Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change | Hacker News Reader

Facing $17B in Fire Damages, a CEO Blames Climate Change

bloomberg.com

61 pointssmaili54 comments

PG&E has is not trimming vegetation back sufficiently. It is an infrastructure expense that is easy to defer -- for a while.

In the Sonoma County fires, trees contacting power lines and either catching on fire directly, or causing a short leading to a transformer explosion sparked a lot of fires. Of course, 100kph winds will cause the fuel to burn wicked fast. I saw a photo of a melted cast metal BBQ grill after the Sonoma fire. A fire that hot is hard to fight in any circumstances.

As far as climate change, goes... well, maybe? We had five years of drought, followed by a very wet winter. I have property in the Sierra foothills. With dry, drought-stressed trees interspersed with a few drought-killed trees, there was a lot of standing "hot" fuel. The wet winter caused the grasses to grow like mad the next year -- by late summer, when the grass was dormant and tinder-dry, there was a lot of "cool" ground-fuel to spread fire. Some idiot drove through tall grass and the hot catalytic converter lit the grass, leading to the Detwieler fire, which burned over the top of my property -- most of which burned cool (I lost a few trees, and a 60 year old not-historical-at-all outhouse... some of my neighbors were not nearly so lucky.)

Back to PG&E maintenance practices, there was a tree that fell on a power line near my property taking a power for a short service stretch, luckily it didn't spark any more fire on the mountain.

PG&E can whine about climate change, but bottom line, they need to be much more diligent about vegetation control. It doesn't take a PhD to understand how some wind and a dry branch can cause a whole lot of trouble.

I came here to make this point, but you made it better than I would have. The Carr fire started in a similar way. A blow out on a trailer tire, and the sparks from the wheel hitting the asphalt started the whole thing. One of the large fires last year was started by a backfire. Seriously.

Way back in ancient history, the 90s, I saw 'brush hogs' all over the place in Arkansas keeping the side of the roads neatly trimmed. Dense forest existed, but it wasn't directly next to the road. Why we don't have that in California I don't know, but we don't. I have only seen brush hogs at work here a a handful of times in the 19 years I've been in California. Instead they do ridiculous things like bring in a herd of goats or sheep to graze on the medians. Just 'hog it. For starters.

I don't even want to get into the logging conversation - this isn't the time or the place. The enormous forests should have some kind of logging happening to thin them out. I'm not talking about Muir woods - I'm talking about a 50 mile radius around the great city of Redding, for example. All of the area surrounding Clearlake. All of Lake County. It's a start.

I don't know why you are downvoted -- there isn't enough management of our resources happening. State and national park services are stretched thin due to ongoing fires they don't have the time or resources to do controlled burns or clear land (they want to, they are just limited). Our forests are too dense and turn into tindersticks with one or two years of drought.

Commercial logging is not the answer, though mechanical thinning might be to get things back to a natural state before reintroducing a properly balanced fire regime with natural and if necessary prescribed fire.

PG&E needs to be doing a better job and California should consider bringing back its logging industry.

I get burning wood isn’t the cleanest energy source but dead trees are going to burn no matter what. I’d rather someone harvest it and burn it in a controlled environment rather than it rage uncontrollably.

Would composting be viable for some of it? This article claims significant carbon capture:

http://biomeiler.nl/carbon-sequestration-by-biomeiler-wood-c...

There's plenty of western states on fire right now with robust logging industries.

Which? Oregon and Washington are a small fraction of what they used to be. Federal laws (endagered species act, etc) killed off the vast majority of it, and decimated many small towns.

Idaho and Montana.

> PG&E needs to be doing a better job and California should consider bringing back its logging industry.

The logging industry will happily wipe out nice, mature, profitable trees that are robust against fire and leave behind the unprofitable brush that serves as tinder. No thanks.

Electricity infrastructure probably needs to be moved back to a core government function like roadways--especially considering that the infrastructure part is going to dominate more and more over the metered part as more renewables come online.

>The logging industry will happily wipe out nice, mature, profitable trees that are robust against fire and leave behind the unprofitable brush that serves as tinder. No thanks.

