PG&E accelerates powerline undergrounding
Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) is to accelerate its goal to underground 16,000km of lines as part of its wildfire mitigation plans.
PG&E plans to underground at least 280km of powerlines this year. Further, it plans to increase the pace to complete approximately 5,800km – roughly one-third of the total – by 2026.
This major initiative should reduce the risk of damage from fires but also should reduce the long term costs of vegetation management, with a reduction in the need for trimming and removing trees.
Alongside the undergrounding PG&E also intends to expand its ‘Enhanced powerline safety settings’ programme to reduce the risk of ignitions from its electric equipment in the short term.
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The programme, piloted in 2021, is aimed to provide additional safeguards against fire ignitions by automatically shutting off power when objects such as a tree or branch fall onto a powerline. The settings decreased CPUC reportable ignitions on enabled circuits in high fire-risk areas by 80% during the pilot in 2021 compared to the prior three-year average, leading to a decrease in average customer outage durations on these circuits by 40%.
PG&E plans to expand the programme across all 25,500 distribution line miles in high fire-risk areas, as well as select adjacent areas in proximity to high fire-risk areas. Improvements in 2022 are designed to reduce the number of customers impacted, perform rapid and safe power restoration and improve customer communication and resources.
“PG&E has taken a stand that catastrophic wildfires shall stop, and our wildfire mitigation plan for 2022 details the work we are doing right now to make that stand a reality,” commented PG&E Corporation CEO Patti Poppe.
“Undergrounding powerlines and expanding enhanced powerline safety settings represent the best mix of long- and near-term solutions to make it safer every day for our hometowns while keeping our customers’ energy costs and bills as low as possible.”
Other proposals for 2022 include improved situational awareness and forecasting with the installation of additional wildfire cameras and weather stations in high risk areas.
Public safety power shutoffs, used as a last resort to reduce the risk of catastrophic fire, also are set to be improved with such events on a much more targeted basis.
Longer term, plans include hardening the overhead infrastructure with the installation of stronger poles and covered lines, making at least four additional temporary distribution microgrids operationally ready and operating two new remote grids.
PG&E also will install additional automated devices to sectionalise the grid in order to reduce the customer impacts of safety shutoffs.
Inspections of transmission and distribution structures in extreme fire-threat areas, which includes more than 390,000 distribution poles and nearly 39,000 transmission structures also will be completed.
