SAN RAMON, Calif. — Pacific Gas and Electric Co. was holding its weekly wildfire-safety meeting the other day, and vice president Mark Quinlan opened the session with some big news: The utility's equipment hadn't sparked a fire in more than a month.
The three dozen employees in attendance clapped, led by PG&E Corp. Chief Executive Patti Poppe.
At PG&E, going a month without a new fire earns a round of applause.
California's largest utility continues to labor with wildfire problems. Just a year removed from bankruptcy, PG&E is facing criminal prosecution over two big wildfires from 2019 and 2020, and is under federal investigation for its role in this year's Dixie Fire. PG&E's latest high-profile effort to tamp down fire risks — by dialing up the sensitivity on circuit breakers in parts of its service territory — triggered hundreds of instant blackouts, numerous customer complaints and a stern rebuke from California's top utility regulator.
But even as the beleaguered company struggles to overcome its recent history of sparking some of the worst and deadliest wildfires in California history, Poppe says PG&E is making significant strides toward hardening its grid against fire hazards.
"Every day the system is getting safer and safer," she said in an interview with The Sacramento Bee. But she added that climate change and PG&E's aging equipment will continue to present fire hazards, even as the company replaces old power poles, plants miles of wires underground and takes other steps to improve safety.
"The risk exists on our system, because of the climate and the climate conditions and the age of the infrastructure. It has to be fixed," she said.
Closing out her first year as the company's CEO, Poppe spoke with The Bee this week and allowed Bee journalists to attend the weekly hour-long stand-up meeting she holds at PG&E's Wildfire Risk Command Center in San Ramon.
Jotting notes on a computer notepad, Poppe heard updates on transmission-tower inspections, "enhanced vegetation management" and other elements of the company's wildfire plan. All four walls of the giant conference room were covered with charts and graphs tacked to white boards, topped with banners saying things like, "Catastrophic wildfires shall stop."
The meetings have been taking place since April, and Quinlan opened the proceedings with his big news: "no reportable ignitions" in more than a month, meaning no fires about which the California Public Utilities Commission had to be notified.
But Quinlan was quick to warn his colleagues against complacency. Despite the cold, damp weather and the prospect of more precipitation, he said, "It's still fire season out there."
Even amid reports of progress from around the wildfire command center, there were subtle reminders of PG&E's struggles.
Michael Ritter, senior director of vegetation management, said PG&E met its goal of performing enhanced management — creating larger-than-required buffers between trees and power equipment — on 1,800 miles of PG&E's system, mostly in the Sierra Nevada, northern Sacramento Valley and North Coast.
What made the milestone significant was that PG&E had to basically start the project over in April, he said. That's when a court-appointed monitor — who oversees PG&E's probation following its conviction in the 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion — criticized the company for not adequately prioritizing high-risk areas for this enhanced tree-trimming. The Public Utilities Commission, citing the same issue, voted last spring to ramp up its oversight of PG&E.
The increased oversight is the first step in a six-step disciplinary program imposed by the state last year as a condition of approving PG&E's exit from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. If PG&E reaches the sixth step, the state has the right to arrange for a takeover of the company.
PG&E was driven into bankruptcy by a series of horrific wildfires, capped by the Camp Fire in 2018, which destroyed most of Paradise and left the company pleading guilty to 84 charges of felony manslaughter.
Though the bankruptcy case is over, PG&E's legal woes continue. It's been indicted in the 2019 Kincade Fire in Sonoma County and last year's Zogg Fire in Shasta County, which killed four people west of Redding. It disclosed last month that it's being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department in the Dixie Fire, which burned 963,000 acres this year and was the second largest fire in the state's history.
After the Dixie Fire, the company rolled out a new safety program, called "enhanced powerline safety settings," in which circuit breakers in high-risk areas were amped up to trigger instant blackouts in case equipment came into contact with an animal, a tree or something else that could spark a fire.
The result was 600 blackouts affecting hundreds of thousands of customers, some of them more than once. Marybel Batjer, president of the Public Utilities Commission, scolded PG&E for a "shortsighted" approach that failed to warn customers that such blackouts could occur. Almost all of the circuit breakers have been dialed back to their earlier settings as fire season has waned.
Poppe said the company has fine-tuned the program to reduce the size and duration of the blackouts. At the same time, the company lauds the program for reducing fire starts and Quinlan said it will be expanded to hundreds of additional circuits when fire season begins next year.
Poppe, who joined PG&E in January after leading CME Energy Corp. in her native Michigan, said the Dixie Fire taught PG&E a particularly painful lesson: Climate and drought are raising fire danger more than the company had realized.
Although the investigation continues, all indications are that the fire started when a tree made contact with a PG&E power line. The tree was still alive, and the fire started on a day when winds were calm and there were no "red flag warnings" from the National Weather Service, she said.
Because of the drought and climate change, "we've seen all over the place trees just falling over," Poppe said. "What we learned from the Dixie Fire is that as climate conditions continue to worsen ... our response has to evolve with it."
The company is now compiling extensive data on humidity and other factors and won't rely on "external signals" such as warnings from the weather service before taking steps such as blackouts, she said.
PG&E has told investors the Dixie Fire caused damages of at least $1.15 billion — and the company plans to tap into a state-run wildfire insurance fund to cover $150 million of those costs. That would mark the first time any utility has said it will seek reimbursement from the fund, which was established by the Legislature in 2019 to bolster utility finances in case of a fire that causes more than $1 billion in damages.
Critics have said utilities shouldn't be rewarded for causing big fires. But the money is coming from utility ratepayers and shareholders, not taxpayers, and Poppe said the fund was set up so utilities wouldn't be too financially strapped to invest in wildfire safety.
The money will enable PG&E to "attract capital to rebuild the system," she said. "I definitely don't see it as a bailout."
