NFPA Journal - Winter 2022 - 57

change with ambitious renewable
energy mandates. In doing
so, they failed to recognize that
a changing climate had made
PG&E's power lines an immediate
threat to the state. " Unpack that
for us-how are climate change,
renewable energy mandates, and
energy safety connected?
This is one of the more ironic themes
in the book. Starting in 2005, California
was setting some very ambitious renewable
energy targets in pursuit of carbon
reduction. That meant adding a lot
more wind and solar to the system,
and the utilities were required to help
procure that. All three of the state's
big utilities, PG&E chief among them,
contracted for a huge amount of wind
and solar power over the years. Because
of the way the power market is set up
in California, utilities are not going
out and building these wind and solar
farms-that's important, because if
they were actually building them, they
would earn a return on their investments.
Instead, they were simply
contracting for the power from developers.
These contracts were treated as
expenses that were passed through
to customers.
How did that impact safety?
Today, wind and solar are some of our
cheapest forms of generation, but at
that time they were much more expensive.
Collectively, these companies are
spending billions of dollars on these
renewable energy contracts, which
meant that customers' rates were rising.
It's one of several factors that created
pressure to reduce expenses within
PG&E. The company did that, in part,
by reducing inspection frequency and
thoroughness. To the extent that the
regulator had any effective influence, it
was in making sure that these renewable
energy goals were met. By contrast,
the safety enforcement division was
understaffed and underfunded relative
to the policy division. So as these utilities
are racing to get these clean energy
contracts to reduce carbon over time-
at the expense of safety-the climate is
"
CALIFORNIA BURNING:
The Fall of Pacific Gas and
Electric-and What It Means
for America's Power Grid
By Katherine Blunt
Penguin Publishing Group
368 pages
$29
The fire overtook the town [of Paradise,
California] within hours. At noon,
one of PG&E's first responders, called
a troubleman, arrived at the ignition
point in a helicopter. A regional
supervisor had ordered emergency
air patrol of the transmission tower in
response to the early morning outage.
The helicopter arrived to hover at a
tall steel structure that, under normal
circumstances, scarcely elicited
anyone's attention. It had stood there
for decades, becoming one with its
surroundings, until the day it failed.
If you think about the grid as a
network of roads, transmission lines
are like highways, built to carry large
amounts of electricity over long
distances ... Transmission lines are
subject to a cardinal rule. The wires
must be kept away from one another
as well as from the towers that support
them. If the space in between them
narrows too much, electricity can jump
from wire to wire, or wire to tower, in
what's known as an arc, a lightning-like
bolt hot enough to melt metal and send
sparks flying. To reduce that risk, the
wires are suspended from strings of
insulator discs hooked to the T-shaped
arms of their towers.
Peering out of the helicopter, the
troubleman saw an insulator string
dangling. A hook about the width of a
fist had broken nearly in half, dropping
the insulator and the wire it held. An
arc of electricity surged from the wire
as it fell, scorching the tower in a blast
of molten steel and aluminum.
-From California Burning
"
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NFPA Journal - Winter 2022

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