company. And it has a massive wildfire problem.

The utility giant PG&E filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy

protection, the company facing billions of dollars in potential

liabilities for its role in last year's deadly wildfires.

A new report out today on California's deadliest wildfire

ever the inferno north of Sacramento killed 85 people,

destroyed 18,000 homes and buildings.

The Sonoma County DA has filed criminal charges against PG&E

over its role in starting the 2019 Kincade fire.

5 of the 10 most destructive fires in California since 2015,

have been linked to PG&E's equipment. With 25,000 miles of

power lines in high fire threat areas. PG&E has spent the last

couple years relying heavily on one simple way to reduce the

risk of it causing a spark. Shut the power off.

So it happened twice for almost a full week at a time and we

essentially lost that full week of service. We lost all of our

food supply, we were not able to operate, we lost that revenue.

So now PG&E is trying out a new solution for keeping the power

on safely in remote areas. It's this small standalone renewable

microgrid in the mountains of Briceburg, California.

So this system is powering five customer meters year round 24/7

365.

PG&E is also building bigger backup microgrids as part of its

$5 billion 2021 Fire Mitigation Plan. It also includes 300 new

weather stations to monitor for severe conditions, LIDAR, drones

and hundreds of cameras to provide 90% visual coverage of

high fire threat areas, hardening the system by doing

things like moving 23 miles of line near Paradise underground,

and more aggressive clearing of trees around powerlines.

We must succeed, civilization, California, our communities need

all of us to come together to figure out how to solve all

these things at once to get clean, reliable, safe,

affordable energy. But, we have to we are not just going to pack

up and leave California.

We went to Briceburg to see the five customer microgrid that

PG&E says is proof it's committed to doing better and

visited communities asking the utility to work harder at

keeping their power on and keeping them safe.

Keeping the power on for 16 million Californians is a big

job. So is maintaining the integrity of more than 100,000

miles of power lines, while keeping it clear of vegetation

that could turn a spark into a deadly wildfire.

All this while answering to California regulators and as an

investor owned utility, shareholders.

The management of the company mostly tried in the years

leading up to Napa Sonoma and Paradise to please shareholders

by controlling costs.

The deadliest fire in California history occurred in Paradise in

2018 when a live wire broke free from a 99 year old PG&E electric

tower. It was 25 years past what PG&E considers its useful life.

85 people died.

There's one person who committed suicide in his home. As the fire

was bearing down on him he decided to take his own life,

rather than wait for the fire to consume him. So PG&E did not

plead guilty to the death of that person. But they did plead

guilty to the death of 84 other people

Clearly there were oversights. And clearly we wish it hadn't

happened.

PG&E is trying everything it can think of, because it knows that,

you know, it needs to repair its relationship with the state of

California.

By January 2019, PG&E was in bankruptcy. It emerged last year

after agreeing to pay more than $25 billion in damages to

insurers and 70,000 victims of the fires it's caused since

2015.

The way that we operated our electric system in the 20th

century, is no longer safe. We've got crumbling

infrastructure as a country, all over the place. This is not

unique to PG&E.

Indeed, investigators in Southern California found San

Diego Gas and Electric at fault for a series of fires that

killed 10 people in 2007. Texas power companies failed to keep

the power on during this year's winter storms. Portland based

Pacific Power is under investigation for the deadly

2020 wildfires. But a frontline investigation found that going

back more than a decade, PG&E resisted spending money on

preventative measures, saying wind driven fire risk and its

territory of Northern California was significantly lower than in

Southern California. But while utilities in Southern California

launched weather stations, cameras and satellites after the

2007 fires, climate change has drastically increased the risk

in the north. Last year saw five of the six largest wildfires in

California's history all in PG&E's service territory.

Since 2018, the simplest way PG&E reduces the risk of

equipment sparks is by shutting it off in high risk areas during

dry, windy weather. It calls these Public Safety Power

Shutoffs or PSPS events.

There was a big fire in 2019 called the Kincade fire that was

ignited by PG&E equipment. But because it was the only fire

during a wind event that would have ignited many, many fires,

if the power hadn't been shut off, all of Cal fires resources

were dedicated to controlling it and containing it, and that

meant that Healdsburg and Windsor didn't burn down.

PG&E had nine power shutoffs in 2019, lasting from 14 hours to

seven days and impacting at least 1.3 million customers.

That number dropped to six outages in 2020 impacting

650,000 customers. Despite earlier assurances they were

temporary, PG&E says PSPS events are here to stay.

Public Safety Power Shutoff is a tool that's probably going to be

around for quite a while. California is not getting

wetter. It's getting drier it's getting hotter.

Just to end those first couple outages. Our losses exceeded

$30,000.

Brennen Jensen is part of the quarter of California's

population. 11.2 million people who live in 4.5 million homes in

the wildland urban interface threatened most by growing

wildfire risk. In 2019, she and her husband bought the 100 year

old Hotel Charlotte in the town of Groveland, a gateway to

Yosemite.

