News Article

July 22, 2007
There goes the power. Again.
The Valley suffers more outages than neighboring regions.
Is it the weather? Or has PG&E failed to keep up with growth?
By Brad Branan / The Fresno Bee

If you think the Fresno area gets more than its share of electrical blackouts, you're right.

Customers in the Fresno division of Pacific Gas & Electric Co. go without power longer than those in most areas served by the utility in Central and Northern California, according to a report the utility filed with state regulators.

Last year, Fresno-area customers suffered an average of 203 minutes of outages -- 34% more than the average for PG&E.

That doesn't even include blackouts during periods that the government designates as emergencies, such as the deadly weeklong heat wave in the Valley in July 2006.

And overall, PG&E blackout figures are about one-third higher than those of Southern California Edison's, and three times that of San Diego Gas and Electric's.

Experts blame a range of factors for the Valley's low power reliability, including air-conditioner use during its hot summers and an aging electrical grid that has not been able to keep up with rapid population growth.

The consequences are widespread. Businesses lose customers. Health risks rise for the elderly and other vulnerable people. And it's just plain inconvenient.

"It seems the bill is going up, but the consistency of the service is going down," said Clint Nichols, whose house near Shaver Lake went without power for about 30 hours during an outage this past winter.

Equipment failure is the biggest reason for power outages in the Fresno district, figures from the California Public Utilities Commission show.

Such failures accounted for 37% of outages last year, followed by "unknown" reasons at 31%.

During the July 2006 heat wave, for example, a PG&E spokesman identified equipment failure as a factor in two large outages in west-central Fresno and the Pinedale neighborhood.

At the time, the spokesman said transformers had overheated under the strain of high air-conditioner use.

Experts say PG&E has not invested enough in its aging electric grid to keep up with the area's population growth.

"The PG&E system was built some time ago," said Patrick Mealoy of Navigant Consulting, who has provided service to a PG&E competitor. "Investment in the utility infrastructure hasn't kept up with growth in California, and the San Joaquin Valley is the fastest-growing part of the state."

The point was echoed by San Francisco consulting firm KEMA Inc., which wrote in a report two years ago that PG&E distribution equipment "is getting older both in terms of average age and the percentage of very old equipment. ... PG&E increasingly will have to become more proactive in addressing issues related to aging equipment."

PG&E counters that the Valley loses power more often than most in part because it is largely rural, which means it has more exposed service lines and fewer backup lines than do more urban areas.

PG&E, a Fortune 500 company that reported nearly $1 billion in profit last year, has questioned whether customers want to pay more for improved reliability.

All the same, PG&E officials agree that parts of the Fresno division system are old.

The company has spent about $225 million in the last three years on Fresno division improvements, company spokesman Jeff Smith said.

Capital spending will go up slightly this year because of a new $24 million substation in southeast Fresno that began operating at the start of July.

That is the only distribution substation the utility has added in the division since 2000, when one was built in Pinedale. The division has 65 distribution substations.

"We're always looking for ways to improve," Smith said. "That's why we make the investments we do."

Power failures in the PG&E system in Northern California led the state Public Utilities Commission to create reliability standards in 1996. As a result, the five investor-owned utilities in the state have to submit annual reports on system reliability.

PG&E is penalized when it misses reliability targets and rewarded when it hits them. PG&E fell short of the reliability target in 2005. The company agreed to a $2.8 million penalty.

That same year, the utility was fined $6.5 million after a substation fire in San Francisco caused outages for more than 100,000 customers. The company had ignored its own recommendations from a previous fire in the same location, which would have significantly reduced the effect of the second fire, according to a settlement agreement.

In 2006, the company met the reliability standard and is asking for a $150,000 reward.

PG&E does better than some utilities.

The 151 minutes that the average PG&E customer spent without power last year was less than the number of minutes experienced by the California customers of two smaller utilities. Customers of Sierra Pacific Power, which serves a sliver of California near Reno, Nev., spent 153 minutes without power on average. Pacific Corp., which serves the northern tip of California, logged an average 263 minutes.

But PG&E blackout figures exceeded those of Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric.

Edison customers went an average of 116 minutes without power, while San Diego went 53 minutes.

The state utility commission requires PG&E to break out reliability figures for each of its districts. The idea is to identify local weaknesses that might otherwise be masked in an overall assessment.

But regulators concede they haven't closely examined PG&E's reliability reports since they started including results for Fresno and other divisions in 2005.

In 2006, the Fresno division, which covers Fresno County and parts of Tulare and Kings counties, had the fourth-highest average of blackout minutes, out of 18 PG&E service areas. A Central Valley division just north of Fresno had the second-highest average.

When temperatures rose above 100 degrees earlier this month, demand for air conditioning apparently pushed parts of the system too far, and thousands of Fresno customers lost their lights.

Stores at a shopping center on North Fort Washington Road were forced to close one afternoon. "It destroyed business," said Steve Radovich, assistant manager at Bentley's Market. "We lost business. We lost customers."

Blackouts are especially costly for manufacturing companies that have to clean and check equipment after a shutdown, said Joseph Eto, staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The country loses $20 billion to $100 billion each year due to power failures, said Eto, who studied the problem for a national task force following the 2003 East Coast blackout.

"We can't function without electricity," said Victoria Salisch, an attorney and chairwoman of the Greater Fresno Area Chamber of Commerce. "Blackouts stop pretty much everything."

The reporter can be reached at bbranan@fresnobee.com or (559) 441-6679.