That wood waste used to power electric plants across the state before cheap renewables and solar were an option.

>Electricity infrastructure probably needs to be moved back to a core government function like roadways--especially considering that the infrastructure part is going to dominate more and more over the metered part as more renewables come online.

The forests will burn as long as Federal Lands are not managed and cut like they used to be. The Federal Forests will threaten private forests and the adjacent land will be impacted.

It’s simple, dead trees need to be cut down. Invest in as much renewable and clean energy as you want but if we don’t take care of these trees the air quality will be trashed. It’s happening right now.

If she's blaming climate change, doesn't that make PG&E culpable? IIRC the majority of their power is generated from natural gas (at least since they shut down San Ohnofre and planned closure of Diablo Canyon), not to mention what the "G" stands for.

Privatize the profits, socialize the losses...?

Works for banks alright.

If you do the math, I'd guess PG&E's share of the blame is maybe a millionth of a percent.

let's see. PG&E sells 970 billion cubic feet of gas per year [1] and the most recent study I could find pegs the CO2 output of electrical generation at 456 lbs per MWh in 2007 [2] (which is pretty low), and generated or bought about 80 terawatt-hours in 2014 [3]

456 lbs * 80,000,000 megawatt-hours = 36.5 billion lbs CO2 or 1.65 million metric tons from electrical generation/purchased generated power.

Natural gas releases 117 lbs of CO2 per thousand cubic feet [5] so 970 million * 117 lbs = 5.148 million metric tons.

California as a whole emits 359 million metric tons of CO2 per year [4] and PG&E generates 27% of the power in California, 27% of 359 million is 97 million metric tons. PG&E sells products which directly contribute 6.798 million metric tons, or about 7% of what I would consider "their share"

It's honestly lower than I was expecting but still significant.

[1] https://www.pge.com/en_US/safety/how-the-system-works/natura...

[2] http://www.pgecorp.com/corp_responsibility/reports/2007/envi...

[3] http://www.pgecorp.com/corp_responsibility/reports/2015/bu01...

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_carbo...

[5] https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php

I really appreciate you doing the math.

But the cause of global warming today is the accumulated global production of CO₂ since the start of industrialism a few centuries back.

I'll be less ambitious than you and not attempt to compute the number by my definition.

Anthropogenic climate change is a real and significant threat to the current state of our planet. That being said...

It is likely a fairly minor player in the uptick in major wildfires over the past few decades. That is more due to mismanagement of forests, and a "zero tolerance" policy towards fires allowing a huge build up of fuel loads.

> It is likely a fairly minor player in the uptick in major wildfires over the past few decades. That is more due to mismanagement of forests, and a "zero tolerance" policy towards fires allowing a huge build up of fuel loads.

Don't want to sound combative, I'm actually very interested. Do do you have any proof of that?

https://youtu.be/Y27lFsPEZ30

Tom Scott made a little 4 minute video about the topic.

Basically by letting the forrest burn more often there would be less fuel available for the next fire.

And when the fires got smaller the biggest of trees in the forrest would also be more likely to survive through the fire.

So in some forrests that’s what they do in some forrests now.

It's a fairly firmly established fact and widely understood as a major cause within firefighting and forest management circles, including the Forest Service, who is largely responsible for such practices over the past century. The natural fire regime kept forests thinned and healthy with lots of relatively small and low intensity fires that would remove standing dead and the understory while largely keeping the healthy stands intact, with occasional pockets of higher intensity fire that would open up areas in the forest (creating meadows, etc.) and making for natural buffer zones and breaks in the fuel, which further reduced the spread of bigger fires, as well as keeping the forest healthier and reducing disease. Indigenous peoples in the Americas are very well known to have managed forests with prescribed fires for centuries, if not millennia, too.

Climate change is definitely a factor for fires in the southwest as well, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_wildfire_suppressio...

What uptick? A 2016 study by the Royal Society has shown that 'Global burned area have dropped by about 25 percent over the previous 18 years'.

