Greentech Media
Summary
Pacific Gas & Electric is turning to a decidedly low-tech solution to keep its customers’ lights on for this year’s coming fire season: mobile diesel generators.
The bankrupt utility is struggling to secure its grid from causing more deadly wildfires and has been stymied in attempts to set up natural-gas-backed microgrids to power substations during fire-prevention blackouts. But California regulators are adamant that PG&E must find a more permanent and less costly and polluting backup plan in the years ahead — even if it’s not clear yet what form it may take.
On June 11, the California Public Utilities Commission plans to vote on a proposed decision that would greenlight PG&E’s plan to secure up to 450 megawatts of mobile generators to back up communities during public-safety power outage events this summer and fall.
PG&E’s “Temporary Generation Plan” is a major expansion from its use of mobile generators last year, when forced switch-off events caused blackouts for millions of Northern California residents, some for days at a time. Those blackouts did, however, prevent a repeat of the catastrophic grid-sparked fires of 2017 and 2018 that killed scores of people and caused the tens of billions of dollars of damages that pushed PG&E into bankruptcy last year.
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