PG&E blackout update: 40,000 in Northern California without power, with more to come
About 40,000 homes and businesses across Northern California were without power Thursday as PG&E Corp. shut the lights off to curtail wildfire risks during severe winds.
An additional 4,000 customers were expected to lose electricity sometime Thursday afternoon as a fresh wave of hot, dry Diablo winds kicks up, said PG&E spokesman Paul Moreno.
Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s “public safety power shutoff” — the third in about a month’s time — was initially expected to black out 53,000 customers. But Moreno said about 9,000 customers are being spared because of microgrids — a form of temporary generating stations — and other technologies designed to limit the footprint of its wildfire safety blackouts. That reduced the total outages to 44,000 customers.
The outages hit parts of 24 counties, mainly in the Sierra foothills and Bay Area. The blackouts began around 6 p.m. Wednesday and are expected to last through late Friday night.
Separately, the Independent System Operator, which runs the state’s power grid, issued a Flex Alert beginning at 3 p.m. The alert is a voluntary call for conservation and is designed to stave off a repeat of the rolling blackouts that hit the state during the mid-August heat storm.
State officials have been pressuring PG&E to limit the scope of its wildfire blackouts after a series of deliberate outages last October left hundreds of thousands of Californians in the dark.
At the same time, the state’s largest utility can ill afford to be blamed for causing another major wildfire.
PG&E was driven into bankruptcy by billions of dollars in liabilities from the 2017 wine country fire and 2018 Camp Fire. It’s exited bankruptcy but faces liabilities of as much as $600 million from last October’s Kincade Fire in Sonoma County — which started even though power had been shut to the region. Cal Fire has blamed faulty PG&E transmission equipment for that fire.
Meanwhile, the company is under investigation in connection with the Zogg Fire, which killed four people last month in Shasta County.
This story was originally published October 15, 2020 at 1:02 PM.