'Even in California, which for years has wrestled with fire devastation, a study in the International Journal of Wildland Fire found that the number of wildfires burning more than 300 acres per year has been tailing off since a peak in 1980.'

Stefan H. Doerr, Cristina Santín. Global trends in wildfire and its impacts: perceptions versus realities in a changing world. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2016; 371 (1696): 20150345

Less fires != good.

If you have less forest fires you build up fuel for the fire and the rare fire that DOES happen will be much more violent and extreme.

Natural forest fires burn away a lot of fuel for the next fires so it's smaller.

That must means more fuel is building up and burning all at once. Fires are an integral part of the forest ecosystem.

it may mean that, it must not.

we should be looking at the full distribution of wildfires year by year, but I'm not a US resident so not very acquainted with looking up what where

Ok it’s face it seems the fires are made worse by climate change, but probably caused by poor infrastructure maintenance.

Which to me begs the question, shouldn't companies be doing more maintenance to ensure fires don't get out of control? If you really believe climate change was responsible, why were they asleep at the wheel?

Otherwise it just seems like a blatant attempt to socialize the losses.

Novel, but likely ultimately to fail. IIUC, the CEO is claiming liability to PG&E is negated by the overall affect of climate change. That would likely have to be argued in court but that undertaking sounds quite massive, and would require a tremendous amount of science. What I think is really going on here is that she's trying to find someone else to take the blame, financially, and probably pushing the state to indemnify PG&E. A novel idea, but I think a court would rule this an act of God and tell PG&E that's what its insurance is for.

She isn't setting this up as a court case. She's trying to manufacture enough political cover for the governor and various other cronies to plausibly save her firm from its self-imposed predicament. They can pass any law they want, if the voting public is confused enough.

so confused we think its very nice of the legislative branch (or is it the executive) to show the judicial branch how its done?

"California Bill Would Shield PG&E, Edison from Some Wildfire Liability"

https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/west/2018/04/26/487452...

On a national level, the same thing happened for ATT etc. when Room 641A was exposed to public scrutiny. Otherwise there would have been lots of lawsuits on that. Actually, aside from the post facto nature of these particular laws, I'm glad that the courts have to defer to the legislature in defining the Law. Judges are on average even more corrupt than legislators.

Could the hot air from these fires lift a balloon? Ignoring the difficulty of attaching a burning tree to a balloon, could it lift its own weight? Fireproof Robots, cutting burning trees into neat piles, tied together, to be lifted by balloon?

Hmmm... data in the article isn’t that compelling. You’d need to go back decades to see if recent fires are out of the norm.

There's a lot of data on this subject. BuzzFeed News recently had an article about how fires have changed over the past decades: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/california...

And for the HackerNews-y type, they even made all the data and R code for the visualizations publicly available: https://buzzfeednews.github.io/2018-07-wildfire-trends/

It is hard to pin the increase on any one cause - it's a confluence of factors. Here's a perspective piece by a few well regarded experts: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/07/californ...

One of those experts is Daniel Swain, who has an excellent Twitter account which posts a lot more data: https://twitter.com/Weather_West

If we're talking climate change, you'd need to go back tens of thousands / millions of years to see if recent fires are out of the norm, with recent being defined as 10,000 years or so.

I blame firefighting causing forest change. Firefighting causing fuel levels to build up to unprecedented densities. Who put out fires before we started? Nobody. Nature handles that fine herself. But leave it to us to try to "improve" on it.

Fire suppression is a major problem, for sure. But it wasn't all natural in the past, either. Humans have been managing forests through the use of fire for a very long time, setting fires to thin out the understory and make areas more appealing to wildlife they could then hunt, etc., which would in turn make the forest healthier and less prone to megafires.

Bloomberg should hire writers that know how to proofread their writing: "He’s proposed a bill that would lesson utilities’ exposure to damages from fires, citing climate change." That tends to "lesson" their credibility.

Enlighten me, what's the typo?

they used "lesson" in the quote/article when they almost certainly meant "lessen".

Should be “lessen” instead of “lesson”

This is why the rest of the world has abandoned above-ground power lines in favor of secure underground power lines. Fewer fires, fewer black outs...

