On Thursday, March 24th, the California State Auditor released a detailed audit of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety’s (OEIS) oversight of electrical system safety with respect to utility wildfire mitigation efforts. 

The Audit shared some interesting statistics, including: 

  • PG&E owns the vast majority of uninsulated powerlines in high fire threat areas (33,000 miles of 40,000 miles of uncovered conductors operated by the six investor-owned utilities) 

  • Powerlines are responsible for 74% of utility-related wildfire ignitions.   

  • While Southern California Edison is working to replace its bare lines with covered conductors (roughly $700,000 per mile), PG&E is implementing other system hardening efforts, increasing the sensitivity of its system shutoff settings, and planning to underground 10,000 miles of distribution lines over the next several years (average cost of roughly $3 million per mile with a range between $93,000 and $5 million per mile in rural and urban areas respectively).   

  • It is estimated that Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) events cost roughly $42/day for residential customers and $12,600/day for small and medium sized businesses, costing a total of $21 billion to date.   

The Auditor estimates it would cost approximately $28 billion to replace the 40,000 miles of bare power lines in high fire risk areas.  It also noted that “the significant cost of making improvements necessary to prevent the need for power shutoffs, such as installing covered power lines or moving them underground, may be one of the reasons why the improvements have not yet been made.  However, even if these improvements cost billions of dollars, [Southern California Edison] estimates of customers’ costs during power shutoffs indicate that power shutoff’s have cost more than $21 billion to date.”   

Importantly, the Auditor highlighted that OEIS does not consider the outages related to last summer’s PG&E Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings (EPSS) to be covered by a new law, Senate Bill 533 of 2021.  RCRC strongly supported that bill, which requires utility Wildfire Mitigation Plans (WMPs) to identify circuits that frequently experienced planned outages and the measures that will be taken to reduce the need for and impact of those outages in the future.  The 600+ EPSS outages over the course of a few months in 2022 impacted over 650,000 customers, with an average of 1,000 customers per outage and an average duration of over 17 hours.   

The Auditor observed that while utilities’ use of PSPS events as a wildfire mitigation tool are declining, these decreases are due to more sensitive powerline safety settings that trigger more frequent outages for a smaller universe of customers.   

Disturbingly, OEIS’s response to the audit seems to indicate that it believes energy safety and reliability are mutually exclusive and that recent outages are merely “inconvenient” for customers.  This is inconsistent with CPUC assertions to the contrary which note the disruptive nature of the outages and the serious health and safety impacts that can result.  The Auditor strongly rebutted OEIS’s audit response, arguing that reliability and safety go hand in hand and that safety improvements will enhance reliability. 

The Audit made several recommendations to improve oversight, safety, and reliability, including: 

  • Require utility WMPs to disclose improvements necessary to prevent future power shutoffs, such as installing covered power lines. 

  • Require utility WMPs to disclose the number of circuits frequently deenergized as a result of enhanced powerline safety settings. 

  • Require OIES to find that a utility substantially implemented its WMP before issuing a safety certification that allows that utility to access the Wildfire Fund. 

  • Create a risk-based routine audit schedule of IOUs, and a schedule of penalties for violations discovered during CPUC audits. 

For more information, please contact RCRC Policy Advocate, John Kennedy.