President Batjer: This Commission meeting is called to order. It is pursuant
to the California Government Code Section 11125.5, which provides for
a state body to hold an emergency meeting to address an emergency situation
which must be determined by a majority of the members of the Commission
at the beginning of this meeting. To satisfy this requirement, I will
now identify the emergency situation. Pacific Gas and Electric Company,
PG&E, initiated a series of public safety power shut offs, PSPS events,
during the week of October 7th. These PSPS events affected up to 700,000
accounts that serve approximately two million California residents. Not
only did this event have an unprecedented scale, but it turns out that the
company's implementation of the PSPS Protocol was flawed. Unless it is executed
well, shutting off power has severe public health and safety consequences,
from effects on transportation and roadways to effects on safety of
residents at critical facilities such as hospitals and residents who need
electricity for medical equipment, basic mobility or storage of medicine.
These impacts are at their most severe in isolated, rural and-or tribal
communities. The public health and safety impacts become even more detrimental
when electric service is shut off over a large area without effective
coordination that prevents emergency personnel from county or tribal
governments to do their jobs. At this time, Northern California continues to
have a fire risk. And additional PSPS events may occur, again, at any time
if weather conditions change. Without an effective best event evaluation
and swift charges, excuse me, changes in both PG&E's policy and the company's
ability to implement them, the events of the week of October 7th could
be repeated. The threat of a poorly executed, wide-scale PSPS events
compromise a delivery of electricity to the public, including homes, hospitals
and public facilities. Until PG&E's conduct is reviewed and corrective
action are identified and implemented, there remains a substantial risk that
the public health and safety of Californians will be severely impaired with
potentially catastrophic results. I now ask my fellow Commissioners to
confirm the situation qualifies as an emergency situation as defined by
Government Code Section 11125.5. Clerk, could you please call the roll?
Clerk: For item one Commissioner
Shiroma. <v Commissioner Shiroma> Aye
Clerk: Commissioner Guzman Aceves. Commissioner Guzman Aceves: Aye.
Clerk: Commissioner Randolph. Commissioner Randolph: Aye.
Clerk: Commissioner Rechtschaffen. <v Commissioner
Rechtschaffen>Aye. <v Clerk>President Batjer.
President Batjer: Aye. Thank you. Please rise and
join me for the Pledge of Allegiance. (sound cuts out)
Edgar. Robert. Could you please play the safety
information and announcement for everyone?
I don't want to delay any further. So I'm going to read the emergency
instructions. As you all are aware, our number one priority is indeed safety.
As such, we will address certain safety concerns in this venue. In the
event of an emergency, please calmly proceed out the exits. We have four
exits, two in the rear and one on either side of the dais. In the event we
need to evacuate the building, our assembly point is at the Garden Plaza
area between the War Memorial Herbs Theater and the War Memorial Opera.
You can see that on the video. When going out the rear exit, head out
through the courtyard and down the front steps, then across McAllister
Street, south on Van Ness, and continue to the Garden Plaza area, which is
immediately to the right after passing the War Memorial Theater. When going
out the side exits, go out either exit and you will find yourself on the
Golden Gate Avenue. From there, proceed east, turned south into Van Ness
Avenue, and walk towards McAllister Street, then cross McAllister Street
to Garden Plaza area, which is immediately to the right after passing the
War Memorial Herbs Theater. In the event of an emergency, our Executive
Director will call 911. Today that is Ed Randolph, sitting in for Alice
Stebbins. Public advisors, Alison Brown is certified in CPR and first aid.
Again, thank you very much for your attention. Sorry, that our video did
not work. Okay, some housekeeping rules before we begin. At this meeting,
we will hold public comment after we hear from the PG&E representatives. This
will give the public a chance to hear the discussion and provide feedback
on what was said in their public comments. You may notice that we are
using American Sign Language virtual interpretation for this meeting. For
those who are hard of hearing or hearing impaired, this means that we will
have a sign language interpreter at an off-site location who is shown on
a computer monitor for those in the room who need such assistance. Can
someone raise their hand as to where we are in the monitor? We've attempted
to secure an in-person sign language interpreter through our existing
sign language contracts with partners in Communications and the Bay Area
Communication Access, as our protocol calls for. We also reached out to
other state agencies and five vendors, but none were able to accommodate a
request on such a short notice. We hope that the virtual translator meets
the needs of those in attendance. We will also have the text of this
meeting posted to our website next week for the accommodation of the deaf
and the hearing impaired. Further, I ask those who will be speaking today
to adhere to the time frames shown on the agenda. I will be trying to keep
track of the times as well. At this time, may I please ask the representatives
from, I'm sorry. Wait. We have to go back on the record. Okay, we're
back on the record. And staff, I'll ask you to take your seats in the
audience, and at this time, I will ask for the representatives of PG&E who
will be speaking to please take their seats at the hearing table here. You
can come up Mr. Johnson or separately, and then we'll have the other
representatives join you when it's time. If that's appropriate. Sir. I'll make
a statement first. I'm sorry, I was waiting for you to get settled. Thank
you. Okay. First, I would like to thank my fellow Commissioners and all
in attendance for making today's emergency meeting on such short notice.
Just this past week, we recognized the two-year anniversary of the Tubb’s
Fire in Napa and Sonoma counties. October 8, 2017. 22 people lost their
lives and more than 5600 structures were destroyed. And in just a few weeks
from now, we’ll mark the one anniversary of the campfire in Butte County,
November 8, 2018. The deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California's
history. 86 people tragically lost their lives and a staggering 18,804
structures were destroyed. Many of us in this room have a personal connection
to those destructive wildfires, and we will always recognize the
tremendous loss of friends, family and loved ones. This brings us to today
where we're at a historic peak of the wildfire season, and time is of the
essence. I called today's emergency meeting and required the presence of
the executives and board members from the Pacific Gas and Electric Company
in an effort to ensure all CPUC regulated utilities are better prepared
and that their customers are better served when our state faces the next
wildfire threat and, if warranted, another power shut off incident.
California has been a global leader in implementing, excuse me, adjusting
my mic, in implementing laws to reduce the causes and impacts of climate
change. It has also been a leader in supporting climate research, which
has forecasted increasing threats and impacts from wildfires in coming
decades. And sadly, the state has learned too well in recent years, the
level of destruction climate-changed induced weather events can have on our
communities when combined with neglect, negligent maintenance of electrical
infrastructure. California will become more resilient. But resilience will
not and should never translate to California's being willing to put up
with inadequate execution of measures that are supposed to keep them safe.
And for the CPUC, although utilities are responsible for keeping their
infrastructure safe, we cannot and should never stop demanding better ways
to reduce fire wildfire risk and to reduce the use, scope and impacts of
a power shutoff without compromising public safety. What we saw play out
by PG&E last week cannot be repeated. I've only been at the CPUC a couple
months, but it does not take long to see the privilege investor-owned
utilities have in being a unique provider of essential services to the
public. It also has not taken me long to realize how some utilities fail,
understand what a privilege it is. And that with such privilege comes great
responsibility to those who they serve. It is the CPUC’s responsibility,
therefore, to identify and correct such failures. This is why we are here
today. My specific goals with this meeting is to make sure any future
power shutoff event is never like the one of last week. In the past year,
the CPUC adopted the wildfire mitigation plan for PG&E and protocols for
power shut offs and continues to examine current practices from each power
shut off event. The utility's plans for these events, however, are only
effective when they are implemented in a reasonable and competent manner.
This did not happen last week. We will question and assess today, what
we will question and assess today is the scope and scale of the last week's
power shut off event, and equally important, it's inadequate execution
by PG&E. The impact of the scope and scale of the power shut off to
lives, businesses and the economy cannot be overstated. The loss of power
endangers lives, especially those individuals who are reliant on power for
medical reasons. It also imposes additional burdens on our most vulnerable
populations, and it causes major disruptions
to businesses, hospitals, schools
and transportation networks as well strains state and local emergency
and public safety resources. To exacerbate the situation, PG&E was not
fully prepared to manage such a large scale power shut off. Throughout
the event, PG&E had multiple issues with communications, coordination and
event and resource management. Among various problems identified, we witness
be PG&E not adequately prepared or scale its business operations for the
increase in customers contacting the utility during the power shutoff
events, including the crashing of its website and its inability to answer
the calls of customers seeking assistance and critical information. We have
also heard from local and tribal governments on the lack of coordination
until the power shutoffs commenced, the lack of critical information flow
and in some instances, total breakdowns in communication. The CPUC acknowledges
PG&E’s staff cooperated with the state agencies and were transparent
with problems as they arose. Such collaboration is imperative in emergency
situations and must continue into the future. This level of cooperation
also needs to be inclusive of all emergency response personnel impacted
by these events, particularly county and tribal governments. We also
acknowledge the contributions of the frontline utility workers. They face
risks themselves as they work long hours, often in rough terrain, to notify
customers in remote areas, monitor the system during turnoff events, and
restore service as quickly as possible afterwards. However, failures in
execution combined with the magnitude of this event created an unacceptable
situation that should never be repeated, and that requires scrutiny and
correction. While PG&E spent significant resources warning the public about
the risk of the power shutoff events and what the public should do to
prepare for an event, it is not clear that PG&E spent the time it should to
make sure the utility was prepared. Today, we focus on what we can learn
to ensure their significant improvement in determining the need and, if
required, the execution of any future power shut off events initiated by
PG&E. With that, I would like Mr. Johnson to introduce himself and provide
his opening statement. Mic needs to be on. Sorry, sir. Closer to you.
Bill Johnson: Try that again. I’m Bill Johnson, the president
and CEO of PG&E. So President Batjer, Commissioners, Members of
the Commission staff, members of the public. Good afternoon. As
the president said, we're here to discuss today the difficult
decision PG&E made last week to turn off power for safety across
hundreds of communities and 35 counties, a decision I believe
achieved its essential purpose, but one that also suffered from
significant shortcomings in execution. Given those shortcomings, we're
also here to discuss how we're improving for the next time we
might need to turn off power if weather conditions require that.
We're also here to begin discussing how we're working toward a
future in California, where these types of shutoffs are no longer
necessary. Let me assure you, we do not like to turn off the power.
It runs contrary to the reason any of us ever got in this business.
But as I look back at last week, one of the things that stands
out in my mind, we actually didn't have any catastrophic fires
in Northern and Central California, and that was the sole intent
of the PSPS. Now it's hard to prove a negative. We can't prove
our decision avoided fires that otherwise would have occurred.
But we do know this: that winds above 45 miles an hour create a
high risk of vegetation contacting distribution, and vegetation
contacting those lines is the most common cause of fire related to
electrical equipment. So in this event we saw winds above 45 mile
per hour in many locations for sustained periods of time, and
we have more than 100 confirmed cases of wind damage to our
electric system, things like trees and branches and other things
coming into contact with our lines and actually power lines on the
ground. And these instances were widespread across the system.
Contact of this type is known to cause ignition when lines are
energized, which is what CalFire concluded cause many of the North
Bay fires two years ago. We would never want to experience that
again. No one ever wants to see anything like that again. And it
is our sincere commitment at PG&E to make sure that we don't. So
how did PG&E, how did California Utilities, and now many of the
utilities across the West, get into this condition where we have
to shut off power? And the answer is the risk of fire has grown
significantly in recent years, driven by climate change in various
forms. PG&E's example is this. In 2012, the state's elevated
fire threat designation applied to 15% of our territory, a very
large territory. Today, more than 50% of our territory has that
designation. So in response to this increase in risk and after the
horrific campfire in 2018, PG&E did several things to reduce the
risk of wildfire. Inspected and repaired as needed on a priority
basis all of its assets in the Tier 2 and Tier 3 fire districts.
Adopted and implementing much more aggressive enhanced vegetation
management. Accelerated a plan to harden its system through
changes in equipment and materials. And developing more robust
PSPS program, which it submitted to this Commission as part of its
wildfire safety plan, and that plan is built on strong meteorological
capability, situational awareness and analytical predictive
analytics. And that's the plan and the program we followed in
instituting this PSPS. Perhaps because of the history of significant
events of this company, I have heard and read a lot of skepticism
about our actions. I hear skepticism about whether the shut
off was truly necessary and whether the scope was too large.
Skepticism that we did this to save our own skin rather than for
public safety. The fact is that we did this for one reason and
that its safety. The only thing we cared about and all of this was
the safety of our customers, our employees, and the people of
California, and our efforts last week were a product of that mindset.
