If you live in wildfire country and get your electricity from PG&E Corp., brace yourself for blackouts this summer.
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. said Friday it’s ramped up the sensitivity on more than 1,000 circuit breakers for wildfire season in an effort to reduce fire risks.
It’s the second summer for PG&E’s Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings Program, which was rushed into effect after the utility’s equipment sparked the Dixie Fire last July. The settings automatically shut off power to an area whenever PG&E equipment comes into contact with something that could trigger a wildfire: an animal, a tree branch or anything else suspicious.
Last year the enhanced settings triggered more than 600 instant blackouts, often for hours at a time, angering residents, elected officials and the California Public Utilities Commission. PG&E officials said the program prevented wildfires and would be expanded this year to take in a wider swath of the utility’s territory.
More than five times as many circuits are now affected compared to last year. Roughly 3 million Californians — about one in five customers — live in areas covered by the program.
At the same time, the company said it had fine-tuned the program for this wildfire season so the blackouts would affect fewer households and power would be restored more quickly.
“When we stop ignitions, we stop wildfires,” said Mark Quinlan, the utility’s vice president of transmission and distribution operations. “Rest assured that we work every day to prevent outages and to expedite restoration if they do happen.”
The blackouts are different from PG&E’s “public safety power outages,” which the utility imposes when dry winds and other weather conditions intensify wildfire risks. Those outages generally take in a much wider territory and can last a day or more — but customers are typically given a 48-hour advance warning. The public safety blackouts have proven controversial as well — particularly in October 2019, when fierce Diablo winds prompted multiple, massive outages across much of Northern California and still failed to prevent the Kincade Fire. That fire prompted the evacuation of more than 180,000 residents of Sonoma County.
PG&E remains under intense pressure to eliminate wildfires. A string of massive fires linked to the utility, capped by the catastrophic Camp Fire in Butte County in 2018, drove PG&E into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company emerged from bankruptcy in 2020 but has continued to struggle with wildfires.
It cut a deal with district attorneys to avoid criminal prosecution in connection with the Dixie Fire — the second largest in modern California history — and the Kincade Fire. It recently pleaded innocent to 31 felony and misdemeanor charges over the 2020 Zogg Fire, which killed four people in rural Shasta County. The company doesn’t dispute Cal Fire’s conclusion that the utility’s equipment sparked the fire, but PG&E said it didn’t violate any laws.
“We did not commit a crime,” Chief Executive Patti Poppe said at the time.
