The California wildfires, the third year in a row for a high fire season, raise a number of perplexing questions: are these evidence of global warming affecting the ecosystem; are investor-owned utilities incapable of protecting the public; have the state’s aggressive renewable energy goals diverted resources away from protecting the grid?
There are no definitive answers, but some interesting avenues of inquiry.
Has California’s climate changed to the point of rendering the state more vulnerable to wildfires? On Monday’s top-notch NPR news talk show “On Point,” Arizona State University fire historian Steven Pyne noted that “California is built to burn, and it’s built to burn explosively,” meaning that the state’s environment, including dry chaparral, lots of combustible forest, an arid climate, and seasonal high winds are a recipe for wildfires. “And almost everything people have done over the last 150 years has aggravated those conditions,” he said.
What’s the role of a warming climate? According to Pyne, “Climate change is acting as an enhancer.” Over the years, California, understanding it fire vulnerability, has had an aggressive firefighting program, pouring funds and manpower into rural firefighting, using the model of urban fire control. But, says, Pyne, “That model has failed. We simply can’t respond fast enough and vigorously enough and we never will under these conditions.”
Should non-profit public power systems replace the state’s investor-owned utilities? Does the profit-making structure of the state’s dominant utilities – PG&E, San Diego Gas & Electric, and Southern California Edison – lead to skimping on maintenance funding, which does not earn a rate of return compared to capital expenditures? Would government-owned utilities perform better at fire protection? That’s a popular option, particular in San Francisco, which has long coveted PG&E’s system (its home-town utility).
Despite the political appeal (particularly to Bernie Sanders fans), there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that municipalizing the state’s investor-owned utilities would result in better fire protection. “Power lines are not just a problem in California,” said Pyne. “They are magnified there” because of the winds. In Tennessee, where the federal government’s Tennessee Valley Authority owns generation and transmission, a 2017 wildfire near Gatlinburg killed 24 and caused evacuations of more than 14,000.
In California, as Ted Nordhaus of The Breakthrough Institute in Oakland., Calif., noted on the NPR’s “1A” talk show Wednesday, the Getty and Tick fires in Los Angeles are in the service territory of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the nation’s largest municipal utility.
While the structure of public power – munis and rural electric cooperatives – gives them financial advantages, including avoiding taxes, their historic mission has not been to invest in reliability but to keep customers rates lower than the competing investor-owned utilities. Repairing existing infrastructure and investing in new is very expensive, whether for public power or private companies.
California Gov. Gavin Newsome has made fulsome proclamations about forcing the states IOUs into better behavior, including the possibility of a state takeover. That’s purely posturing entirely impactical. PG&E is in bankruptcy reorganization, and court protection. A state trying to gobble up the private power system would take, at best, decades. In the meantime, the utility’s delivery infrastructure would continue to degrade.
Has California’s drive to improve environmental performance of its jurisdictional utilities, including eschewing coal and pushing solar, diverted resources from keeping its grid in good repair? That’s a tough question, but the answer is probably not.
The libertarian Institute for Energy Research wrote recently, “For years, the state made the utility spend billions on wind and solar power and electric-car subsidies when it should have been inspecting and clearing lines. Credit Suisse estimated that the utility’s long-term contracts with renewable developers cost the utility $2.2 billion annually above current market power rates.” That’s factually true, but makes an assumption that if PG&E had not been forced to buy wind and solar generation, it would have spent the saved dollars on maintaining its transmission and distribution system. More likely, it would have spent those savings on boosting its bottom line and paying shareholder dividends.
What’s the bottom line on the California wildfires? It’s easy to blame PG&E, the state’s largely supine California Public Utilities Commission, and adopt the political posturing of Gov. Newsome. But that feel-good response doesn’t accomplish much.
The real task is coming up with practical solutions to a long-festering, systemic problem. Building new resources – bridges, roads, pipelines, power plants, and transmission lines – gets a lot of attention. Keeping the infrastructure in shape doesn’t. That’s got to change. How? Beats the heck out of me.
— Kennedy Maize