You know, the reputation and condition of this company has been
adversely affected by instances in the past where it did not
keep people safe, and in this instance, we were doing our best
to do just the opposite. Another misconception is that we turned
off power because our system is in, quote, shambles. Actually, our
system is in the vast fire threat areas we serve is in pretty
good shape. We know this because we just finished an unprecedented
inspection and repair process. So it's not accurate to state
that the conditions of our system drove this PSPS. The PSPS was
driven by a widespread wind event and the desire to keep people
safe. But making the right decision on safety isn't the same
thing as executing that decision well, and on this aspect, some
skepticism is in order, and that's part of the reason we're here
today. As I said, I believe shutting off the fire achieved its
purpose, but it caused hardship and different safety risks for
millions of our customers, friends, and neighbors. You know, any time
when we have to live without power is difficult, but in this case,
the hardship was widespread and was made worse by shortcomings
in our communications, our online maps, and other areas. When
people needed information, our website and call centers were under
equipped to meet that challenge. When people could access our site,
the map showing potentially impacted areas were not dependable.
So I acknowledge these critical errors. They're not acceptable
and they cannot happen again. So to our customers who are
impacted by the shutoffs and to all of those who did not get timely
accurate information about them, I apologize for the hardship
and the lack of information, and we'll let you know this cannot
happen again. There are others speaking behind me will give you
more detail about what it is we're doing. But let me describe some
of the errors we’re focused on. First, communication. Should the
prospect of another safety shutoff authorize, we commit to
communicating with the customers and communities with as much notice
as possible, with as much clarity as possible, and as frequently
as possible. We did not deliver on that commitment last week.
Our website crashed several times. Our maps were inconsistent,
perhaps incorrect. Our call centers were overloaded. So we are
reinforcing our website and call centers to handle a much higher
volume in these events. And we're working to improve the quality
and accessibility of our outage maps. We will also continue improving
coordination with our government agency partners. We welcome
members of CalOES, CalFire, and CPUC staff into our emergency
operations center. As we planned and executed the work, we sought
and accepted feedback and counsel. We're grateful for that
assistance. We will ask for it again and in fact we rely on it. So
thank you to all those folks. Another area of focus where us is
narrowing the scope of safety shut offs. We've made progress on this
since last year, but more is needed, and we will use all the tools
at our disposal. And those coming after me are more equipped
to describe those tools. But in time we'll be able to use shutoffs
with more precision so that fewer customers are impacted, and
I believe, and I certainly hope that we get to a point where the
PSPS is not needed at all, because ultimately, none of us want
a future where these shutoffs are commonplace or even necessary.
So we're working to reduce fire risks in a multitude of ways,
and this will take some time. In the shorter term, if the conditions
are right for wildfire, we might have to employ PSPS again.
And we all need to be prepared for this eventuality and PG&E has
to be better prepared than it was this time. If we do, we will
do the best we can with the least impact possible. We're actually
here to improve the quality of life, not burden. So to close, I
want to thank the Commission for bringing us together this afternoon.
This is a topic that millions of Californians, including us,
care deeply about. We share a desire to get better at it and
eventually to render it unnecessary. Our desire is to provide power
to people, not to take it away. And most important, we all share
a desire to prevent catastrophic wildfire in our communities.
And I look forward to continuing our work together to meet that
objective year after year. And those are my comments. Thank you.
President Batjer: Thank you, Mr Johnson. I'm
going to turn to my fellow Commissioners and
ask whether they have questions of Mr. Johnson
at this time. Yes. Commissioner Shiroma.
Commissioner Shiroma: Oh, yes. Good afternoon, Mr Johnson. You know, in
September, PG&E conducted a PSPS events, in late September, and it was
of less magnitude than the October period of time. And in the letter
that was required by the CPUC to be submitted on that, on page eight, it
talks about learning from that particular episode and as far as successes
and things to improve. And are you able to or are your other team members
able to speak to what things were identified to be improved, which were
supposed to be used or maybe were used for the October PSPS event?
Bill Johnson: That letter, I think those who come after me probably helped
write that letter and are better able to speak to it. But a couple of the things
were better communication and better coordination with the state agencies. Some
of the things that we've mentioned. The scope of those prior events were in the
tens of thousands of customers. This was in the hundreds of thousands. And so
I think some of the things that appeared as weaknesses here probably wouldn't
have been, you know, obvious in those smaller ones. But I think people behind
me, and I will make sure there's someone behind, who can answer your question.
Commissioner Rechtschaffen: Mr Johnson. Last Saturday, after the
PSPS was over, you were quoted in an update saying something to
the effect that wildfire risk is greater than ever and moving
faster than regulation. Do you recall saying something like that?
Bill Johnson: You know, I said a lot of things last
week. I don't particularly recall that saying that.
Commissioner Rechtschaffen: Okay, well, given the risks involved
to the public, that was a very concerning statement to us
because it suggested that the extent of your responsibility or
duties were limited to regulatory compliance. And it's especially
troubling given that we've been working with PG&E for the past
almost-decade trying to instill a safety culture in a company
that values continuous safety improvement beyond compliance. I'm
just wondered if you wanted to comment now on that statement.
Bill Johnson: Thank you for the opportunity. As I said, I
don't remember saying that, and if I did, I certainly did
not mean to imply that anything we're doing is hampered by
regulation or the actions of this Commission or the state.
Actually, it's quite the opposite. Your focus, as the
Commission, on things like safety culture, on wildfire safety
plans, on all of these things, is the right thing to do.
And I'm not pointing a finger at anybody other than us.
President Batjer: Commissioner Randolph.
Commissioner Randolph: I appreciate your statement that you
want to get to a point where the system, where widespread
shut offs are not necessary on the system. But when do you
anticipate getting to that point? And what are the steps
and whether you or the next panel wants to provide further
detail, you know, seeing a path to getting to the point
where these widespread events are not necessary is, I think,
where we all need to be. So how are we gonna get there?
Bill Johnson: Thank you for that question, Commissioner.
And there are people, I'm not deferring every
question, but there are people specifically going to
speak to that point. But some of the answers are in the
shorter term, more sectionalizing equipment, particularly
on subtransmission, so that you can take out smaller
sections of line. I think there's a definite need to
move towards some form of microgrid sectionalization
so you can have small contained, you know, they do
some of that in other parts of the state. You have to
have some generation support behind that. The use of
different materials like covered wire, will help some,
so it's called tree wire hardening the system. Increased
vegetation management, all these things, will
help, and eventually, I think the technology will get
us to a point where we don't need to be doing it.
Commissioner Randolph: What is the timeline you see for that?
Bill Johnson: So better every year. I think this is probably a 10-year timeline
to get to a point where it's really ratcheted down significantly. I think it'll
be better every year. I think everybody gets better at it every year and with
every event, and we learn a lot from each other. But the risk is significant.
Commissioner Randolph: Have you prepared sort of a
prioritization of that, so that you can understand sort of which
segments of your system would achieve the first, you know, the
broadest benefit early in terms of making these improvements?
Bill Johnson: The answer is yes. And the
specifics will come from an expert after me.
President Batjer: Commissioner Guzman Aceves. You're not on yet.
Commissioner Guzman Aceves: As Commissioner Rechtschaffen stated, we've
been looking within the safety culture proceeding and examining PG&
E's treatment of its customers as if it's entitled to them. Thank you.
It's treating its customers as if there's no way it could lose them. Is
your lack of preparedness and consideration for your customers a reflection
that, fundamentally, you believe that you are entitled to them instead
of having the privilege to serve them? Do you think the lack of care you
had for your customers merits you retaining them as your customers?
Bill Johnson: I don't believe anybody should think, and I certainly do not
think, that you're entitled to your customers. I think regardless of the
system and whether it's, well regardless of it, I think our objectives
should be every day to make sure that we feel like we can't keep them and
doing everything we can to keep them. To me, one of the keys to success
in his business is happy and satisfied customers, which we don't have
today. So, I certainly don't think that myself and I don't think the
organization as a whole thinks that. As far as whether that attitude permeated
this event, I didn't see any of that. I see a lot of good people doing
hard work every day, trying to do the right thing to serve the customer. I
would tell you I haven't been there long and one of the things I have
focused hard on, like in every meeting and every opportunity, that we're
here to serve customers. That is our primary and only function. And so, I
don't believe you should think you are gonna keep your customers. In fact,
some of our customers are talking about doing something else right now,
and I certainly don't think any of that attitude affected this event.
President Batjer: Any other comments? I have
one. I have one final when Mr Johnson. As
was stated in my opening remarks, which I'm sure we'll engage the next panel in, I was
absolutely astounded at what I saw as pretty
simple preparedness for a major out outage
like the PSPS we experienced last week. Simple
things like you have already enumerated, I
did in my letter to you, you did in some of
your response back to me, of the website, the
call center. But, you know, we'll be judged by outcomes and not by plans. So I'm really
hoping that we hear today that you have done
a tremendous amount of review of the plans,
so we have much better outcomes. Okay. Thank
you. Any other questions? Thank you, Mr.
Johnson. Ask the next panel to please come up.
And I think you may have a couple of folks
that we didn't have on the agenda, so I'll just
allow the executives to introduce themselves,
once they get seated and settled. I'm going to have them introduce themselves right
now. And then before you speak, it might be helpful for those recording to reintroduce
yourself. And when you introduce yourself,
if I may also ask you to provide your title.
I think we do have tent cards. Thank you. We'll be discussing the issues and problems
identified during the recent public service
power shut off, the events, and the corrective
actions taken to date. With that, we can turn to the panel for your presentations.
Andy Visi: Thank you President Batjer, Commissioners,
Commission staff, and members of the public.
Good afternoon. I'm Andy Visi, the CEO and President
of the Pacific Gas and Electric Company. Thank you
for your invitation to be here today. I've been at
PG&E for just about two months. However, my entire
41 year career has been in the energy and utility
industry, both domestically and internationally.
I'm an operator by training and at heart, and I can
attest that no one gets into this line of work
with the dream of having to turn the lights off
on customers. It runs counter to our nature. It's
not in our DNA, and it's not what our customers
expect. But what is part of our DNA is keeping people
safe. Throughout all the companies I've worked
for safety is the golden thread. It's the value
that comes before anything else. And I have learned
the same is true at PG&E, and what that means is,
when faced with a choice between turning off power
or putting our communities at risk of catastrophic
wildfire, we take the very difficult decision to go
dark. We've made this decision a handful of times
in the past couple of years, and unfortunately,
we will likely need to continue doing so in the
near term for the sake of public safety. So we need
to keep getting better at doing it. We need to
make it as minimally disruptive to our customers as
possible by being more targeted and restoring more
quickly. My colleagues and I will discuss specific
ways we're doing this during the next two panels,
but I'll also say it's our goal not to do these
type of shut off at all. We want to be a safe and
reliable operator, and that's going to require
transformation in the years ahead to effectively adapt
to the changes and the challenges of climate. We'll
talk about that work today as well. So as an
overview, let me lay out some general areas of focus
of our improvement efforts. First, this works
scaling our support functions, specifically, our IT
Resources and call center workforce to handle the
surge in activity that accompanies service disruptions
of this type. No one likes being without power,
but we can’t also leave the public in the dark
when it comes to the information to help them plan
and stay safe. Second, we have to improve our
coordination with local and state governments, agency
partners, and tribal governments. We need better
processes and procedures for communicating with these
various entities, so we're sharing timely and accurate
information and collecting important feedback
on our performance in real time. We need to team
with these agencies to plan and scale for these
shutoffs so they can effectively support their
communities and maintain their critical services. Third,
we must focus on improving the information content
of our outage maps and develop better practices
for sharing those maps. Millions of people need to
be able to look up their addresses online to see
whether their home or business is going to be impacted
and had confidence in that information. While
we believe that the operational components of the
public safety power shut off were well-executed, we
still have opportunities to improve the process.
Specifically, the scope of those impacted and the
speed of restoration. This is all about keeping people
safe from catastrophic wildfires and minimizing
the time customers are disrupted. We're working
hard to narrow the scope and the frequency of the
shutoffs and speeding restoration through a variety
of near-term and longer-term efforts. As I said,
safety shutoffs cannot be standard practice. It's
simply not sustainable. Our challenge is to adapt,
to rethink the system, to use technology to our
advantage, and to enlist expertise from wherever it
resides. The risk we all face is real. We operate
an electric system in a growing tinderbox. This is
the challenge of our time and one that we're committed
to taking head on and solving with our customers
and the communities we’re privileged to serve.
