Contractors with PG&E work in a trench to lay underground electric cables in Placer County on Oct. 17, 2024. Burying lines and other wildfire prevention projects have raised the price of electricity in California. “It’s so easy to forget the risk that we live in — until it happens to you,” said Moss, a longtime clean energy advocate. “All of us in California have to think about how we better prepare to survive disaster, which is only going to be more of a problem as the climate changes.
One of the biggest controversies is whether the utilities should be spending so much on burying power lines, an extremely costly and slow process.concluded that the utilities commission and the state’s advocates office must do more to verify whether utilities were completing the work they sought payment for.
The same day as the destruction in Paradise, another fire ignited some 470 miles south. In the Simi Hills of Ventura County, Southern California Edisonmade contact with others, triggering “arc” flashes that rained hot metal fragments and sparks onto the dry brush below. These triggered two blazes, which soon merged to form the Woolsey Fire.
“My husband stayed until the last minute, when it just — it looked like it could cost him his life,” Moss said. “Everybody else left, and just about all of us lost.” “It just takes the wrong ignition … under the right conditions, to have a catastrophic fire,” Thomas Jacobs said. “But are we in a better place? The numbers seem to indicate we’re moving in the right direction.”
SDG&E began prioritizing wildfire prevention, including underground and insulated lines, a decade ahead of the other two utilities, after its lines sparked three major fires in 2007. The company has avoided a catastrophic fire since 2007, despite operating in one of the nation’s most fire-prone regions.
“We now have this very odd system,” said Lynch, who served on the utilities commission from 2000 through 2004. “The Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety reviews the plans, puts out guidelines, but then the still has to ratify the plans, so that the utilities can take money from their ratepayers.
“In some areas, really is the correct approach to minimize risk. But it’s also very slow and very expensive, and so there’s a need to address safety in as many miles as quickly as possible, to reduce overall risk,” Campbell said.PG&E’s plan to bury 2,000 miles through 2026 to 1,230. The commission approved installing covered conductors, or insulated power lines, over 778 miles.
Geraghty, of SDG&E, said the process is transparent, with public comment periods and hearings. Regarding critics who say wildfire prevention should be cheaper and faster, “every one of them had that voice, had that say, had that transparency through this entire process,” he said.