Groan...
I was just reading the NOAA weather report last night and seeing it's likely to be over 90F this week and windy where it's normally only mid 70's.
PG&E is a dysfunctional corporation. They give monopolies a bad name. The governor needs to declare a state of emergency and assume control. No other utility anywhere de-energizes entire systems because it might be windy.
I'm sure there are many hard-working dedicated people at PG&E, but their management is completely out of their depth. This is shameful.
Not only that, but PG&E haunts the entire nation. A group of current and former employees shot up Metcalf substation out of revenge and because of that now every utility has to pay for erecting concrete bunkers outside of their substations.
I'm not singling anyone out on here, but over the years I've rightfully bashed PG&E on professional forums only to be met with contempt and outrage. I can not confidently say time has vindicated me.
"Telling the truth is never wrong, no matter if you're the only one telling the truth, you'll always be right, the rest will always be wrong."
I've gotten two emails and two texts that they're gonna yank the cord out tomorrow late afternoon.
I just barely got my off-grid installed this week. I'll have to extension-cord it if I need it.
I see this whole thing as an energy management failure by the state and Feds. For a hundred years they've run the entire state as a solar energy storage bank. Banking decades of energy as fuel on the ground and in the sky - plants. They've never done off season burns to maintain a fixed, reasonable fuel loading in the wilds. So now if anything lights it off, in our new hotter dryer windier wild-lands, it's almost always a massive conflagration. It can be a guy with a lawnmower, a car wreck, a ciggybutt, lightning, Pacific Graft and Extortion and woooosh!! Instead of a couple of hundred or even thousand acres and a few burned homes and freaked-out people you have hundred thousand acre town-erasing maelstroms and dead people. And, enough lawsuits to bankrupt even the biggest monopoly around.
The wild-lands should be allowed to burn or encouraged to burn, off season with a management plan that cycles all the problem wild-lands regularly. This has the additional effect of forcing people to keep their fire setbacks and breaks maintained and functional as they'd be faced with regular fires.
After PG&E shut off 1/2 2+ million people via distribution shutdowns they left a transmission line on and a tower jumper wire failed in the origination area.
