What can we learn from the blackouts in California?

In early October of this year, California experienced sweeping blackouts across the state. People were left flustered as school and workplaces were shut down, emergency services struggled to find backup generators, and daily life got a whole lot harder for over 2 million people.

So why would any utility company choose to do this?

To avoid something even worse… igniting devastating wildfires.

Image taken from Vox.com. Photograph by Hans Gutknecht/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images

Due to climate change, California has experienced and will continue to have more frequent and intense drought periods. Unfortunately during times of high winds during drought conditions, sagging transmission lines near mismanaged forests can easily spark quickly spreading wildfires.

In November of 2018, California experienced its most deadly wildfire, Camp Fire near the town of Paradise. This fire was attributed to an aging transmission tower owned by Pacific Gas and Electric, PG&E, California’s biggest utility company.

So this year, when the conditions indicated a high risk of fire, PG&E shut off the lights. The only problem is they didn’t do a very good job of notifying their customers. To make things worse, their website crashed midway through the outage!

This article describes the multitude of cascading events leading up to the recent California blackouts. However, in California, preventative blackouts will become the norm in order to avoid deadly wildfires.

To Virgin Islanders, unexpected blackouts and poorly managed utility companies sound all too familiar. So is there anything we can learn from what is occurring in California and can Californian utilities make the best of a bad situation?

There is hope and the answer is hazard mitigation, resilience and distributed energy.