PG&E anticipates cutting Northern California customers’ power more frequently this fall as the state braces for wildfire season amid extreme and exceptional drought conditions.
Although the company expects smaller outages than the nine that affected 2 million customers in 2019, PG&E Chief Risk Officer Sumeet Singh told The Wall Street Journal that new shut-off criteria, the state’s dry weather and strong seasonal winds could lead to more outages than a year ago.
"The big, big variable that’s unpredictable here is the wind," Singh said. "But in all the forecasts that we’ve done, we do not see ourselves getting back to the same kind of (power shut-off) events like we saw in 2019."
Marin, Napa, Solano, Sonoma and at least part of Alameda, Contra Costa and San Francisco counties are in exceptional drought conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, while San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, along with the rest of the Bay Area, are in extreme drought conditions.
Over 85% of the state is in extreme drought conditions, compared to fewer than 3% a year ago. None of the Bay Area counties were under such conditions a year ago.
Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared the state’s drought emergency had expanded to 41 counties.
PG&E disclosed in regulatory filings last month that it’s behind on its work trimming trees and inspecting power lines, but Singh told the paper that the company expects to be back on track by the fall. Under the company’s new shut-off criteria, a result of a federal judge’s recommendations, PG&E now must consider whether its power lines could be hit by trees during windstorms.
Singh said PG&E has taken additional steps to reduce the need for large outages, including building a network of weather stations to more accurately monitor conditions and installing devices that would enable more targeted shut-offs.
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