Maybe The Evil Power Company Ain't So Bad Afterall

As everyone knows, PG&E has gotten excoriated for all of its major mistakes and infrastructure problems that have led to deadly fires in the past.

One of the solutions was to anticipate Red Flag fire conditions and turn off the power lines that often spark the fires.

This last week, they did just that and, predictably, their turn-off procedure left something to be desired. In many cases they turned off the power nearly 24 hours before there was any wind. People were furious.

Turning this stuff on and off doesn't look very simple.

I'm no apologist for the power company. But I wondered if turning off power was not very easy to coordinate. For example, in our house, if you are worried about a fire in the back bedroom and you turn off the breaker that supplies the electricity to that bedroom, you end up also turning off power to the bathroom, where there may have been no fire concern.

In addition, the people working the switches to turn off power to ABCville probably aren't in ABCville and have never even been there. Hard for them to know the nuances of ABCville powerline risks etc.

Now that the Red Flag warning has passed, it seems that NorCal had no major powerline-caused blowups. Maybe no deaths from fire at all.

So while we're piling on our complaints about how PG&E handled the power shutdown, let's try to remember that.

Maybe, just maybe, PG&E succeeded at doing what everyone wanted them to do. Which is to minimize the fire risk to Northern California.