What I want to say and I'm gonna go off prepared
remarks because this is about learning and this is
about improving. One of the things that was said
earlier led me to this conclusion. It is about
anticipation. As you approach these big events, you
have to think broadly. Anticipation is clearly a
part of a PSPS. We have to anticipate weather before
it happens. We have to anticipate where we need to
shut off the system. We have to think through how
we're going to restore. But I have to say our
anticipation was not adequate. We did not anticipate the
large volumes that were going to our websites. We
did not anticipate all the local needs that were
not being served by the information we were providing.
So one of the things that we need to do broadly,
not just with PSPS, but as a company that deserves
the right to serve the customer it has is we
have to develop a mindset or culture of anticipation.
What else can happen as we approach a PSPS? What
if we had a PSPS and experience an earthquake at
the same time? What happens in the local community
that's ongoing that will be impacted negatively
by shutting off power? What does this require? It
requires scenario planning, running all the scenarios,
asking all the tough questions, and tabletop
exercises to see how we would perform. It requires,
on an ongoing basis, scanning of the environment,
intimate knowledge of the communities that we serve.
So we understand what would be disrupted. What
would be the additional safety concerns that they
may be facing. This requires a greater engagement
with our communities, and it also tells us that we
should be thinking about PSPS all the time, not
just seven days in advance when we see the weather
changing. So there is significant work to do. And
my colleagues at the table here will all tell you
about what we're doing now and what we will continue
to work on. So let me again introduce them before
I conclude my remarks. We have Laurie Giammona,
who is our Senior Vice President Chief Customer
Officer. Michael Lewis, Senior Vice President of
Electric Operations. Kathy Kay, Senior Vice President
Chief Information Officer. And Aaron Johnson,
who's Vice President of Customer Solutions. They all
have an active part of these operations, but more
importantly, they have an active part every day in
making sure we live up to the expectations of serving
our customers. So with that, I'll conclude my
remarks and with your permission turn to Michael.
Michael Lewis: Thank you, Andy. And good
afternoon, everyone. My name is Michael Lewis.
President Batjer: You need you're closer to
the mic. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay.
Michael Lewis: My name is Michael Lewis, Senior
Vice President of Electric Operations, PG&E. I
want to thank you for this opportunity to share
our lessons learned and corrective actions from
the October 9 PSPS event. We strive to be a superior
operating team. The pathway to this objective
is to be highly self-critical and to embrace
criticism as a means to improve. As the officer in
charge of this event, the decision to de-energize
power to 730,000 homes, businesses, and public
service facilities was gut wrenching because I
recognized the hardship that would create for our
customers and our communities. I have been with
PG&E for 14 months and in the industry for almost
34 years. I have lead hurricane restoration efforts
in Florida and the Carolinas for 14 years,
so shutting the power off goes against all of my
training and experience. With that said, it's my
true belief that those actions prevented a
catastrophic wildfire. From an operation perspective,
allow me to share four items where we're working
to get better. The first is integration. How
PG&E’s electric operations can better integrate
with state agencies such as CalOES and CalFire.
This needs to be much more than just one way flow
of communication or enhanced transparency. We will
work to create a unified command structure so that
PG&E and these safety-focused state agencies,
communicate and coordinate effectively, especially
when we are reaching a point of making key
decisions during the operations. We will train
all of our people who respond to PSPS events and
emergencies on the protocols of standardized
emergency management system, or SEMS protocol. This
would ensure that we speak the same language as
CalOES and CalFire. And we will improve both of
precision and availability of our maps that overlay
the footprint with our circuits so that all of
us, PG&E, state agencies, local agencies and
customers, are working from the same playbook. Let
me just say that the question regarding lessons learned
in the September event. We failed in executing
the lessons of that event to provide mapping for
this event. So that will be a primary focus
for us to ensure that doesn't happen again. A
second focus area for our team in Operations is
to do a better job of making sure our grid is as
prepared as possible for a PSPS event. We need
to ensure that all circuits within a PSPS footprint
are in service. During this event, we had a
transmission line that was out of service due to
planned maintenance, and it resulted in customers
in the Humbodlt County being taken out of power.
They need to be, which shouldn't have happened.
Going forward, during pre-event planning, we'll
make sure that all circuits are energized to
ensure that doesn't happen again. Another lesson
learned is what I call the societal continuity
issues. Basically, that means we need to do a
better job of planning for how a PSPS event will
impact key pieces of infrastructure throughout
our service area, including bridges, tunnels and
mass trading systems like BART, light rail systems
and others. During the event, we were able to
successfully work with them to ensure that the
tunnels and trains stayed energized This to place
however during the execution of the operational
phase of the event, rather than the planning prior
to the event. We're gonna change that to ensure
that we have a better plan to ensure we have all
the communication and coordination done prior to
moving into the execution phase of the event.
We would do that with a robust inventory down to
the city and county level, then factor in what's
needed. The last area where we know we need to get
better is involving our standard of restoration.
We've been telling customers, stakeholders and
our regulators that preparations should be made
for outages lasting 3 to 5 days after the all
clear signal was given. We now recognise that
five days as a benchmark is unacceptable. In this
event, the vast majority of our customers were
restored within 48 hours, and, frankly, that now
has to become the new benchmark for us to beat.
In the future PSPS events, we will resource every
circuit with a dedicated restoration team. Rather
than this past event, it was everything 2 to 4
circuits. If that requires mutual assistance,
we would ask for it sooner and have outside crews
on the ground before restoration begins. We also
looked into the possibility of doing area patrols
overnight. Right now, nearly all of our line
inspection work occurs during daylight hours.
There's a possibility that a fixed-wing aircraft
equipped with infrared and high-definition cameras
would allow us to see our lines, even at night.
Also, I want to note that we're working with a
consultant with much utility and emergency response
experience to do several things for us. First,
over the next 8 to 10 weeks, they’ll conduct a
detailed assessment of our performance with the same
critical eye that I mentioned earlier. It would
help us with integrated SEMS protocols within our
entire company, and they’ll take an advisory
role as we incorporate improvements and initiate
future PSPS events. In closing, I do wanna mention
the incredible commitment of our employees.
They didn't make the decision. I did, yet they
carried it out in a way that humbles me to be a
part of this organization. They did it in areas
that I would consider to be hostile. Fundamental
to our business is to ensure that they should also
become unnecessary. As you heard from Bill and Andy,
we’re hardening the electric grid with stronger
poles and lines, putting power lines underground
in certain areas, and add a new technology
that will allow us to further specialize our
system, in the end, allowing us to impact fewer
customers with public safety power shut offs. These
improvements, combined with the steps outlined
previously, are going to help us minimize this
tool, so that one day, PSPS becomes a true last
resort. We're moving as quickly as we can on all
these fronts. As that I've already said, this is an
opportunity for our team to get better, to learn
and adapt, so they will serve in our customers
in the best and safest manner possible. So now our
hand it over to my colleague, Laurie Giammona.
Laurie Giammona: Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Laurie
Giammona. I serve as PG&E’s Senior Vice President and Chief Customer
Officer. On behalf of our more than 20,000 employees, we understand
and feel significant impact that turning off the power has on the
customers, on our customers, and on the communities we serve and the
communities that we live in. I acknowledge that we were not fully
prepared to support our customers to the best of our ability, given
the size and scale of this public safety power shutoff event, and
I am personally committed to fixing those gaps. Last week's PSPS
highlighted the opportunity to further understand and more effectively
plan for the various events, scenarios and the conditions that we
were dealing with, as Andy stated, including the societal impacts
that a disruption in service has on our customers and our communities.
There are three areas of challenge that I'd like to focus on
today, and what we're doing to address them immediately. The first
relates to the impact in a dynamic and changing weather environment,
and what that has on our customer notification protocol. The second
was an impact to our customer communications from our website
failure. And the third relates to our community resource centers and
our engagement with our community partners. Our goal, depending on
weather, is to send customer notifications once a decision has been
made by the officer in charge, and the required agency notifications
have occurred, at 48 hours, 24 hours, and just prior to shutting off
the power. We use automated calls, texts and emails. Notifications
were launched in English, and they're launched in Spanish to those
customers that have designated language qualifications. For medical
baseline customers that were unable to reach via our outbound
messages and notifications, we continue to try to reach them on an
hourly basis by contacting them via phone and other channels. But
in addition, we preposition our field crews so that they are able
to go and do home checks on our customers. So for those medical
baseline customers that we're unable to contact via our notification
channels, and we therefore don't receive positive confirmation, we
actually send one of our employees to their home to check on them.
Should they find that there is, that the customer has a need that
can't be met, we partner with having them engage 911 or we escalate
that through our emergency protocols. As part of our preparation,
we fully staffed our call centers. We were ready for this event.
We have four call centers that are served by our employees in
California. In addition, we suppressed all of our credit billing and
disconnect activity so that we could leverage our billing and credit
representatives and they could take calls as well. We maximized
overtime, we brought in all available staffing. However, as we saw
during the latest PSPS event, the events were dynamic. The weather
changed. Our notifications were large in scale, and as a result of that,
we saw a tremendous surge in volume as we launched notifications.
These notifications were certainly at a velocity that we had not
launched before. I acknowledge that it's less than optimal to
receive a notification that your power is going to be shut off and
then not have your power shut off, but as both Andy and Michael said,
we're working in a dynamic environment and we're working to really
reduce the scope of the outages. So, unfortunately, customers did
receive notifications and then did not receive a power shut off. And
that creates a very uncomfortable situation for our customers and
one that can create a hardship. As we launched our notifications,
we saw a surge of volume come to our call centers and our website.
They first start with our website. All of our notifications are
directed to go to our website because that's where our customers can
receive the most dynamic alerts, they can sign up for alerts. When
we started to experience problems with the website, customers came
back into the call center. As we prepared for this event, what we
do in our call center is we upfront load emergency calls and PSPS
calls so that customers that are calling in with an emergency or
for PSPS purposes can be moved to the front of the queue. We put
that in place. However, unfortunately, customers didn't all opt to
go in to that first prompt and ended up in our general queue. Our
plan for these events will be, going forward, that, as we launch
notifications, we will immediately have the emergency and PSPS prompts
upfront loaded and we will suppress all other call volume. We will
use technology so that we can call customers back that are calling
for general questions and enquiries, and we will focus immediately
after notifications on our customers that are calling for the PSPS
events. I think what's important to note is that, during our event,
during the duration of our event, the maximum delay that a customer
experienced if they were calling for a, and they were in the PSPS
footprint, was 21 minutes. And that was on the day that our website
was crashing. But overall, no emergency call or PSPS call held longer
than 11 seconds, so we were able to handle all of our calls and
then, as call volume dropped, we were able to bring back in our
normal call volume. But as I said, going forward immediately, in
all future PSPS events, when the notification protocol is higher than
100,000 customers, we will immediately flip to our emergency protocol
within the call center. The other area I'd like to focus on is our
community resource centers. We built a plan to stand up community
resource centers in advance of the power shutoff so that they would
be open when customers’ power was shut off. Our plan was to put
at least one customer resource center in each community and each
county. These are sites that provide information for our customers,
water, air conditioning, and charging opportunities. In this event,
we were moving fast. We obviously were serving many counties, and
we did not do a good job in coordinating with our counties. That's
an opportunity for us. Going forward, we're gonna be working very
closely to develop a playbook with each of our counties so that
we have sites identified where we can stand up community resource
centers and provide the communities with the support that they need.
You have our commitment that we're going to have that playbook
built out by the end of this year. So looking forward, we will continue
to act to improve on the way we support our customers by listening
to their concerns and making the following improvements. As I
stated earlier, we will immediately implement our PSPS call center
strategy, so that in the event customers begin to call, our PSPS
customers will know they're at the head of the queue, and they will
receive immediate service from our live agents. We've upgraded our
notification system. We had upgraded it prior to coming into this
event. This notification platform allowed for precise communication
with our customers. But obviously, given the event dynamics and
the movement of the weather, we over-communicated to some customers
that did not otherwise have their power shutoff. Going forward,
regardless of the size of the event, we’ll performance test our
systems to ensure we don't have technical gaps or volume challenges.
We're developing a more effective plan and will develop a playbook
with local governments to understand their needs and preferences for
our community resource centers while updating the criteria to include
cell service availability in those sites. And we'll be doing
that by the end of the year. And then we will continue to coordinate
with CalOES for assistance with leading a comprehensive review of
our potential customer impacts of PSPS as well as other extended
outages, for example, earthquakes, on all major transit providers,
refineries and business dependent on fuel for operations. With support
from those customer agencies, as well as we’ll work closely with
the other IOU's. Additionally, I wanted to mention we've been working
very closely this year with CalOES, and Vance Taylor, specifically,
who is the Access and Functional Needs chief for CalOES. We've
been partnering with California Foundation for Independent Living.
