PG&E can’t meet basic service requirements when the wind blows more than 25 miles per hour.
Here’s Todd Royal of Law & Liberty on the wildfires and power outages in California:
What we are witnessing is a “man-made power outage problem” caused by Democratic Party-aligned environmentalists, activist judges, and the California Air Resources Board. Obama-era environmental regulations rewrote decades-old solutions to forest management by eliminating controlled fires to clear away dead foliage, and allowed plaintiffs attorneys and judges free reign to impose crushing judicial and regulatory costs for basic land management. If these regulations continue unabated then PG&E’s grid will continuously be shut off when hot winds affect their customer base.
When government-run electrical utilities are not able—or even allowed—to use market solutions for such basic issues as cutting down trees encroaching on their utility lines, then you have Third World conditions for electricity delivery. PG&E’s main business is the transmission and delivery of energy in the forms of natural gas and electricity service “to approximately 16 million people throughout a 70,000-square-mile service area in northern and central California.” Now PG&E can’t meet basic service requirements when the wind blows more than 25 miles per hour.
As historian Dr. Victor Davis Hanson laments, “California has become America’s First Third World State.” This is the future for California “when six of the ten most destructive wildfires in the State’s history were started by faulty electrical equipment.” The promise of smart grids, which are still technologically unfeasible, won’t help PG&E control grid shutoff if it refrains from doing mundane tasks such as brush clearance, controlled fires in vulnerable areas, and updating electrical infrastructure that is over 100 years old.