Pacific Gas and Electric (PGE), which has spent more than $2 billion on the program, has deemed the program inadequate and will be shifting strategies, according to internal documents first reviewed and reported by The Wall Street Journal.
“PG&E has increased our investment in wildfire mitigation efforts by $2 billion over the last five years (from $3.8B to $5.5B),” Matt Nauman, a spokesperson for PG&E confirmed to The Hill in a written statement.
PG&E implemented its so-called “enhanced vegetation management” program in 2019, following multiple destructive wildfires, to supplement existing tree-trimming protocols in high-risk fire zones.
“We develop and implement our wildfire mitigation programs based on the best information and data that we have at the time, and our capabilities have continued to evolve and mature since 2019,” Nauman said.
California state law already requires utilities to conduct a certain amount of trimming, but the company stressed that it was working “to exceed fire safety standards.”
The enhanced vegetation management initiative involved pruning limbs and branches that overhang the 4-foot clearance zone around power lines, while aiming for a 12-foot clearance minimum at the time of pruning. Workers also cut down dead and diseased trees, while evaluating the health of those tall enough to collide with electric equipment.
But the program only resulted in a 13 percent decrease in ignitions during periods of high fire risk and a 7 percent reduction year-round, the Journal reported, citing the internal analyses.
PG&E is now instead opting to rely on “Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings” in at-risk regions — in which lines cease operating within a tenth of a second of touching an object, according to the Journal.
In 2022 — the first year the company fully deployed the technology — PG&E cited a 68 percent decrease in ignitions on safety setting-enabled circuits, the company said in a statement.
There was also a 99 percent decrease in areas impacted by ignitions — in comparison to the 2018-2020 average — despite the dry conditions that year, according to PG&E.
This alternative approach, which is both safer and cheaper, will enable the company to reduce tree-trimming spending by around $1 billion from 2023-2026, the Journal reported.
“To be clear, the essential work of our trained PG&E arborists and our contract vegetation-management crews to keep trees away from power lines will continue,” Nauman said.
About 5,500 employees and contractors are working in Northern and Central California to prevent trees and limbs from making contact with power lines on a daily basis, according to Nauman.
PG&E had indicated that a shift might be in store this past spring, when the company presented a 2023-2025 Wildfire Mitigation Plan to California’s Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety.
The plan prioritized the undergrounding of about 10,000 miles worth of power lines, while also touting the success of its 2022 launch of “enhanced powerline safety settings.”
That year, more than half of PG&E customers whose lines gained these settings did not experience a power outage while the technology was enabled, the company noted, while recognizing that such failures “are an inconvenience.”
Following the submission of the plan, the California Public Utilities Commission expressed concern that “PG&E’s reliability has substantially decreased” due to the shutdown system.
A total of 2,375 related outages affected more than 2 million customers, the commission noted in a spring report published by the Public Advocates Office.
“At the root cause level, PG&E’s aging and deteriorating
distribution assets are contributing to poor service reliability,” the report stated.
But PG&E maintained on Wednesday that the size of fires that do occur are now much smaller due to its Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings system.
“By stopping ignitions, we help prevent fires from starting and spreading,” the company said.