We have a contract under way with them. We're leveraging affinity
groups so that we can really better serve our customers that are in
need, be it backup generation or customers that have functional
needs that we need to serve better during these outages. Thank you.
President Batjer: Thank you. Who's next? Miss Kay?
Kathy Kay: Yes. Good afternoon. My name is Kathy Kay. And I'm
President Batjer: Move the mic a little closer.
Thank you. You have to speak directly into it.
Kathy Kay: Good afternoon. My name is Kathy Kay. I'm
a Senior vice President and the Chief Information
Officer at PG&E. From a technology standpoint,
I acknowledge that we were not fully prepared
to support our customers to the best of our ability.
Given the size and scale of this public safety
power shut off, our customer website crashed several
times over the course of two days and this was
extremely unfortunate and unacceptable. We have taken
concrete steps to fix the issues and ensure our
website is better prepared for future events. During
the event, requests to our website increased by
more than 250 times the peak load we've ever seen
in the past from any of our previous PSPS events or
weather events. To give you the size of this, we
normally have about 7000 user requests an hour and
we saw it spike to over 1.7 million user requests
per hour. We did anticipate an increase in customer
requests. We saw it in previous PSPS events and in
other weather events, and we had more than scaled
for that. In fact, our site is scaled for 3 to 4
times the normal load and we have a spillover site
that's over 100 times the scale of our peak load.
But what we didn't anticipate, and this was a
lesson learned, was the amount of external interest
coming to our site from media outlets from agencies.
We had media bots hitting the site repeatedly.
We had a lot of traffic in terms of the download
of the maps at much higher levels than we had
anticipated, and that was the cause of what was causing
a lot of the performance problems that we experienced.
While we worked on the solution during the
event, we provided information to customers through
other channels. We used Facebook, nine Twitter
accounts, and Next Door to share updates on the
PSPS and event. And we also conducted more than 900
interviews with media during the event. But I
acknowledge this was not enough for our customers. They
needed a lot more information than we were able
to provide on those channels and even when we did
provide it, it was hard for them to see. So, I
acknowledge that this was not an acceptable alternative.
As learning, we should have put up a static website
much earlier than we did. That would have allowed
our customers to have some information while we
were stabilizing the site. Instead, our customers
were unable at times to get into the site. When
they did get into it, it was slow. Sometimes, they
couldn't get information at all, and other times
they received error messages. By having put a static
website up earlier, they would have had access to
some basic information about the PSPS event. And
that is a lesson learned. And we have already built
a static site should we ever need to leverage it in
the future. There's three things that customers are
looking for during a PSPS event. They want maps.
They want to be able to look at where the impacted
areas will be. Our local governments also want to
look at that, and we have an information portal
that's available for map files, also, behind PG&E
dot com. The second thing they want to look at is
is whether they will be personally impacted. So
they want to be able to enter their address and be
able to learn whether they're impacted or not. And
then the third thing is, when the power is shut off,
they want to be able to see when it will be restored.
All three of those capabilities had significant
load that we had not anticipated. And so, during
the event, we focused on stabilizing those three
features. During the event itself, we solved a number
of problems. We were increasing capacity. We
actually moved the maps to a cloud-based solution,
leveraging Amazon Web Services. It allowed us to
scale dynamically. And what I mean by that is, as
the traffic was coming, it could scale up in
capacity to meet the load of the demand of the map
requests. We also reached out to many of our vendor
partners. We leveraged EZRI. I mentioned AWS. we
leverage service watch. We also sought and received
assistance and guidance from Amy Tong, the State
CIO, and her team. In fact, she had three people
who joined us Wednesday evening and stayed with us
until Friday afternoon. We also got guidance and
advice from Deputy Executive Director Liza Malashenko.
As we prepare for the next event, we've made
improvements to the site already. Mainly at these three
features. They all can scale now dynamically in
different environments. So we've moved the load
all to a Web-based cloud in AWS. We can scale it
dynamically. So if people want maps, it scales to
whatever traffic we see. Address look-up now scales
as well. So that as customers want to look at their
addresses on and see if they're impacted, we have a
site that does that. And then from the restoration
perspective, we also have the capability in an AWS
environment that scales as well. We've tested
them all to two times the peak load that we saw,
that 1.7 million, and we're testing them to even
higher levels this weekend. In addition to that,
we've leveraged a content-delivery network to take
some of the load off of our environment, so that if
pgande.com starts to experience problems, they're
still able to see the content, and we're leveraging
Alcamy to do that. That also has been done, and
we are testing that this weekend, so it'll be ready
for Monday. We also, in the future, we’ll be
building a whole new site that really is solely for
weather events and PSPS events, so that all of the
critical information for these types of events are
really going to be on a whole different site,
externally accessible, so that the main usage for
pgande dot com will be for the normal things that our
customers typically leverage it for, which are
things like looking at their accounts, paying their
bills and looking at energy usage. This will allow
us to scale it dynamically as needed to respond
to any of the events and any of the traffic that
we are unable to anticipate. In the meantime, the
entry point for PG&E dot com will remain the same.
But we've made the adjustments that I've already
mentioned, have tested them, and are ready for the
next PSPS event. I think it's important to note that
the immediate challenges we faced have been solved.
But going forward as part of any pre-event, we
will performance test to high volumes that we've
seen to make sure that the sites are all responding
as we expect, so that we’ll be ready for future
events. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to Aaron.
Aaron Johnson: Good afternoon. My name is Aaron Johnson
and I serve as PG&E’s Vice President of Customer
Energy Solutions and have been working in Electric
Operations on the design of the Public Safety Power
Shutoff program. During the October PSPS event, I
supported the company's liaison function in the Emergency
Operations Center, or EOC. Specifically, I lead the
operations briefings for the local, the various local
agencies impacted by the event, including counties and
tribal governments. I'm going to provide an overview
of our coordination efforts with local governments,
discuss where we fell short and what we're doing
to fix these challenges. To start, we understand and
recognize the significant impact that this event had
on our customers and communities. We also recognize
that, in many ways, we fell short of what our local
government partners expected of us, and frankly, what
we expected of ourselves. And those shortcomings
resulted in considerable frustration. We have to do
better and we are taking steps to be better. To that end,
PG&E leadership held 2 hot wash conference calls
with counties impacted by the recent PSPS events on
Wednesday. The focus was on quick wins or things we can
do immediately to improve collaboration during a PSPS
event. In the coming weeks, PG&E leadership will also
hold in-person meetings with counties and tribal
governments impacted by the latest PSPS event for
individual after-action reviews to add to our internal
review and improvement plan. On the hot wash calls this
week, we received feedback on the operations briefings,
having dedicated points of contact, our agency data
transfer portal, maps, and the community resource
centers. I will touch briefly on each of these. During
the most recent PSPS event, PG&E utilized a regular
cadence of operational briefings that were held three
times per day to keep county and tribal representatives
updated. These calls were a direct response to feedback
during previous PSPS events and the 17 planning
workshops held this summer with our local government
partners who expressed a desire for updated real
time information as well as a single source of direct
information from PG&E and from our EOC. While we receive
positive feedback for improved sharing of information
and insights on the operational briefings, there's
clearly room for improvement. As the leader of these
calls, I did not clearly enough establish or enforce
the purpose of these calls early on, which is overall
situational awareness rather than the resolution
of individual issues. The overwhelming interest in
the calls, from government partners, starting in the
2 to 400 entity range and surpassing 1000 callers at
peak, necessitated a shift in technology and call
format. The changes we made improved the capacity and
structure of the calls. We will continue utilizing
this operator-moderated calling format for future PSPS
events and are exploring a WebEx approach that would
allow the sharing of documents and the ability to take
questions in writing. In addition, PG&E will consider
a regional call structure for future large events,
as suggested by this Commission. But many counties
indicated a preference for a single call with a more
streamlined structure. The early calls were flooded
with individual questions. In response, PG&E identified
a dedicated single point of contact that supported
each impacted county and a dedicated tribal liaison.
At the counties request, that single point of contact
was embedded in the counties EOC. Eight counties
took us up on this offer. This approach approved our
coordination, received significant positive feedback
from the counties. PG&E will continue this practice for
all future events, recognizing that the single tribal
liaison was insufficient for the tribal needs in this
event, and so we will be expanding our staffing there
for future events. We also received feedback from our
local government partners regarding the agency data
transfer portal we used to share information. Challenges
we heard included gaining access to the portal,
access to confidential customer information, the
organization of data and maps in the portal, and more
clearly signaling when new and changed information was
placed into that portal. As immediate action, we will
be doing outreach to counties and tribes to update
and validate portal access lists and improve the user
experience of the portal layout and design. These
actions will be completed in two weeks. In addition, I
want to thank CPUC staff for helping us resolve privacy
issues to get specific medical, baseline, and critical
facility information to counties and tribes that
wanted it, and that will be our practice going forward
in future events. The lack of precision and the
maps we provided was also raised by the counties. The
maps were developed in consultation with CalOES and
provided outage polygons or broader affected geographic
areas, rather than precise meter by meter delineation,
which can understate affected areas. Checking whether
specific facilities were affected, especially
on the boundaries of those maps, was intended to be
accomplished on the Online Address Checker Tool, which
was not available given the website challenges. Going
forward, we will be drawing tighter polygons and
exploring suggestions from CalOES and the counties to
provide a more seamless data transfer capability for
their GIS needs, as well as developing the capability
for counties and tribes to use the address checker
tool with batches of facilities. Checking individual
facilities when they were concerned about hundreds
of facilities was a challenge in the event. Finally,
on community resource centers, I want to acknowledge
that we missed the mark on collaborating with the
counties and tribes on where to locate these facilities.
Laurie spoke to our plan to better predetermine these
locations with counties and tribes in advance. Going
forward for all events, site selection will be a
collaborative process, with counties and tribes. Stepping
back from all of these specific items, the broader
way to enhance our partnership with the tribes and
counties is working with them to better understand the
electric grid in their jurisdictions. Some examples
include what facilities are on which circuits, how the
local grid is configured and what areas are more or
less likely to be affected by a PSPS, and what is the
likely sequencing when it comes time for restoration?
In sum, a more technical deep dive to provide
transparency into the operation of the grid to help them
with their planning. We have done this with certain
counties that have asked for more specific information,
but we will be doing this systematically with all
counties and tribes in the coming months. Thank you.
President Batjer: Thank you, Mr Johnson. We'll now turn to questions
by the Commissioners of each panel member. Okay, Commissioner Randolph..
Commissioner Randolph: This is a question for
Laurie. And I want to focus on vulnerable customers.
So first, do you have records of all the contacts
that you made for, you know, with vulnerable
customers, and kind of the results of those that
you could provide? But then also, you know, as you
know, medical baseline is really a very crude proxy
for trying to identify vulnerable customers. So
what are the steps that you are making to identify
beyond just medical baseline? And then I think
my last question is the anecdotal evidence that
I've heard is that some of those contacts were like
gee, sorry, tou know, there's not much we can do.
And so I want to kind of understand how those
contacts can be improved and how the potential
solutions for vulnerable customers can be improved.
Laurie Giammona: Great, thank you for the
question. So we don't disagree that, you know, the
proxy of Medical Baseline doesn't capture the
entire population. But I'll address Medical
Baseline, and then, I'll talk about how we're
extending the outreach to connect with more customers
that might not have this designation. So for
this event we had 34,568 customers that had
medical baseline designee designation. When we sent
the outbound notifications to those customers,
we received confirmation, in our initial bursts,
as we got confirmation back from 32,670
of those customers. That left 1877 customers that
we needed to contact before we shut off power.
We scheduled our available field personnel to
make home visits and assure that they received
positive confirmation. Of those, 743 received
face-to-face communications. 702, there was no
access, they were not at home, we door tagged
and continued to call those customers And then,
another 432 customers, we had no, they were not
home, we rolled several trucks, we left the door
hanger, continued to contact them. So as we look
at that for our medical baseline population,
you know, that is a focus that we continue our
hourly to focus on to ensure that we know that
those customers have been reached. I'll give
you an example of a situation that we had with
the customer who did not have the designation
of medical baseline, but was actually a hospice
customer. As I mentioned, we've been working
with CalOES and certain foundations and affinity
groups to reach these customers. We've been doing
that in preparation of these events, but in
this event, we received a call in the call center
from a customer. And actually, it wasn't the
customer of record. It was actually their
hospice provider, and the customer had a do not
resuscitate order. Therefore, they were they were
not going to be able to transport the customer
to the hospital. They lived in the Half Moon Bay
area. We took the call in the call center. We
escalated it to the emergency center. The customer
branch worked with CalOES as well as with
one of our agency partners. And through our
agency partner, we were able to have the agency
partner deliver a generator to the customer's
home. They did not have an interruption of power.
