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California’s blackout dilemma: Fire safety is colliding with grid reliability
California leaders are pushing utilities to prioritize affordability, wildfire resilience and reliability all at once, but those three goals often conflict.
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George Rose
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Topline:
The number of utility customers in California affected by intentional power shutoffs to reduce the risk of sparking fires has spiked this year. Most of the increase is in Southern California Edison's territory, where nearly 526,000 customers experienced safety outages through Aug. 1. In all of 2024, that figure was about 137,000, and it was just 34,000 in 2023.
Why it’s happening: Edison revisited its high-fire-risk-area maps and concluded that another 130,000 customers should fall into the risk zone where the utility may decide to roll out a public safety power shutoff, according to Brian Chen, Southern California Edison’s vice president of project and field engineering. At the same time, the state is coming off of two wetter-than-average years, during which vegetation has grown, increasing fire risk in many regions as those plants can become fuel during dry months.
What are the effects? Communities that have never been hit by public safety power shutoffs are experiencing them for the first time in 2025. That’s led to complaints from some rural residents who have been caught off guard by days of blackouts that left them overheated and frustrated.
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The big picture: The situation speaks to the complexity of the politics surrounding California's grid. State leaders are pushing utilities to prioritize affordability, wildfire resilience and reliability all at once. But those three goals often conflict. Deenergizing a line on a hot, windy day may be the right decision for safety, but it strikes a blow to reliability. And undergrounding lines to avoid that trade-off is pricey, upsetting advocates who don’t want to see costs passed on to peoples’ power bills. Edison has a general rate case pending before the California Public Utilities Commission, during which regulators will decide how much the utility is allowed to raise its fees. Undergrounding wires has been a key point of contention during the proceeding, dividing the utility and affordability-minded interveners who are pushing for more focus on insulated wires and fast-trip technology.
In the Legislature: The dynamics of the entire situation could also change significantly if a sprawling bill aimed at electricity affordability, SB 254, passes, as it would reshape how California’s utilities mitigate wildfires and incorporate that work into their rates.
For more ... read the full story in POLITICO’s California Climate newsletter.
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