By Hudson Sangree

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Utilities are bracing for another fire season as the state heads into summer, but officials say troubling questions remain about how to gauge their level of readiness.

Pacific Gas and Electric said widespread power shutdowns will be a key part of its strategy following two years of catastrophic fires fueled by high winds and dry vegetation. The Camp Fire, sparked by PG&E equipment Nov. 8, was the deadliest and most destructive in state history.

The state’s two other large investor-owned utilities, San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison, have employed strategic shutdowns for years, but this could be the first season that tactics used in drier Southern California are regularly deployed in relatively rainy Northern California.

PG&E has used intentional blackouts only once before, when it first started the practice last October. (See Fire Season Becomes Blackout Time in California.)

“We will only turn off power for public safety and only as a last resort to keep our customers and communities safe,” PG&E said in a news release, responding to controversy surrounding the program.

The Camp Fire and a rash of deadly fires in 2017 led PG&E to file for bankruptcy in January, shake up its leadership and boost fire-prevention practices. (See PG&E Names New CEO, Board Members.)

The utility’s Public Safety Power Shutoff program now includes roughly 25,000 miles of distribution lines, up from 7,000 last year, and about 5,500 miles of transmission lines, including 500-kV lines, an increase from 373 miles at 70 kV and below in 2018. The plan affects potentially millions of customers in areas of elevated and extreme fire risk in the state’s coastal regions, mountains and foothills.

‘Uncharted Waters’

At a legislative hearing last week, representatives of the IOUs and an official from the California Public Utilities Commission outlined additional measures and shortcomings in the state’s firefighting arsenal. The hearing of the Assembly Utilities and Energy Committee examined the IOU’s wildfire mitigation plans filed with the CPUC earlier this year. (See PG&E Lays out Billion-dollar Wildfire Plan.)

“We’re in uncharted waters,” committee Chairman Chris Holden said.

Sumeet Singh, in charge of PG&E’s wildfire safety program, said the utility has installed 350 weather monitoring stations and plans to have 1,300 by 2020. It has installed 30 high-definition fire-detection cameras and is aiming for three times as many in 2019. The cameras allow firefighters to more quickly verify the location of a fire and monitor its progress before arriving on the scene.

“We’re looking to get to 100 cameras by the end of this year” and to establish remote visual coverage of 90% of PG&E’s high-risk fire areas in the next two to three years, he said.

PG&E said it is making a major push to inspect and harden its grid, which covers 70,000 square miles of Northern and Central California, or 42% of the state. A federal judge overseeing the utility’s criminal probation in the San Bruno gas pipeline explosion case has put pressure on the company to increase inspections and fix problems. (See Judge Postpones Strict Probation Conditions for PG&E.)

“We launched an aggressive inspection program [in] December of 2018, where we moved forward with inspecting all of our transmission infrastructure in the high-fire-risk areas, and we are near completion of doing the same for our distribution system,” Singh told lawmakers. “This really entails an unprecedented level of effort that we have undertaken within our service territory.”

Singh said PG&E has increased transmission line inspections by 130% this year and ramped up inspections of distribution lines by 400%, using a combination of drones, helicopters and workers. The company has turned to Silicon Valley to adopt machine learning to identify potential problems using powerline imaging, he said. (See Silicon Valley Tackles Wildfire Prevention.)

The company is boosting its vegetation management, including clearing branches that overhang bare wires even when its vegetation clearances meet regulatory standards, he said. Half of all ignitions occur when overhanging vegetation contacts power lines, Singh said.

Replacing wooden poles with composite ones and strategically burying some power lines are among other grid hardening strategies, he said. The utility recently said it would bury new power lines in Paradise, as the town is rebuilt.

Gaps in Expertise, Resources

PG&E’s moves mirror those undertaken by SDG&E in the last decade after a series of devastating wind-driven fires in San Diego County in the early 2000s. The combination of 175 weather stations, more than 100 cameras, de-energization and grid hardening has eliminated major wildfires sparked by power lines in the utility’s service territory, said Brian D’Agostino, director of fire science and climate adaptation at SDG&E.

“Since we’ve implemented this plan over a decade ago, we have not seen a catastrophic wildfire ignited by electrical equipment across our region,” D’Agostino told the committee.

The company has spent $1.4 billion in its effort and is continuing to improve, he said. Expanding the use of easements as firebreaks is a current focus, he said. So is tracking “every spark,” he said.

SCE has adopted similar techniques and is pursuing others along the same lines as SDG&E and PG&E.

“They build upon programs we’ve had for many years — things we’ve done in response to redline warnings,” said Phil Herrington, senior vice president of transmission and distribution for SCE.

About one in 10 wildfires in California are ignited by electrical equipment, but a higher proportion of those fires grow into destructive blazes, state fire officials said.

Elizaveta Malashenko, the CPUC’s deputy executive director of safety and enforcement, said the utilities’ efforts may be laudable, but their timelines for completion remain uncertain, and no industry-wide standards exist for wildfire prevention. Last year’s omnibus wildfire bill, SB 901, required mitigation plans to be filed with the CPUC, yet evaluation has proven difficult without longer-term data, she said.

“The PUC isn’t set up to top the expertise of utilities … so I think that’s a gap,” Malashenko said.

“I think we also lack a vision of where are we going with all of this,” she said. “There’s a lot of activity that’s being proposed as part of wildfire mitigation plans, and it looks like the right type of activity, but we don’t really have an articulated vision of what goals we are trying to hit in the future.

“We hear a lot of statements of, ‘This is going to take a long time. We shouldn’t expect that this first round of wildfire mitigation plans and these efforts that utilities are putting in place right now will address all wildfire problems this year.’ … But I think we need to unpack this a bit more and get more specific,” she told the committee.

“What does this mean? How long of a roadmap are we talking about? Are we talking about being able to see measurable results in five years, in three years, in 10 years, in 50 years? How are we going to track that, and what does the system of the future look like?”

Regarding wildfire compliance, there are no black-and-white rules like a building code, she said. And the CPUC was never designed to inspect power lines. “That capability is nonexistent,” Malashenko said.

Every foot of rail line in the state is regularly inspected by CPUC personnel. Doing the same with power lines would require 1,300 to 1,500 additional workers and an annual budget of $125 million, she told lawmakers.

“To me, the question here isn’t which agency does it, but that this gap exists, and we need to recognize it,” she said.

(See related story, ALJ Endorses CPUC ‘Stress Test’ for Wildfire Costs.)