[Newsbot]

Title: Californians fume over PG&E power outage:
Category: Uncle Sam
Posted By: Martin15
Date: 2019-10-09 14:18:45

[Martin15]

Millions of Californians could spend days without power as the state�s largest utility continues shutting off electricity in a desperate attempt to avoid wildfires sparked by windblown power lines.

The first power cutoffs, affecting about 513,000 Pacific Gas & Electric Co. customers, began shortly after midnight Wednesday in several counties around Sacramento, including Placer and Yuba. Roughly five hours later, the outages had extended to Humboldt County to the north, Marin County to the south and Nevada County to the east, according to a map provided by the utility.

The second phase of the shutoff was expected to begin around noon in areas around Silicon Valley and the East San Francisco Bay, but the utility said those outages would be delayed until later in the day. About 234,000 customers in Alameda, Alpine, Contra Costa, Mariposa, San Joaquin, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Stanislaus, Tuolumne and parts of Mendocino and Calaveras counties are expected to lose power by the evening.

[Martin15]

The fallout from this is going to be epic.

[DrCaleb]

Why? It's the classic race to the bottom. People want cheap power, PG&E put poles in place as cheaply as possible. That results in outages, and/or deaths.

This is the intended result.

[BartSimpson]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

Why? It's the classic race to the bottom. People want cheap power, PG&E put poles in place as cheaply as possible. That results in outages, and/or deaths.

This is the intended result.

Uh, not so simple.

PG&E wanted to put their high tension and rural lines underground for decades. They managed to get it done in some areas but it's been effectively banned in others by short sighted fools who don't want their daily lives upset while necessary construction occurs.

Then the State of California made it even easier for residents and environmental groups to extort money from PG&E for all manner of nonsense thus slowing down a much needed project with bullshit...

https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/c ... ogram.page

The result has been two massive fires where PG&E was threatened with fines if they had shut off power. That resulted in a lawsuit where PG&E was found at fault for a decision that was made by the Public Utilities Commission.

And now PG&E has the weight of law to cut off power in fire prone areas.

Good.

Now maybe the fucking NIMBYs and the extortionate Sierra Club will get the fuck out of the way to let PG&E get all of their lines underground like they wanted to do decades ago.