And in fact, one of our linemen went and visited
the customer throughout the duration of the
outage because we flagged that and was able to
ensure that the generator had fuel throughout the
duration of the outage. I share that example with
you because that's how, you know, we believe
that through partnerships, through the affinity
groups, through CalOES and their partnerships
is the best way that we can reach this community
group because they don't have a designee
potentially of medical baseline. So that is an
example of how we're leveraging our partnerships and
we're leveraging affinity groups to reach out
to those vulnerable customers. We’re not done.
We know we can do a lot more and we're gonna
continue that outreach with those partnerships
Commissioner Randolph: And so you'll expand the number of groups you're
interacting with and the information that you can provide to them?
Laurie Giammona: Absolutely.
President Batjer: Yes, of course, Commissioner Guzman?
<v Commissioner Guzman Aceves>What about the leveraging
of the partnership that the counties? I don't know if
you saw the counties letter, but they were particularly
available for this population and having even more
resources and more connectivity. And I've heard, you
know, some efforts with the counties, But this has really
been like the most disappointing element of not having
that pre-existing relationship with all the elements of
operationalizing county relationships. And Mr Visi
talked about anticipation, partnerships and long term
relationships and understanding your customers. Sure, it'd
be helpful for them to understand your distribution grid,
but what about you understanding your customers? Did
you work with the counties? You mentioned you had 722
customers that you did not get to? Did you give that list
to the counties? Did you say can you help us find these?
Laurie Giammona: Thank you for the question. Yes. We've
been working with the counties throughout the year as
we've been preparing for these power shut offs. And,
certainly as part of emergency preparation, we're gonna
be doing more work with the counties so that we can
leverage their resources, and we can provide them with the
information that's necessary for their customer demographics.
We do have a lot of customer information. With
this population though we don't have a a designee. So
some of these customers don't self-identify through a
process by which we can segment those customers. So to
answer your question, we will be working much closer
with the counties to not only leverage their resources
but provide them the information that we have so that
we can partner on supporting these customers. And we are
leveraging our community-based organizations as well.
<v Commissioner Guzman Aceves>So did you give
that 722 list of people to the counties?
Laurie Giammona: Yes, we were communicating with the
counties on our medical baseline contacts and the contacts
we had made with the customers and those that we had
not. We believe these customers, these were homes that
were not available. So, you know, we don't have positive,
there were some customers we don't have positive
confirmation on. We're also checking and going back in the
records to ensure that they're still the customer of record
President Batjer: Commissioner Rechtschaffen.
Commissioner Rechtschaffen: I would like to follow up on the larger point
that Commissioners Guzman Aceves made about coordination with the counties
and local governments and also go back to something that President Batjer
said. We've received scathing letters of criticism from local governments.
I'm sure you've seen them as well, including
one from rural county representatives
who said communication needs to be vastly improved as the existing
processes have proven neither timely nor effective. And perhaps even more
damning, they feel like they're not listened to. We have systematically
heard that there has been little follow through when IOUs are given feedback
from local jurisdiction. I've received briefings from PG&E staff about the
number of meetings in town halls and outreach efforts that PG&E's undertaken.
But clearly they're not working. My question is a two-part question.
What's gonna be different this time? And more particularly, what outcome-based
measures are you going to report to us? It's not gonna be okay simply
to say we had another town hall meeting or 500 meetings. What are we gonna
hear from you about outcome-based measures that you're gonna report to us?
Andy Visi: Let me start since I have overall responsibly
to this. Commissioner, I’ll address the question
you asked, but I’d like to go back, Commissioner Aceves,
to you. We're facing a new and different challenge
in the industry, and this last event made it crystal
clear where the shortcomings were, as it's stressed,
everything that we did. And we're acknowledging that, as
I said, that this whole idea of anticipation requires
intimacy, which is a different level of engagement
with the communities and customers. We don't have that
right now. The time of unilateralism, in terms of action
that a utility can take when it comes to these type
of crisis situations, no longer works. It no longer
works for a number of reasons. One is that the needs of
individual communities, individual customers are
paramount. The impact of shutting off power impacts people
differently, and our ability to do it right requires a
very deep knowledge of our communities, our customers,
and others who have to serve them as well. And we are
not there. We need to get there. We need to establish
different inter-relationships and connections on an
ongoing basis with local communities. One of the things
that is apparent, at least to me from where we sit,
is that there has been a lot of consolidation, a lot
of bringing to the center, a lot of bringing to the top
in a way of creating efficiencies and productivity.
Much is lost in that. Indeed one of the things about
this industry over my 41 years of experience, it's very
local. It's very much based and integrated with the
communities we serve. Most of our people, our tens of
thousands of employees, are part of and integrated with
these communities. Yet somehow when we come to take
decisions, we withdraw from that because it was a
standard service provided broadly to a homogenized group
of recipients. That doesn't work anymore. It doesn't
work anymore because technology allows us to get more
granular, gets us, allows us to disaggregate, allows us
to get information, allows us to know things we didn't
know before, and be much more effective with granular
data than with broad assumptions about our customers.
We’re in that transition now, and we have to quickly
find stopgap measures to become more intimate with these
communities. So all these issues you pulling out are
on point. We have to develop standing relationships.
We have to develop trusted interactions with the people
we serve. Some of the steps that we're gonna take
immediately is to appoint individuals whose only
responsibility it will will be to understand and learn
those things. One of the things I had in my written
comments were that we were going to solve this problem.
And the original wording was we will solve this on behalf
of our customers, and I looked at it and I changed
the wording to We will work with the communities and
customers to solve this, because we have to know the
intimate details of the relationship that the services
we provide with the people who use them. It is a
shortcoming, and it's something we have to get on and
Commission Rechtschaffen, we don't have those outcome
based measures yet, but we need to get them to hold
ourselves accountable to the performance that we have to
provide. And so this whole experience is not just about
improving the way we do PSPS. It's fundamentally about
pivoting on the way we interact and serve our customers
every day, and that's what we have to think about.
Commissioner Rechtschaffen: So I was just gonna, I
appreciate that. But the only thing specific I heard from that
is you're gonna hire some additional people whose job it
is just to develop relationships with local governments.
Andy Visi: Well, we're not gonna hire people. We're going to assign
people people, such as Aaron Johnson, whose role will come to be a
much more integrated liaison with communities. And we'll do that as
much as we need to do to refocus our people to get more regional in
the way we react without customers. It's a pivot in our business. I
didn't say we have to hire anybody, but we have to change our priorities,
and the way we interact with it and understand what our customers
needs are in a real time basis, and not just during times of PSPS.
President Batjer: It seems extraordinary to me, extraordinary, that we're two or
three PSPSs in and, other IOUs too, and that
you're just now realizing that you really
oughta have a liaison designated to each one
of your impacted counties and that you're
just realizing that maybe you should have
done some preplanning to have your community
resource center's already sited and that you
don't have your liasons SEMS trained. I'm
hearing, we're gonna, we're planning, we're
gonna have a playbook by the end of the year.
This isn't hard. This is not hard. You've been in the business 41 years. You gave a
very nice speech or a few words about
anticipation. I can tell you, you guys failed on
so many levels on pretty simple stuff. Creating
liaisons, setting up CRCs, understanding
that your website needed to scale. In the response to me that Mr Johnson gave, you
spoke about possible 5.2 million people.
Doubtful it'll happen. But it's a possibility.
You're gonna scale to 1.7. I will get to some more questions on the website shortly.
You said we need to get there. You need to get
there now. Not at the end of the year. How
many counties have you talked to since last week? How many? How many county managers
or how many direct EOC managers have you already called And said whoops, we blew it.
But we're gonna have a better relationship and it's going to start today. Have you?
Aaron Johnson: Well, the hot wash calls that I described
President Batjer: I don't what hot wash is.
Aaron Johnson: Sorry to use jargon. It's sort of an after-action review of the
events. So we met with, we invited all 35 counties' emergency managers to be on that
conversation. We had the vast majority of them participate on very short notice.
I spoke with a couple of them individually, myself and other folks on our team.
President Batjer: And I understand about eight right
now. Liasons that you've sort of identified, right?
Aaron Johnson: No. We have relationships with each county and people designated both
from a government affairs perspective and from a public safety perspective, all those
roles exist. Many of them serve multiple counties. And so what we did in the event
was narrow their focus and and assigned more people to that role so that they were
serving individually. We had eight actually go
to the EOCs at the request of the counties.
Many of the other county said we want, we would prefer to work with you by phone.
We don't actually need someone here. But those are the numbers that you were asking
about. I don't want to leave the impression that I believe that that is sufficient.
President Batjer: Well, I just repeat, you
need to do it now. Commissioner Shiroma?
Commissioner Shiroma: Thank you. I have a
comment and then, I have three questions. You
know, trying to think of sort of an analogy,
and I keep coming back to the Wizard of
Oz, where, you know, smoke and mirrors and this and that, and then you pull back the
curtain and there's some guy back there, you
know, tryingto do publicity and and some sort
of an impression of what the entity is all
about. And look, I know that the five of you
are taking responsibility, alright? And at first, Mr Lewis, I thought, are you taking
it on the chin for everyone by saying you made
the decision on those PSPSs. But all five
of you are taking responsibility and I
appreciate it. I wasn't sure if you got some
sort of short straw to take the responsibility.
Now, look, back on that April 10th letter
from you all, PG&E to us, it says in there
the kind of criteria that are used for PSPS,
and, of course, redfire zone, temperatures, humidity, wind speeds and so forth. But it
has in there, from you all, from PG&E to the
Commission, the inadequacy of alternatives
to deenergization, such as additional patrols
and repairs or vegetation management
work, that could be completed before the predicted event time. And in the footnotes,
saying PG&E is also pursuing long-term
mitigation through its wildfire mitigation plan
such as sytem harding to reduce the frequency
of PSPSs. So here are my questions for
the 100 incidents identified, are you analyzing
how good was your prediction in terms
of where those located? What was cause? Was it the vegetation? Was it wires? There were
pictures on TV and what have you of those. And to do that deep analysis of how good
you're doing, all the predictions too. How far
in advance are you asking for mutual aid,
especially in the sheer magnitude of the
shutdown and all the inspections that had been
done? I heard that you did ask for mutual aid
and you were able to get everything back
on in 48 hours. But really, how far it goes to advance planning. And then three, have
you talked with your line crews and the
workers and the members of IBW1245 and others
to hear feedback from your workers on improvements
to be made, observations in the field,
and so forth. And in around that, involved them and looking at, especially Mr Lewis,
you have deep experience from Duke Energy,
hurricanes and so forth, I imagine. Have you
looked at the worst case scenario that, like
you said before, there's an earthquake?
There's the 30 hour, 45 mile per hour winds,
the humidity and so forth. And maybe a
couple of tanks exploding, you know, in
Crockett. Have you looked at and done that deep
analysis of what do you do in a worst case analysis? And what do you do ahead of time
towards addressing it and then mitigating it?
Those three questions for the time being.
Michael Lewis: Thank you for the questions. I'll answer all three. And
so let me begin with the preparation. Back in April, I assigned one of
my senior directors to develop a playbook in all in all of our divisions
to expedite the restoration in case of a worst case scenario. So we
drilled. We actually staged the actual PSPSs throughout the summer. We
shut down operations completely to facilitate not just a tabletop, but
actually, we flew helicopters. We did everything in real time except
power off in preparation for the worst case scenario. As I mentioned in
my opening comments, this number was the actual benchmark. Five days. Okay,
so that was where, in my view, there needs to be improvement. Because
if benchmark was two days, I would have asked the mutual assistance
earlier. I did ask for mutual assistance, but it was in the operation
phase when that occurred, and we did receive a few crews. By the way, is
not mandatory. That we get resources. They have to choose to come and
support us and we have teams from Oregon and other places that was on
site, ready to work, but there was still a small number of resources.
President Batjer: I want to interrupt for one minute.
Because I was PSPS s calls and OES, I don't know
what hour this was, maybe the second or third. Probably
the third PSPS called. Offered to help you with
mutual aid. Eric Lamoreaux said, Do you need help with
mutual aid? We're here to help you. We're here to
make the calls for you. Create the relationships if you
don't have them The answer is we got it, we got it.
