
Sue the power utility for wild fires and win. Net result. Higher rates as the power company needs money to pay off the lawsuit. Blackouts to prevent any other attempt to connect wild fires to the power company. Again the law of unintended consequences and be careful what you wish for, you might just get it are proven true.
If you had solar….wait
If you had solar hooked up to BYPASS the grid and not GRID TIE-INS, you could have some power, but not enough for A/C without considerable expense and the Musk solar panels do not catch fire…etc…
How much has been spent on illegals and the train to nowhere?
How much could have been done to BURY electrical cables in the ground by now in the high risk areas? They can bury cables at astonishing rates with modern machines. But hey lets just keep putting them on poles. the utility says it costs 3 million a mile to bury cables, I bet you can get a red neck to bury them cheaper than that( I would have said Pedro but did not want to get the delicate sensibilities of CA SJW posers, pants in a wad) (or is it against the law to joke in CA now?)
Anywho, how many mi could have been buried for 20 bil so far these past years?
I wonder how many of the folks in the know, invested in generator stock beforehand?
If you overlay the fire maps with electrical transmission maps, which transmit 25% of California’s electricity very long distances from the Pacific Northwest and from the Southwest states. Most of the areas with overhead transmission lines are federally-owned, thus are cheap to lease and are poorly maintained by the US Government.
In order for the utilities to meet California’s strict renewable energy standards, they are forced to import hydro and solar power over long distances as local baseload generation capacity is shut down. Long transmission distances adds system resistance which results in conductor heating and sagging and loosening of electrical connections. When wires head and sag they can cause sparking and fires.
In addition, the lack of baseload generation causes a loss of local voltage support, aka “reactive power”. Reactive power is analogous to a bladder (hydrotank) on a well pump that evens out the well pumping power so you don’t burst the downstream piping. Reactive power is catestrophically important when power use exceeds or is less than the actual power capacity being generated: e.g. the circuit is “out of phase”. Reactive power is local.
Down stream PV (photovoltaic) does not provide reactive power, it only provides “real power”, e.g. the power measured in kilowatts you typically see on your electric bill. In AC circuits, the amount of power that flows through any system is the “apparent power” which is the resultant of real power and reactive power. Without local reactive power, the apparent power at the generators must be adjusted, if possible, to balance the load. It is unfeasible to adjust the power output at the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, like you could adjust the power output at your local fossil fuel generation plant.
In a wildfire situation, electric utilities have come to learn that burnt down homes don’t consume electricity and in the absence of local power sources, have figured out that the best way to prevent collapse of the entire electric grid is to shut down segments of the electric grid to prevent overloading the circuits. This similar strategy is employed in places like Florida just prior to hurricane impacts.
California would be wise to loosen their renewable energy standards to allow a larger percentage of power generation from baseload (fossil fuel) sources that can be cycled on/off or ramped up/down depending on demand, and that would provide a measure of reactive power to lessen the loads on the transmission system that rises above fire-prone areas of California.
It would be wise. Somehow, wisdom seems to avoid California.
I
I’ll take “States in a turd swirl” for $1.50, Alex.
“Millions of homeless, Illegal immigrants invading every community, drugs everywhere, STD’s reaching epidemic proportions, water shortages, skyrocketing taxes, massive power shortages and blackouts, highest gas prices in the nation, half the state’s on fire, street gangs run rampant, tons of feces on the streets of every major city, rampant gender confusion, pedophiles everywhere, and Democrats rule.”
Answer: California
You can’t even vote conservative in California anymore. My friend who lives there says ILLEGAL ALIENS can run for and hold community elected positions and can vote in federal elections.
I would like to see TRUMP Nationalize the CA. National Guard and declare martial law on California and bring it back into the United states instead of its seditious condition that the years of 4 family rule find the disenfranchised patrons of California in.
2,5 million customers that will hug and kiss their diesel gensets if they have some. And those with solar power should be allowed to enjoy the blessings of their installation. Because not being able to receive electricity also means they cannot feed it back into the grid which will bust the comfortable bubble they have been living in. Whats the bubble? They think they live on green electricity because they used the grid as a dump for electricity they could not use and got paid good money for it while receiving cheap electricity from the grid when their solar array did not deliver anything. Welcome to the real world on renewable bubblenomics.
I don’t know if electricity price regulation exists in California but if it doesn’t and if PG&E are the sole supplier then their obvious solution is to do what is right from a technical point of view. This will generate a cost base. Then decide a reasonable profit and this sets the price of energy to the consumer. In other words they will have to pay what they voted for. Simples as the Meerkat says.