Misguided Public Safety Power Shutoffs

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 28 October 2020.]

Dear Gov Newsom – This is an open letter to you from an old and very disgruntled citizen who has spent the last 63 years of his life in this beautiful state.  During these decades I went to school, earned my living, raised my family here, and watched the steady decline of a once golden state.  And I can attest that it truly was the Golden State because I was there.

Today, after decades of a virtual political monopoly in Sacramento, our state has landed on the bottom of the barrel with several other equally discredited states.  We purposely raised our taxes to the highest levels, became the leader in regulatory burdens heaped on our businesses and homeowners, and are now the hands down mecca of the nation’s welfare recipients – one out of three live here.  We lead the nation in the number of homeless, and invite their filthy tent favelas that now stretch from the coastal cities to the Sierra foothills.  Our food and fuel prices have sky rocketed to the highest in the nation.  Our roads, bridges, and other infrastructures are in third-world disrepair, public employee pensions are unfunded to the tune of unpayable billions, and businesses and middle-class taxpayers are departing in droves to greener pastures.

Add to this California’s highest electricity costs and disastrous power outages that now resemble the availability of electricity in second and third world countries, and you almost have the complete picture of where we are today and the direction we’re headed tomorrow.  (more here) And that, because the state’s legislative and regulatory pipeline is chuck full of a lot more of what already pains us.  But governor, this is just a short summary of California’s deficits and decline, about which long and detailed books have been written.  On top of all this, the state’s political leaders and bureaucrats have created a problem that’s even more up close and personal, one that affects all Californians, especially those of us who live in the rural counties.

Decades of forest and wildland mismanagement by all agencies of government and their incompetently run power utilities continue to present a clear and present danger from wildfires. However, in the last years these politicized management failures have become a major disruption to our lives and livelihoods.  Specifically, I am talking about the travesty of public safety and power shortage shut-offs.  Turning off power to millions of already over-charged utility customers should be a criminal act since power shortage shut-offs are the result of abysmally poor planning practices that range from your office all the way down to the sinecured bureaucrats working for the public utilities.

And the anticipative public safety power shutoffs are totally unnecessary.  In northern California PG&E has had decades to survey and maintain their high-voltage long lines through marginally accessible landscapes.  As a result, today the likelihood of windblown vegetation caused fires should be very low.  And downed vegetation caused fires in built-up populated areas are within minutes of fire departments that can respond quickly.  All this makes large-scale public safety power shutoffs a dubious policy.  For the tens of thousands of us without power and without wind, these all have the appearance of politically motivated CYA operations. 

What reinforces this assessment is that no one from any utility or government agency has offered a more detailed reasonable basis for these power shutoffs.   Managing these shutoffs over large populated areas is a complex systems problem.  And optimizing the details of power shutoff policies should have been done long ago by our state’s technicians.  We are the technology leader in the Union, yet our governments’ application of appropriate technologies and sciences resides on the fringes of pre-enlightenment feudalism.

During weather events an obvious public safety policy is to keep the power on, pre-position fire-fighting resources, and immediately start monitoring the high-voltage long lines from the air.  The marginal cost of this early warning tactic would be more than made up by the uninterrupted revenues from rate payers.  Populated built-up areas need little monitoring since these already contain fire-safed properties, and people who live there can call the fire department. No one has explained why this obvious response policy would not work.  Instead, we behave as compliant sheep doing the same ol’ same ol’ to satisfy some mysterious purpose known only to our elites.

Gov Newsom, all Californians look to you to bring about some positive changes for a change.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

Comments

[THOMAS O'TOOLE]

George, Thank you very much!

[Gregory]

George, as someone who has spent the last 66 years of my life in this state, I think you are asking too much of the governor... he can't change the spots he was elected with.

He knows down to the marrow of his bones that the fires we are experiencing are the result of fossil fuel caused warming and accompanying drought, and people like you (and me) need to be moved from fire danger.

He's wrong, but there's no use arguing over it just yet.

[Bill Tozer]

I can understand high wind fire potentials and safety power shut offs. What I cannot get behind is putting our faith in obsolete technologies such as wind and solar, which are unreliable and not up to the task. Of all the vehicles on the road today, electric cars make up 0.5%, a million electric cars. The environmental destruction of using the strategic materials such as cobalt is enough to turn me off, not to mention the materials used need to increase 1,500 % to meet Gavin’s goals, plus a ton of subsidies. Think Tesla and how they got rich.

The physics show that we can only get 17% more efficiency/energy out of future solar panels to max out and wind and solar will never satisfy the current demand needed in a growing state, not to mention adding millions of electric go-carts on the road.

Yes, I have veered off topic.
Bottom line: Gov. Newsome might as well go to Philadelphia and stand in the midst of smoldering rioted buildings and declare “The science settled.” Cut the power.

[scenes]

re: BillT@7:01AM

Energy efficiency is fairly straightforward to achieve, you simply up the density of human bodies. You just make it impractical to build single family homes, especially on acreage, and move everyone into an apartment block where they can do internet marketing and non-profit grant writing from their assigned unit. This will leave plenty of room for the magic of xenophilia to do it's work as we fill up the buildings with those from rapidly expanding populations.

Add a few monorails and state-owned farms and you've achieved nirvana.

Upper management will be assigned some Ladas with the occasional ZIL. They can be 'lectric powered of course.

As far as Newsom is concerned, he's just the mouthpiece for the forces that run the place, no surprise there. Act as if you are on your own and you won't be disappointed. There's simply too much inertia in the direction of higher taxes, lower power availability, and plenty of homeless and generally unmaintained property to burn everything down.