Michael Lewis: So after that call, I had a conversation
with Mark Garaducci and we reversed that decision. Okay.
President Batjer: I just wanted that
clarification for Commissioner Shiroma's point.
Michael Lewis: So, in terms of preparation
for worst case scenario, this event
here was the worst case scenario as far as history is concerned. It mirrors
the October 17th wind event in every way. And so having this type of impact in
terms of, originally, it was 4.6 million customers and we did reconfigure our
system in a way to get that down to 738. Furthermore, we're able to reconfigure
about 48,000 customers after we did a shut off and turn it back on with sooner
because we were able to reconfigure the service of the one's that were in Tier
1 get back on active service sooner than waiting for the all clear. So we
accomplished a lot of reconfiguration on the front end and in the back end. But
we're still left with the 738,000 customers to keep deenergized. (inaudible from
off-mic) Yes ma'am. 100 instances, we're still we're still going to the evaluation
of those events right now, trying to categorize them in ways to see, you
know, are we getting a pattern in terms of where we are with our maintenance
program and particularly our enhanced vegetation management program. Where does
that allow with these particular events themselves? We have not concluded that
analysis yet. I'm able to speak about a pattern in terms of our current findings.
Commissioner Shiroma: And will that be included in the report due
to the CPUC within 10 days of the PSPS. You're working on that
communique to us and by the way, this letter that I'm referring to
is on our website. This October 10 letter from the September PSPS.
<v Commissioner Rechtschaffen>Another follow-up
question about restoration. We've heard from the
general manager of the Northern California Power
Association who said that they had offered
to establish mutual aid relationships with you.
They had field crews available and that you
didn't call them to ask for help until the very
end of the PSPS. You want to comment about that?
Michael Lewis: As I stated, you know, earlier, we, with the given five-day
benchmark, we had a plan, had resources available, we had over 6000 resources. 41
helicopters, all prepositioned to execute the restoration effort. So initially, yes,
we did have the event, for my way of thinking
in terms of restoration performance,
covered. As we got into the event, we decided to pursue more resources to bring
that restoration time further in. So beginning, absolutely, as already stated,
we did not pursuit mutual assistance. We did receive resourceis into our service
territory. But I'm not familiar with the specifics of this one engagement.
President Batjer: Commissioner Randolph. Oh, I'm sorry
Commissioner Shiroma: And feedback from your workers,
your line crew workers and the folks who are out there
inspecting, are you including their feedback in the
lessons learned and actions to be taken in the future?
Michael Lewis: Yes. In fact, we are, out of our practices that we
have in place now, from our workers, for example, we deenergize all of
ourre closers for the for the full wildfire season. Whereas before
we were, you know, as we have a red flag warning we would take them,
re-closing status. That came one from one of our operators. We're
constantly gaining insight from field workforce who knows this better than
anyone to ensure they're incorporated in our overall plan. Se we gather
make their feedback as well, as part of our interaction with you.
Commissioner Randolph: Okay, I just have a quick question, from what
you're all are saying, it sounds like electric operations was the
only group that did tabletop exercises, scenario planning. It doesn't
sound like any of you other divisions did that. Is that correct?
Laurie Giammona: We do a tabletop all as a whole
event. So we're all involved in tabletop exercises.
Commissioner Randolph: Okay. On the customer side, though, how much
of that, kind of scenario work did you do ahead of time? Because I
heard a commitment from Mr Visi that that was going to increase. So
I'm just trying to understand why there wasn't more of that before.
Laurie Giammona: Yeah, I think that,you know, really as Andy stated, I
think, we've been planning for wildfire season and now we're in wildfire
season. And so we've had multiple events back to back, and we're trying
to move quickly with the lessons learned. But we do do integrated
table tops. I think what Michael was specifically referring to with the
divisions was the restoration work that he planned for and tested from
an electric perspective. So I think we've been, as we do tabletops, we do
it integrated across the organization. Does that answer your question?
President Batjer: Yes, Commissioner Rechtschaffen?
Commissioner Rechtschaffen: I have questions
about the community resource centers without
relitigating the failure to identify in advance.
Are they all accessible to the disabled people?
Laurie Giammona: So we, as we were planning
for the wildfire season and beginning
our work with the communities to identify locations, we identified 200 locations
that we already have land agreements on. We've been vetting those with the
communities. There are base camp locations, some are accessible and some are not.
Some would be appropriate and some would not
be appropriate for use for our customer
resource centers. Our intention, as we build out this model, is that there are
versions of a customer resource center, based on what the needs are of the
community. Our optimal location would be some of the locations that we had in Sonoma
County, where they were a hardened facility that had, you know, proper indoor
restrooms, et cetera, and had full
accessibility. For the other sites that we stood
up, we worked to ensure that they were ADA compliant and accessible. But I will
tell you, in some of our more rural areas, that was that more of a challenge.
And our plan is to work very closely with our communities. In some cases, we
leveraged our sprinters to very small
populations. But as you can imagine, in some
of these communities, the roads are not lit even when there is power. So we're
gonna that is an area that we have to continue to work on with the communities.
Commissioner Randolph: Why were you limited to areas where you
just, where you had pre-existing land agreements? Because it seems
like one opportunity in working with counties is to say, hey,
County, do you have something we can use on an emergency basis?
Laurie Giammona: Yeah, and, you know, unfortunately, I mean, we have,
you know, in our own portfolio, we had a vast amount of land. As
we got into these events and back to back events, in the in the
Sierra Foothills and Sonoma county, we have areas that we have agreed
upon are the right locations. In some cases, we have recommendations
by the counties that we then pursue. But maybe the owner of the
property does not want us to be there, or it's a merchant. So it's
clearly an opportunity for us as we build this out with our counties.
Commissioner Rechtschaffen: Will you commit to making them all accessible?
Laurie Giammona: Absolutely. We were committed
to making them ADA accessible and we're committed
to providing any resource is that are necessary
for customers. We've not designed, these are
not designed to be overnight shelters. These are
designed to be resource centers that provide for
charging, provide for cell service, WiFi were
available, restrooms, cooling, heating and water.
Commissioner Rechtschaffen: How late do you plan to keep them
open. That was another concern, that they closed early evening.
Laurie Giammona: In this event, we worked
with the counties and they provided additional
security measures for us. And where it was safe,
we kept them open until 8 p.m. So after the
dinner hours and into the evening. So our hours
of operation in most locations were 8 AM M to
8 PM. Through the duration of the outage, we did
not demobilize any of the sites until we had
confirmation from the counties that we had their
approval to demobilize. We also partnered
with State and with the counties individually
to ensure that we had appropriate security. We
provided security. But as we got into the later
hours of the evening, we partnered with local
law enforcement and the county sheriffs to
ensure that customers and employees were safe.
President Batjer: Ms Commissioner Guzman Aceves?
Commissioner Guzman Aceves: Thank you President Batjer. Mr
Lewis. I wanted to agree with the point you made earlier and
acknowledge that all of your hard working men and women,
particularly those restoring the lines, did a tremendous amount of
work. Everybody who was doing their best at the call centers, all
of your workforce, and I appreciate you taking responsibility
that was a decision and a lack of planning and preparedness
by the executive management. And I think we agree in the
failure being there. I wanted to ask a two-part question, Mr.
Visi. Mr Lewis actually mentioned that some of the populations,
most notably Humboldt County, did not have to lose power.
Will you be reimbursing those customers and other customers?
Obviously, the Governor has asked you to provide a rebate to
all customers. And as a second part of the question, could you
also clarify what funding was used to fund the exclusive
dinner that took place in Napa for some of your gas customers?
Andy Visi: So the answer to the first question is that the issue
of reimbursement of customers for a service disruption is a
topic that is appropriately discussed here. I don't have a response
you at the moment. It is not our intention, at this moment, to
undertake a reimbursement for those customers, or other customers,
that suffered consequential damages as a result of this. However,
that said, that is a conversation and deliberations that appropriately
with this Commission and with us for future conversations.
<v Commissioner Guzman Aceves>So is that say, just to
clarify, that you will not be reimbursing customers
unless you're mandated to? Even those customers and
you just acknowledged should never have been cut off?
Andy Visi: What I'm saying at this point in time, we are not committed to
making those reimbursements. At this moment. We have not taken that decision.
<v Commissioner Guzman Aceves>Argue that you
don't need this venue to make that decision.
Andy Visi: We'll take that under advisement.
I'm just answering the question that asked.
Commissioner Guzman Aceves: Okay, you can answer the second one.
Andy Visi: Yu'll have to remind me now of what the second one was. I apologize.
Commissioner Guzman Aceves: It was reported that PG&E had a
very lucrative and expensive dinner in Napa County, same day as
the anniversary of the Santa Rosa Fires and all the North Valley
fires. What is the funding source for those expenditures?
Andy Visi: That funding source of those expenses
will not be the customer. All right, I'm answering
it to you that way because I don't know the
details, but it will not be. If it was, it will not
be. It's not the intention there. And we've taken
actions to deal with accountability for that decision.
Both Bill Johnson and I were in the EOC when
that event happened. We were not aware of it. We
have taken appropriate measures to ensure it will never
happen again, and that there will be no customer
funds that will support any of the activities
that took place there. I just can't tell you this
moment where they were, but I will tell you what
the commitment is, is that they are will not be
funded other than out of shareholders pockets and
those type events will not happen going forward.
Commissioner Shiroma: Okay, how are you goiing
to assure that's not gonna happen going forward?
Andy Visi: We, Bill Johnson and I, have been clear. We have communicated
it broadly. Everybody understands that, and the actions that were taken as
a result, how the accountability was acted on, sends a very clear and
significant message that that will no longer be an acceptable practice at PG&E.
President Batjer: Thank you. I have a question for Miss Kay. Please.
There were several things that you listed, that I'm aware of,
from the letter that Mr Johnson sent to me that you are doing or
have done. And some of those were actually done during the PSPS.
Some of them, I think, were initiated by the California Department
of Technology, in real time, actually, with your team and some
of your vendors. We were pretty surprised that you had not already
had Cloud Services as part of your services and that your server
was on the premise. And some of the other things. You didn't have
the proper testing software. My understanding is yes, ESRI was
there, AWS was there, Microsoft was there, but they weren't, they
were people that perhaps couldn't even make real time decisions.
They were junior in nature. And that we helped you all make real time
contact up the chain of command so we could get quick decisions,
the best minds at the table at the time. Is there a resource
issue or is there a lack of attention on your technology shop?
Kathy Kay: I think this is an area that we need
to improve. I can talk about cloud first. We do
leverage cloud services. In this space, though,
you're absolutely right, our customer website,
PG&E dot com is still on-prem. Some of the services
behind it are in the cloud. You know, they're
served by SAS providers, suffer as a service
providers. As for the utilization of our vendors, I
am accountable for the fact that we were not engaging
at the right level. I do appreciate the help
we got when Amy's team came. They were able to get
resources at higher levels. We had been working
with a lot of the teams. We had a lot of the work
completed, but you are absolutely right. They
helped us with the testing at a level that we
weren't able to do in that evening at that speed.
President Batjer: Right? My understanding at the
time was that it was quoted to me that it was gonna
take 12 hours to do the test and CDD said, we'll
take it to the data center and do it in an hour.
Kathy Kay: Actually, they did it in the cloud.
President Batjer: Yeah, yeah, cloud environment.
Well, it's very concerning to me that a corporation, a
company of your size, seems to be very lacking or not
very modern in your IT practices and infrastructure.
I've sat in many a legislative hearing with Amy
Tong and her team, who used to report to me in my
previous job, where we would take a little bit of a
scolding because what were we doing in the IT Area?
Because, after all, we're the home of Silicon Valley,
and we should have the best and the brightest. I'm
very proud of her team.And so is the Governor's
office. And I think for allowing us to be a partner
with you. But we were pretty astonished at the lack
of your infrastructure. May I ask you, too, Miss
Kay, were you there that the whole time during the
the outage, the PSPS, and when the website crashed?
Kathy Kay: Yeah, I was not there on Tuesday. I was
actually, right as the site started experiencing
problems, I was actually flying to a meeting of
all this CIOs of 20 utilities. When I landed,
I started troubleshooting with my team. I was on
WebEx throughout the night. The next morning when
it started experiencing problems, I flew back. I
never did participate in any of the meetings.
President Batjer: Okay. Thank you. Are there
any other questions of the panel at this time?
