PG&E Unveils 'Moonshot' Effort to Underground 10,000 Miles of Distribution Line to Reduce Wildfire Risk

Written by John Egan for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Pacific Gas & Electric (San Francisco, California) last week announced a plan to underground about 10,000 miles of distribution lines, at an estimated cost of $20 billion or more, to reduce the danger of wildfires sparked by utility equipment. The July 21 move came as the utility, a unit of PG&E Corporation (NYSE:PCG) (San Francisco), acknowledged that a tree fell on one of its power lines, breaking it and possibly causing the Dixie Wildfire. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Sacramento, California) said that fire, which is only one-fifth contained, has burned at least 142,000 acres in Butte and Plumas counties in northern California. The fire began July 13.

PG&E provides electricity to about 5.5 million customers across a service territory of about 70,000 square miles in northern and central California. Much of its northern California service area is heavily wooded. Wildfires have wracked its service area in recent years, some triggered by failing utility equipment. In 2017, devastating wildfires scorched wine country in northern California. In 2018, the Camp Fire destroyed the city of Paradise, about 82 miles north of Sacramento, killing at least 85 people and destroying about 14,000 homes. In 2019, failing PG&E equipment sparked the Kincade Fire, which burned more than 77,000 acres of vegetation in Sonoma County, the heart of California wine country.

State regulators and the courts have fined the utility billions of dollars for failing to maintain its equipment and causing fires. The company, which filed for bankruptcy protection in 2019 after amassing $30 billion in wildfire liability, pleaded guilty last year to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter related to the 2018 Camp Fire. The company's wildfire liabilities included a $13.5 billion cash-and-stock settlement with California wildfire victims in 2019.

At a July 21 media event in Chico, California, PG&E Corporation Chief Executive Patti Poppe described the magnitude of the utility's wildfire prevention challenge by invoking former President John F. Kennedy's 1962 moonshot speech: "We do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win."

"We will make it safe, and we will bury the lines," she said.

"We know that we have long argued that undergrounding was too expensive," she said. "This is where we say it's too expensive not to underground. Lives are on the line."

She extolled the efforts, and the occasional bravery, of PG&E employees who worked to reduce wildfire dangers, chiefly by trimming trees. "That tree that fell on our lines (on July 13) is one of 8 million trees that are in threat distance to our lines. (Wildfire mitigation) is an extraordinary problem. This year alone, we will remove over 300,000 trees (from our service area). We will trim more than 1 million trees. We will harden hundreds of miles of our lines." The tree-removal and tree-trimming efforts reportedly will cost $1.4 billion this year.

"Today, there are thousands of people working on our system, making it safer today than it was yesterday, and it will be safer tomorrow than it is today. Yet we are still dissatisfied. You deserve better."

The undergrounding effort is expected to take years. PG&E officials confirmed the utility was undergrounding about 70 miles of distribution line this year. At that rate, it would take over a century to underground 10,000 miles of distribution line. Adam Wright, PG&E's executive vice president of operations and chief operating officer, told reporters, "I could see a future where we (underground) 1,000-plus miles per year, and this continues to accelerate."

In an email to Industrial Info, PG&E spokesperson Paul Doherty said, "There will be an initial ramp-up period due to limitations in our supply chain and labor force. Within a couple of years, we will be doing 10X the mileage we are doing today and even more."

In a call with reporters, Poppe acknowledged going from the current rate of 70 miles of undergrounding lines per year to 1,000 miles would be "the moonshot. It should be a shocking number because it's a big goal."

In a separate regulatory filing by the utility, it estimated it could cost about $4 million to underground one mile of distribution line. That could bring the cost of undergrounding 10,000 miles of distribution line to $40 billion. Industrial Info was unable to confirm that number with PG&E.

This project is said to be the largest such effort in highly wooded and rugged terrains among electric utilities in the U.S. News reports estimated the cost at $15 billion to $20 billion, but some said the initiative could cost up to $40 billion.

Additional details, such as when the program would begin and what it would cost, were not immediately available. The company said it would prioritize undergrounding of distribution lines in High Fire Threat Districts (HFTD), without specifying where those areas were.

In his emailed statement to Industrial Info, spokesperson Doherty said, "We are still in early days in scoping this program. Our initial focus is on distribution, but we will also be exploring the undergrounding of transmission lines." He added: "We will engage stakeholders as partners early and throughout the process. We cannot do this alone. We will need the counsel and partnership of local communities and governments to work with us to make this critical work a reality."

Doherty confirmed estimates that the work could cost $15 billion to $20 billion, possibly more: "We're committed to completing this work as safely and affordably as possible. Given the early stages of our effort, we're not yet at the point of scoping all of the costs, and we're starting this conversation now because we want the ideas others bring to help us do this in a smart way."

At the July 21 media event, CEO Poppe "We were going to make this announcement in a couple of months, when we had a little more meat on the bones. But we couldn't wait, particularly given the emotional toll (wildfires) take on all of us. We need you to know we are working night and day to solve this incredible problem."

PG&E said it maintains more than 25,000 miles of overhead distribution power lines in the highest fire-threat areas (Tier 2, Tier 3 and Zone 1), which is more than 30% of its total distribution overhead system.

To dramatize the scale of the effort, PG&E said 10,000 miles is nearly halfway around the world, or roughly 1.5 times the distance between San Francisco and China.

The company said the exact number of projects or miles undergrounded each year will evolve as it performs further project scoping and inspections, estimating and engineering review.

Between 2018 and 2020, PG&E said it completed multiple demonstration projects aimed at converting overhead power lines to underground in high fire-threat areas of Alameda, Contra Costa, Nevada and Sonoma counties. Learnings from those efforts will be deployed to lower the costs of its massive undergrounding effort.

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