by Craig S. Harrison, Moira Jacobs and Chris Gralapp 

PG&E recently announced it will reduce its multibillion-dollar program to trim trees that grow near powerlines. The program involves pruning branches that overhang the 4-foot clearance zone around powerlines, while creating a 12-foot clearance at the time of pruning. Workers also remove dead trees. PG&E has accomplished a great deal of vegetation work in Bennett Valley in recent months, but we are unsure the extent to which this change in focus will affect future vegetation management here. 

PG&E increased its investment in vegetation management from $3.8B to $5.5B since 2019 following many destructive wildfires. The company now deems the program to be inadequate and is relying instead on “Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings” (EPSS) in at-risk regions such as Bennett Valley. EPSS began this year in Bennett Valley on July 11, and when an object such as a bird or tree limb touches a powerline, it ceases operating within a tenth of a second.

PG&E states in 2022 it achieved a 68 percent decrease in ignitions on safety setting-enabled circuits, which resulted in a 99 percent decrease in areas impacted by ignitions compared to 2018-2020. The company also states that the size of fires that do occur are now much smaller due to its EPSS system.

The company submitted a 2023-2025 Wildfire Mitigation Plan to California’s Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety earlier this year, which prioritized the undergrounding of 10,000 miles of powerlines. However, undergrounding is moving forward very slowly and there is no commitment to bury any lines in Bennett Valley.

PG&E states that more than half of its customers with EPSS did not experience a power outage, but conceded outages are an inconvenience when they do occur. Bennett Valley experienced scores of outages during 2022 [link to January 2023 VOICE], and the company has promised to improve. Since EPSS was enabled on July 11, PG&E’s records indicate that Bennett Valley experienced outages on July 23 (302 customers), July 24 (302 customers), and August 13 (843 customers). The cause of one outage is unknown, and the other two were equipment failure and vegetation. The authors have also experienced outages on June 8, July 7, and July 15.

The California Public Utilities Commission stated that “PG&E’s reliability has substantially decreased” due to EPSS.  More than 2 million customers have suffered 2,375 EPSS-related outages. The commission concluded that the root cause of PG&E’s problems is its “aging and deteriorating distribution assets.”

The outages in Bennett Valley so far this summer are fewer and seem to be of shorter duration than in 2022. The longest was three hours. This is progress, but still far too many. Because of the suddenness of the outages, Bennett Valley residents without a battery or generator have their lives disrupted frequently. We solicit a resident of Bennett Valley to research subsidies for batteries and generators and to write an article on this topic for the VOICE.