COST-BENEFIT ASSESSMENT* OF PG&E’S EXPENDITURES FOR VEGETATION MANAGEMENT v. BENEFITS OF INFRASTRUCTURE IMPROVEMENTS 

The massive system failures in Texas these last days, has awakened the nation to how our Utilities are vulnerable. From the Big Freeze we heard words such as “It is as bad as California”.

PREFACE

Texas, also, has a history of Utility failures. Out of cold frozen nights, broken pipes and rotating power outages, comes the word that they didn’t perform:

MODERNIZATION

And it applies to us. For over one hundred years, PG&E’s treatment of thousand after thousands of miles of their distribution system has been in opposition to Modernization. Think about it, the greatest change of their primary solution to any Wildfire-Safety-Plan, has been more Vegetation Management. And over those miles and years, their modernization solution to fire ignition has been changing from a tree ax to a chainsaw.

Their bare lines exist, as a testimony to their lack of foresight.

In the enclosed paper, we will show that working on vegetation is no excuse for ignoring modernization of an antiquated system while achieving only a 5% reduction of causation of wildfire, which is not economically justified, and falls far short of making PG&E’s circuits safer compared to other operators.

Southern California Edison’s approach to a modern system is not only better, cheaper, but also significantly safer, and PG&E should, without doubt, follow SCE’s lead and drop Enhanced Vegetation Management and install covered conductors which address almost 90% of known initiators. 

Here is the pdf of the *Cost Benefit Assessment.