Okay, I thank you very much. Appreciate it. We're going to now ask our next
panel to come to the table, please. And I do thank you for waiting.
President Batjer: Okay, Thank you. If you will please introduce yourself. This
panel, we're going to discuss the scope and scale of the recent PSPS events and
expectation for the future. Some of that obviously has already taken place. But
that is the subject of this panel. So please introduce yourself with your title.
Sumeet Singh: Absolutely. Thank you, President Batjer,
and respectful Commissioners. My name is Sumeet Singh
and I lead PG&E's Community Wildfire Safety program.
As part of our discussion, I will also be referring
to some slides which I will also navigate as part of the
discussion. So, to your point,, President Batjer, the
focus of this discussion will be focused on using the
past PSPS events to provide insights on the approach
and the process that PG&E uses to inform the scope of
such events. We’ll focus the discussion on leveraging
the most recent event, which by all accords, was
unprecedented for PG&E and perhaps the electric utility
industry in terms of the number of customers and communities
involved. As can be seen from this table, these
are the four events that PG&E implemented, public safety
power shutoff for this year. The recorded wind gusts
and the amount of damage we experienced on our system
from the October 9th event was significant. As stated by
Mr Johnson, no catastrophic wildfires occurred, but we
understand the hardship of this event, and potential
events of this scale, have to our customers and our
communities and have an unwavering focus on doing better,
I believe, Commissioner Shiroma, you had requested,
what were some of the lessons learned, specifically
from the September 23rd to 26th PSPS event? Think you
might have been referring to Section 14 of that October
10th letter, and there were three specific items that
were identified within that letter. The first related
to the scope refinement process, and through our
discussion, I will touch on that in terms of the practices
that we have employed to target, from a scale standpoint,
not only narrowing the scope of the event but
also minimizing the duration of the outages that our
customers and communities experience. The second item was
around the accuracy and timeliness of submitting the
notification forms to the state agency CalOES, and we
put a significant focus on this past October 9th event to
have dedicated members within our emergency operations
center that are focused on ensuring the timely and
accurate reporting of the data related to the event
to the respective state agency. And then the third
lesson learned that we stated was notification and
communication process. And I think the panel before me
addressed that. Given the scale and scope of this event
and the unprecedented nature, we have a lot more work
to do in that space. Go to the next slide. Our focus
as part of the PSPS events is the prevention of any
potential ignition caused by utility assets, especially
during conditions of high fire risk. As you started off,
our engagement today in the hearing today, Commissioner
Batjer, you talked about the destructive nature of
the fires that we have all experienced within our
service territory, both in 2017 and last year in
Paradise, and that cannot be repeated. And that is our
unwavering focus, as part of our PSPS events, and our
broader Community Wildfire Safety Program, while minimizing
the impact to our customers and communities. And really,
that minimization we focus on is two dimensions. First
dimension is number of customers and counties. I will
touch on this in more detail. And the second dimension
is the duration of the shut off itself. So what you see
in these maps is, if you look at the map on the left
hand side that has the label of 3.8 million customers
on the top, this map shows the potential customer
impact as a result of an overlay of high fire risk with
critical burn environment designation. And this designation
is the highest fire risk rating that is issued by the
North and the South Operations Predictive Services
which, to our understanding, is an interagency entity
that's used by CalFire to inform the fire risk within
the state of California. So you can see the footprint
for this specific event in regards to the high fire
risk and critical burn environment as it pertains to
our service territory. The next map that you see, from
the left of that which has the heading of the 2.1 million
customers, shows the potential customer impact as a
result of an overlay of the red flag warning. And this
is issued by the National Weather Service. The map
that you see next to that of 1.6 million customers.
That's an overlay of PG&E's utility potential fire risk,
and in two slides, I will discuss the underlying methodology
that we use to help inform our utility potential
fire risk. The utility potential fire risk is in part
informed by the National Weather Service as well as
the Northern Operations Predictive Services on PG&E's
predefined fire index areas. And these are regions
that have been used by the state and federal agencies
such as CalFire and the U. S. Forest Services. They’re
designated as fire danger rating areas. And we leveraged
these areas to further align with the high fire
threat district maps that were issued by the CPUC in
January of last year. And in essence, what the fire index
areas do is, they further breakdown our service territory
that's made up of about 38,000 square miles of high
fire threat districts, which represents 54% of our
overall service territory, and we have 109 fire index
areas that cover the 38,000 square miles. And we have
planned and canned execution playbooks at each of these
respective fire index levels, so that we can streamline
the notification to state agencies, counties, cities,
customers and have detailed steps to de-energize,
inspect, and subsequently restore service. But given the
scale of this event of October 9th, we did not rest
on the fire index areas. And this is the number that
Mr Lewis cited as part of his comments in regards to
the 1.6 million customers. We further narrowed and
targeted our focus on areas within the FIA's that have
the highest potential for the utility fire risk. As an
example, as part of this effort, we were able to narrow
down 42,000 potential customers impacted in Kern County,
which would have been the impact if we just focused
on the fire index areas and reduce that down to 4000
customers as part of the event. Our weather forecasts are
informed by the broader meteorology community within
the state of California. We do not do this work in
isolation. As an example, for this specific event, five
days before the event, on a daily basis, our meteorology
team was engaged, and interacting with the Northern
Operations Predictive Services as well as the National
Weather Services. And additionally given the scope
and scale of this event, we, at the request of CalOES,
held an inter-agency video conference on October 6th
with the referenced agencies to review in detail what
we were forecasting in regards to a widespread high
risk event with the potential for significant fires,
an event that was looking like the highest fire risk
event of the season, and likely the strongest offshore
wind event since October 2017. And there was consensus
in that community of meteorologists in regards to that
assessment. Although we reduced the scope of the PSPS
from the initial projections, as you can see from these
maps, we know we need to do better going forward and
we will discuss our approach and how we plan to do so
further. Our focus on reducing impact is not only on
the number of customers, as we discussed in the prior
slide, but it is also to minimize the duration of the
outage based on the weather forecast and the associated
fire risk. And what you can actually see in this chart
is the X Axis shows the number of customers impacted and
the, I'm sorry, it's the opposite. The Y Axis shows
the number of customers impacted, and the X axis shows
the respective timeline. And given the scope and scale
of the weather impact, the event evolved through early
morning on Wednesday, 10-9, into Friday afternoon,
10-11. And as can be seen on this chart, some customers
were restored as other customers were being de-energized,
given the fact that the fire risk varied in our
service territory at different points in time. And
as Mr. Lewis stated in his comments right after the
de-energization happened on Phase One, we were actually
able to further reconfigure our grid through switching
operations to provide an alternate supply source to
restore service to 48,000 customers that were outside of
the potential fire risk before the all clear. Another
takeaway from this chart is that nearly all customers
were restored within 48 hours, as Mr Lewis also
mentioned, but as was stated, we know we need to do
better and we're committed to do so. The next slide, I
will touch on the underlying basis and the methodology
that we used to help inform the scope. So the scope of
our public safety power shutoff event is based on two
primary factors. The first factor is something called the
outage-producing wind, which is, the way to think about
it is, the likelihood of an ignition that could take
place from a utility asset in our asset. And then, the
second parameter is a fire potential index, which is
if an ignition happens, what's the likelihood of spread,
meaning fire turning into a catastrophic wildfire.
Let me first touch on the fire potential index. It uses
both weather, which includes wind speed, temperature
and relative humidity, and fuel loading factors, which
includes the type of vegetation on the ground, because
that's a proxy for fuel, and the associated moisture
content. And this is a very similar approach to the
spread element that is used by the US Forest Services
to inform the National Fighter Danger Rating system.
Regarding the outage producing winds, what we have
done, and you'll see this in one of my slides, that
correlates the damage that we found as part of this event,
because we were forecasting that I think there was a
question in regards to the forecasted damage, the actual
damage compared to our forecast, and what we've done
is we've established and correlated sustained wind
speeds which directly correlate to wind gusts and looked
at last 10 years of data regarding outages and the cause
of the outages as it pertains to our distribution
system, aligned with the peak wind gusts and the
sustained wind gusts. So we have leverage nearly 300,000
data points regarding the performance of the system
to be able to help inform how it's gonna perform over
the course off a certain forecasted wind speed. We
further calibrated this model using 1600 fires that are
greater than, approximately 1600 fires, greater than
40 acres from the US Forest Service's data set, which
dated back to 1992, and this is the basis of our forecasted
utility risk model. The map on the slide shows the
primary basis of the outage producing winds, which is
directly correlated to the sustained and the peak wind
gusts. And as Mr Johnson mentioned, at the speeds of about
40 to 45 miles an hour, for our distribution system,
we start to see vegetation coming in contact with our
lines, and what you can see is there's a significant
footprint within our service territory that exceeded
that threshold for this particular event in October 9.
The scope that we specifically identify is based on the
forecasted wind speed, coupled with our assets that
are located in the high fire risk areas. So areas that,
where our assets traverse, high fire spread coupled
with high wind gusts. So one example I'll point you to
the map is, if you look at the Sacramento Valley area,
you can see that the wind peak wind gusts were fairly
high. However, we did not include this area within our
scope, and the reason is because it's primarily located
in Tier 1, which has a low potential for fire spread
risk. And as can also be seen, the damaged locations
that we've identified and confirmed so far, the 100
plus, which is the blue dots that show up on this map,
there's a strong correlation to what we forecasted and
the confirmed hazards and damages that were identified
on the system as we did the safety inspections after
the all clear. One other item I want to touch o, because
we've received a lot of questions from a lot of our
customers and counties is, well, where I was in a
particular county or a location, I did not experience
the high wind gust or the extreme wind gusts, however,
you still turned my power off. And this example is an
actual depiction of the October 9th event, which illustrates
an example of a radio distribution system within
the City of Pinole. So if you look at the Pink Triangle,
which is the substation, and think about that as
the supply source of electricity, that supply source
has to traverse that yellow shaded area, which is the
high fire threat district, through the lines that are
shaded in orange, because those are the lines that are
the high fire risk areas that we were looking to mitigate.
And as we de-energized those lines, we also had
an unintended impact to customers in the lower fire risk
area. So for example, if you take your attention to
the north section of that illustration and schematic,
hard to see, but that's Pinole Valley Road. But that
entire community is served through that one radio
distribution system, And in this specific instance, there
were approximately 4000 customers that were impacted that
were in the lower fire risk areas. Now there's other
circumstances that were part of this event in a similar
configuration. If you reflect on the comments that
Mr Johnson made in regards to the installation of
sectionalization devices, sectionalization devices help.
But in the instances, and this specific depiction, a
sectionalization device would not help in the isolated
section in the north part of that system because there's
no additional supply source. This is where there's
the opportunity to integrate microgrids as a potential
supply source. So the sectionalization devices is
not the panacea. It's one tool within the tool kit for
us to be able to reduce the overall impact of PSPS.
Commissioner Guzman Aceves: Just a follow up question to that, Mr Singh. I
assume there are many communities like this, and investing in microgrids is
not something that will be cheap. Do you have some thoughts on how you're
planning to prioritize the investment of microgrids in communities like this?
Sumeet Singh: That prioritization, that we are looking at, really is based on
three parameters, and that parameter really is around the areas of our circuit that
traverse the highest fire risk areas. So when you look at the high fire threat
district maps, even the Tier 2 and Tier 3, there's some communities that are at higher
risk as compared to others. So we're looking
at not only the performance of our system,
the condition of the vegetation in and around the area, but also looking at the
spread likelihood, in terms of catastrophic wildfires, including communities that
are challenged from an egress standpoint. As we all reflect on the lessons learned
from Paradise, we understand what the
implication was, given the limited egress for
that community. We are also looking at, and we've done a 30-year climatological
study to help inform 30 years of wind speed history with a specific focus on looking
at the phenomenon of the Northeast wind pattern, which is something what we call
Diablo Winds here. It's very similar to the Santa Ana winds down in Southern
California, and we have a prioritization model to identify those communities, those
circuits, and those are the ones that we're going after first. In regards to your
microgrid question, then we further expand that to identify the communities that would
be the greatest impact as a result of a PSPS
de-energization. And those would be the
areas that we would prioritize first. One item I did want to touch on. We don't
have an example here but turning to our transmission system and our higher voltage
system because that is also in scope of the public safety power shut off, and that
was in scope for this event on. I know that's
a question on top of a lot of people's
minds as well. Our higher voltage systems, which is 115 kV. The 230 kV and the
500, which really is the interconnection between us and the CalISO, the independent
system operator for California. They tend to be more networked in nature, given the
reliability standards that are promulgated by the North American Electric Reliability
Corporation. So one example that'll point to on the October 9th event. Of the
738,000 customers that were impacted, roughly 16% of those were directly impacted
as a result of transmission. So that's about 120,000 customers. And as Mr Lewis
previously mentioned, 80,000 of the 120 were in the Humboldt area, and that was not
a direct impact as a result of transmission.