In normal times, this would be a bustling of restaurants. When

you go through the whole process to determine whether or not to

to take over a business in a particular area, never in that

calculus did we consider that our well established major

utility could turn off the power without any real notice.

Six months into running the hotel, their first PSPS outage

lasted seven days.

One of my employees who didn't have power for several days and

had only an electric stove, you know, called me at late at night

and was like can I come to the hotel and use the propane stove

so that I can make a bottle for my infant son.

Although PG&E does have a safety net program to reimburse

residential customers up to $100 for things like spoiled food,

losses during a Public Safety Power Shutoff are not eligible.

The food was really compromised and had to all be tossed. That

was really unfortunate. Twice.

Residents in high risk areas who can afford it are putting in

generators to keep the power on.

We have seen an incredible amount of demand on Generac

products in the last 12 to 18 months. From an order intake

perspective, it doubled even tripled for a while what we were

used to seeing.

I was actually the primary operator of our generator

throughout the timeframe not sleeping all through the night.

Jensen's generator is decades old. It was so cumbersome and

costly to run during the long PSPS outages in 2019 that they

opted to shut down their restaurant before the 2020

wildfire season rather than struggle to keep the power on at

their own cost.

One improvement came in 2020 when regulators started

requiring more ample notice to customers when the power was

going to turn off. PG&E also says the power came back on an

average of seven hours sooner in 2020 compared to 2019.

Power Shutoffs are here to stay. They may get smaller, but they

are going to be something that we have to live with for the

time being until we develop technological alternatives that

really work and that's gonna take time we have to invent

stuff to get our way out of this.

That's exactly what PG&E has done in one tiny remote area for

now.

Historically, microgrids have been thought of as as a backup.

This is not the backup solution, it is the solution and we think

it's the first of its kind.

They are cranking right now because it's a very sunny

afternoon.

The big difference between this standalone power system and an

off grid solar system you might think of on a cabin in the

woods. This thing is comparable to what a wire can provide. This

system is also designed to stay energized during Public Safety

Power Shutoff.

In April, this first of its kind renewable microgrid started

providing power to five customers including two homes

and the Briceburg Visitor Center. They've been living

solely off of diesel power generators since a 5000 acre

fire destroyed their high voltage line in 2019.

These customers are not paying for this directly. This is PG&E

using its budget for distribution costs. We were

going to have to rebuild this wire one way or another, we're

choosing to rebuild it with this system instead.

PG&E commissioned Grass Valley based startup BoxPower to build

a containerized microgrid powered by a minimum of 70%

solar. It's similar to systems that BoxPower deployed in Puerto

Rico in 2018 after Hurricane Maria took out the power grid

for nearly a year.

It's solar to batteries and then the batteries maintain that so

at nighttime when the sun isn't shining, that's where the

customer is getting their power from.

Two solar arrays pump power down to be stored in a lithium ferro

phosphate battery bank in a fire resistant shipping container.

In the event that there isn't enough solar, we do have the

backup propane generators.

It's to make sure that you never run out of energy no matter what

because this is not connected to the grid. You can't get power

from anywhere else. It's all produced right here on site.

Insulated lines, then take the power up a fortified pole and

across the Merced River to three of the customers

6 or 700 feet over across the river to the homes that are now

being served off this system 24/7.

Two similar remote grids are already in the works. Although,

they're facing permitting issues due to the presence of

threatened species. PG&E is aiming to have 20 standalone

remote grids operational by 2022. With plans for several

hundred more.

Within three to five years, you'll be able to look at and

say this was not just a one off. But wow this is a pattern.

Isolating standalone power systems like this means fewer

miles of wire and fewer chances of sparks. PG&E is helping build

another 100% renewable microgrid in Humboldt County too. It'll

power 18 customers, including a regional airport and a U.S.

Coast Guard Station. And then there's 11 larger microgrids

being built as backup power for whole communities powered by

diesel generators that kick on during PSPS outages. Groveland

was supposed to get one last year, but PG&E says it's now

delayed until the end of this year.

It would be nice to have some better communication and

realistic timelines so that we can properly prepare and come up

with alternative strategies in the meantime.

Jensen who worked as an environmental scientist and

consultant before running Hotel Charlotte says that PG&E should

be powering all its microgrids and more with renewable sources

like in Briceburg.

I hope that they adopt a renewable approach that they

commit to scaling and replicating throughout the

state. This is the opportunity to be able to do this.

A few miles outside of Groveland, Jensen's friends

Deborah and Kevin Kalkowski run a four room bed and breakfast

and small ranch.

So these two horses you see here, these are Arabians.

When PG&E shuts the power off, Kevin uses this tractor to haul

five generators down from their upper farmland to keep the

business operating.

This is a 3000 watt, this is a 2000 watt. We have two of these.

In 2013, you know, we had to evacuate our guests. Yeah, that

was like our first year oh my gosh, I'm opening the business

and people are trying to come to Yosemite there's a buyer and

everything gets shut down. Luckily, in our situation where

it's unique, I can fall back on Kevin.