Good luck even buying a gennie in .CA right now.....
Anyway. Several laws have been signed by our Gov. holding utility company's to a new enforceable standard since they can't be held fully liable for a fire financially. PG&E is basically bankrupt at this point and only has 30% of its obligation of clearing, checking and maintaining the power infrastructure they are responsible for in 2019 schedule alone.. Pretty damn large portion of .CA.
Here is one of them in readers digest condensed form. Been many meeting in communities over all this.
Copied and edited from a post in Greeley Hill Community page...
PSPS is the acronym for “Public Safety Power Shutoff”.
New Ca law (enacted by PUC and signed by Gov Newsome) REQUIRES utilities (ALL, not just PG&E) to de-energize areas that face severe wind threat/ fire risk.
This has the Doppler effect of potentially impacting huge swaths of the State if that threat impacts a “Transmission” (500/230KV) Tower corridor(s).
When that level of shut off is enacted, you don’t just flip a switch back on. The law requires PG&E to physically/visually inspect every single piece of equipment (down voltage) of the shut down BEFORE it can be re-energized. This means every tower, line, transformer, pad apparatus, substation, pole, reclosure, etc.
This is why a 2 day event can potentially keep areas dark for several days after the threat has passed. It is a MASSIVE man hrs. labor intensive process on 24/7 overtime staffing.
PG&E loses HUGE $$ when this is enacted as thousands of meters are not spinning and the labor cost to comply is huge. They don’t want to do these. They are legally mandated to now. This is the arrangement that was brokered through the PUC to balance the conflicting liability/service reliability laws. It is all driven because of California’s “Inverse Condemnation” liability conflict with PUC’s previous fining of the Company based on outage reliability.
Prior, power shut off or outage = fine. Leave it on, and have ANY% role in a fire= 100% liability.
smart move....