There is nowhere in the world that power lines are put underground unless there is a reason they can't go above ground: dense urban area, unable to secure a right-of-way, crossing another piece of linear infrastructure like a highway, etc.. It's way more expensive to go underground, it causes technical challenges at high voltage necessitating additional, expensive infrastructure like capacitor banks and point-on-wave energization control and it's harder and more costly to inspect, test and maintain. Insulated power cables are subject to third-party intrusion (technical jargon for people digging and hitting them), water and contaminant ingress, and it's hard to determine their condition without taking them out of service and using specialized equipment for testing. Even then, it's very hard to pinpoint the exact location of degradation and you have to dig to access it. Splicing them requires very highly trained workers and if the work isn't done right it fails in the middle of the night 5 years later.

There is more underground distribution (medium voltage) in Europe because cities are denser and older and there's less space for overhead lines. Transmission (high voltage) is still 99% above ground.

I'm a power systems engineer and I have no idea what 'rest of the world' you're talking about. The first choice for cost, reliability and ease of maintenance is always overhead.

Finland is moving quite a lot of power lines underground especially in the middle of forests, because falling trees are a problem during a seasonal storm[0]. I'm not sure how this cheaper than cutting down the trees though. Sadly most of the information is in Finnish.

>In reality, the difference in the status of power lines between Canada and Finland is not so clear-cut. As things stand now, 11% of power lines in Québec (my province of Canada) are buried, while this number is approximately 42% in Finland. The main difference though, is that Finland has an active strategy to increase this number to 65% by 2029. Helen, the energy company for Helsinki, already operates a power network buried at 97,7%.

The new law seems to demand that power outages must not be longer than 6 hours within cities or 36 hours on rural areas[1][2].

[0] https://www.tys.fi/power-lines-buried-finland-not-canada/ [1] https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-6927938 [2] https://www.tekniikkatalous.fi/tekniikka/katkoton-sahko-vie-...

> There is more underground distribution (medium voltage) in Europe because cities are denser and older and there's less space for overhead lines.

Do you know if the existence of other relatively large, underground facilities, namely subway railways, is a factor?

Is it a common/reasonable practice to use a rail tunnel for (non-rail) power distribution? I can imagine it would the advantage of not having to dig for inspectin/maintenance but a disadvantage of needing to coordinate with rail operation instead.

Only residential cables run underground really, high voltage is most of the time high up above ground because isolating it is nasty business.

"The rest of the world" is a bit of an overreach, but yes, in a lot of countries they are underground. I would say most cable runs above ground worldwide, but I have nothing to base that on besides traveling a lot.

meant to write, "rest of the _civilized_ world". :-)

Germany is my main example ... my German friends were astonished when they visited the US to see our rickety electrical infrastructure (among other things).

Do you mean that Germany buries their transmission lines? Or that the neighborhoods are built with buried wires?

Yeah, same for the Netherlands, but in many other 'civilized' world (Asia / south EU) there is a lot above ground generally. Cities are usually better than outside, but it's definitely not uncommon in big cities either.

At a certain point, it's going to cost less to cover every sun facing surface in ultra low cost photovoltaics, and have on site battery storage, than to maintain, replace and repair last mile power lines and middle-mile + long distance high voltage lines. Imagine eliminating all of the salary and benefit costs for thousands of linemen, bucket trucks, insurance, consumables, transformers, substations, not to mention the cost of poles and lines themselves.

If PV panels were $0.10/watt and Powerwall-like batteries were 1/5th of the cost they are now, per kWh stored, I can totally see a future where suburban density homes have no power grid connections at all.

What happens when it's cloudy for a few days and the batteries are dead?

Why are the batteries dead? Anyway you might be able to run a cable to your next door neighbour. I know of people who already sell solar power to their neighbours.

Batteries die when it's too cloudy for solar panels to keep them charged. And unless "you" are a licensed electrician it's highly dangerous and irresponsible to run a cable to another house. That's how fires get started and people get electrocuted. In most of the developed world it's easier, safer, and cheaper to keep a grid connection for backup even if you generate most of your own power.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com