The issue there was that we had one of
our lines out of service for a planned
project, and that's one of the lessons learned
that he spoke of, in regards to our
operational learning. So to really narrow it
President Batjer: If I may interrupt, excuse
me. But how long before a maintenance planned
outage, do you plan the outage? Like how close to
this weather event was that maintenance planned?
Sumeet Singh: It varies on its not necessarily just a
maintenance outage. So if it's a maintenance outage, we can
typically plan that was in 60 to 90 to 120 days. I mean,
unless it's an immediate safety issue, then we will take that
action right away, because we do have reliability built
into the network system. In regards to this specific type
of a project, it could be a multi-year project because of
the permitting and the environmental restrictions that we
have to follow to be able to get the permit to do the work
itself. But we do look at all of the work that's happening
within our system, so that at any given point in time, we're
not compromising the overall reliability of the grid.
And in this specific instance, one of the learnings we had
is this type of work, now we're gonna plan in the shoulder
months, which would be outside of the peak time period of
when we anticipate or experience the highest fire risk.
<v Commissioner Randolph>Increasingly, though, I
mean, as our fire season gets longer, it's a little,
it's gonna get more challenging to schedule that
maintenance, right, because you want to avoid the summer
months but you also want to avoid, you know, October
because wildfire season, you know, October's a key
month. But as wildfire season gets longer, it's gonna
get more challenging scheduling that maintenance
Sumeet Singh: It is. And that's an element that we are looking at
from an asset strategy perspective for the current transmission grid
that we have and identifying are there areas where we need to bring in
additional resiliency? For example, switching stations to be able to
provide additional flexibility on the system to be able to continue to
enable us to do the important safety work that we need to do on the
system yet ensure were meeting the reliability standards that we've put
forward and the various regular regulating entities have put forward
Commissioner Randolph: On the topic of transmission,
you know, as you noted, those lines can have a
significant impact in terms of number of customers.
Are there any operational steps that you can take to
protect those lines and potentially avoid PSPSs in
particular locational ized areas that might serve a
lot of customers or you might want to try to do other
ways to keep that transmission line on energized?
Sumeet Singh: You know, thank you for that question.
Absolutely. So when you look at our transmission lines, not
every line is the same, right? Even in terms of the right
of way. And when you start looking at some of our higher
voltage lines that I spoke of, we tend to have a greater
right of way and a greater clearance. So the likelihood of,
for example, vegetation impacting our lines, creating an
ignition, is much lower, as compared to some of our lower
voltage transmission lines. For example, when you look at
our 60 kV or 70 kV, which we refer to as subtransmission,
tend to be very similar in terms of our right of away
and have a much tighter right of way. So one example is
identifying the lines of 60 kV, 70 kV, that provide service
to a significant amount of customers and creating a much
broader right of way as part of that risk reduction measure.
And that's exactly some of the things that we're doing.
President Batjer: A quick question. I'm sorry. Commissioner Rechtschaffen.
Commissioner Rechtschaffen: I don't know if we're finished. Are
you finished? I want to let you finish, and then I have questions.
Sumeet Singh: Sure, I've got two more slides if you'll be able to get
through in short order. So on slide seven, I think, Commissioner Shiroma,
you had asked this question in regards to the assessment of the hazard.
So what we've done is for the confirmed locations of our hazards,
we have correlated, specifically, the location, the type of the hazard,
and our teams are currently identifying what work was done from a
maintenance perspective previously. The specific type of work. When was
it done. To be ableto further help inform the effectiveness of our
risk reduction measures. But one thing I do want to highlight on this
slide, there's a couple of things. So if you look at the map on the
right hand side, it basically shows, in blue shade, the area that was
in scope or that was impacted as a result of PSPS and those exclamation
points as the location of the confirmed hazards or damages. And what
you can see is that there's a fairly strong correlation. And this
really speaks to the statistical-based 10-year model in terms of forecast
versus the actuals of what we observed. The other takeaway is that
the hazards included trees or branches into lines, downed wires,
fallen poles, and the work that we are doing, and the other IOU's in
California are doing, does not necessarily guarantee that we can
eliminate all PSPS events because we do have bare conductor in a dynamic
environment. But we fully realize that that's the future that we are
aspiring towards, so I'll give you a few examples as to why I make that
statement. The first example is the additional vegetation work that
we're doing, on enhanced vegetation, which goes beyond the regulatory
requirements, does not guarantee that a tree branch, that maybe 40 or
more feet away from our line, cannot come in contact with the line during
a high wind event. So it's not immune to that. Or having a covered
conductor. It's not immune to a large tree from fielding into the line
and leading to a wires down situation. So when we have a covered conductor,
the potential ignition likelihood is far lower than it is for the
current bare conductors that we have or the bare wires, but there is
still the likelihood of ignition as a result of the down conductor.
<v Commissioner Rechtschaffen>Do you take those
things into account in determining where
they shut off the power? Your prior hardening
efforts? Your vegetation management efforts?
Sumeet Singh: Thank you for that question, sir. So we're in the first
evolution as part of the implementation of those risk reduction measures
for system hardening. So far, we've done about 100 miles, for our enhanced
vegetation, a little north of 1000. We don't have enough data set
yet, and actually, this is what we are doing, working jointly with CPUC
Safety and Enforcement Division as well as the other California IOU's to
evaluate the operational performance of those circuits to really understand
the data-driven effective risk reduction measure of those measures.
Commissioner Rechtschaffen: So right now you don't do it.
Sumeet Singh: We do not currently leverage that information,
but we plan to do that on a going forward basis as
we continue to collect the data set. And this is one area
that I think us working jointly with the CPUC as well as
the other IOUs, because they've got a broader data set as
well that we can really leverage and leapfrog the state of
California and the utilities on a much faster pace, as
opposed to each of our IOUs only relying on our data sets.
President Batjer: Could you repeat the number of lines? I think
you said 100 miles and 1000 lines? Could you repeat that again?
Sumeet Singh: Sure, President Batjer, I apologize
for rambling so many numbers. So in our wildfire
mitigation plan we had put forward goal of 150
miles for system hardening and we're at about
north of 100 miles. At the moment, year to date.
And for our Enhanced Vegetation Management
program, we had put forward 2455 miles on. We are
north of 1000 miles of that work being completed.
President Batjer: I know, more numbers, but can you give, for all
of our edification, mostly the public's, what would be your total
miles? I mean, how far are you into your vegetation reaching the
total? And how far are you into your hardening reaching the total?
Sumeet Singh: So, in terms of our hardening, its
envisioned to be a 10 to 14 year program. We're
targeting 7100 miles of the highest risk miles within
our high fire threat districts, and for the Enhanced
Vegetation Management Program, it's intended to be a
eight-year program because we're targeting all of the
miles, which is the 25,000 miles of distribution
that we have within the High Fire Threat District's.
President Batjer: We interrupted you again. I'm sorry.
Sumeet Singh: No problem. This is the last slide, and what I was gonna share
here is that there's no silver bullet to solving this issue. But we will leave no
rock unturned to leverage every tool, every technology, that's available in the
industry to address the ongoing risk of not just the unprecedented wildfire risk but
the risk presented as a result of a PSPS event of this scale. And as we've
discussed, right, the fundamental redesign of the electric infrastructure to be more
resilient and flexible will take time, as we just discussed. And this also includes
the installation of permanent microgrids and discreeted generation as we discussed
Commissioner. But what we're doing now is to
implement mitigations that can potentially
reduce the impact of our customers and communities during a PSPS event. So
Mr Johnson mentioned the additional
installation of sectionalization devices and
that actually benefited us in this specific event from October 9th. So far we've
installed, this year, more than 200 sectionalization devices, and as a result,
in this event, we were able to mitigate impact to 77,000 customers. So there is
benefit that we can draw upon now as a result of this. And we have plans to do
more than 550 devices and get those installed
within the next 12 months or less.
Commissioner Randolph: When you say mitigate, what do you mean?
Do you mean like those 77,000 customers were not de-energized?
Sumeet Singh: De-energized. Another item that we actually employed as part of
the October 9th event is the Resilient Zones. So we have a Resilient zone in
Angwin that was operational during the event that maintained service to critical
services within community like the fire station. And we have plans to do an
additional 40 or more. And the last item is where we've provided backup generation,
both at the grid level. So specifically in the October 9th event, we did roll
in mobile generation within one of our
substations and were able to maintain service
to downtown Calistoga even during the de-energized event. And we also worked
with some of the critical infrastructure entities like CalTrans to maintain service
to mass transit like Caldicott Tunnel. So those are all of the things that
we are doing now on. We're going to continue
to do more of very aggressively. The
last thing I'll state is that it's gonna be imperative for us to continue to
engage and partner very closely, not only with the CPUC, CalOES, CalFire, counties,
cities, our customers to really work as a collective Us because that's what
it's gonna take to face this unprecedented risk our customers or committees are
facing. And also addressing the ongoing risk of this scale of PSPS events.
President Batjer: Commissioner Shiroma?
Commissioner Shiroma: So, Sumeet, question. What is your timeframe for these
40 other Angwin-type of microgrids. Are they located all over your territory?
Sumeet Singh: Yes, Commissioner, so they're specifically targeted using the
same prioritization methodology that I articulated previously. In terms of
likelihood of ignition, the consequence of a fire spread turning into a
catastrophic wildfire, egress, as well as looking at the Northeast wind patterns.
So those are all of the elements. Initially, the plans that we had put
forward were approximately three years. But we know we need to do better and
are in the process of reevaluating our plans to identify what we can get
done and how quickly we can get some of these things done in a safe manner.
Commissioner Shiroma: My last question for you, at this point,
is you're the Vice president of Asset and Risk Management,
Wildfire Safety Program, are you also involved in enterprise
risk management and assessment? In so far as did you participate
in in looking at ahead of time at the worst possible situation
that could occur? And also in the enterprise of risk management,
are you involved in looking at the core culture of the
utility, which seems to me to be a part of the the risk map?
Sumeet Singh: My specific focus is on the risks related to electrical
operations and all the electrical operations assets. But we work,
and I work, very closely, and my team works very closely with our
enterprise risk management team to ensure that the work that we're doing
as part of the RAMP proceedings within the CPUC risk assessment mitigation
phases are completely in sync with the methodology that's being
used at the enterprise level as well as the granular risk analysis
that our teams are doing within Electric Operations. That is yes.
<v Commissioner Randolph>Have you done any
analysis in looking at all the map that showed
where the damage was identified? Have you
done any analysis about where those locations
were, kind of, in your prioritization list, in your veg management program and in your
hardening program, were there any locations
where the veg management was behind the plan?
Sumeet Singh: So Commissioner Randolph that that's the work that's
happening at the moment. What I could tell you is that when we
did look at some of the hazards and damages, we did have some locations
where tree branches impacted or came in contact with covered
conductor. So that's an indication of where we've actually done system
hardening work. So there are instances where we have implemented
the risk reduction measures to your point, but that full analysis
of the 100 plus confirmed hazards and damage locations is ongoing.
<v Commissioner Rechtschaffen>Quick follow-up
question. Did your fire index tool
accurately predict where the damage was going to occur and where it didn't occur?
Sumeet Singh: Yeah, so if we go back to slide
seven. Right? When you just overlay, and that was the
intent of this map here, what we forecasted is what
shaded in blue because that's what we made the
decision on in regards to the scope of the public
safety power shut off event. And as you can see, with
the confirmed hazard and damage locations so far,
there's a good correlation in terms of that overlay.
Commissioner Rechtschaffen: Let me ask you a question about, I
don't if you were gonna, San Diego Gas and Electric is state of the
art. They do a simulation where they run 10,000 wildfire scenarios
a day. Are you capable of doing that with your fire index tool?
Sumeet Singh: We are, Commissioner. We're actually leveraging in working with the
same entity and service provider, and we have actually deployed that fire spread
tool and capability. So that's another
analytical element that comes into play, which
is not just the potential forecast of an outage, because an outage is a leading
indicator for a fire ignition, but also if that outage does result in a fire
ignition, based on the weather forecast, what would be the potential spread and what
could be the associated consequence? So we have a model, and it's the same exact
vendor, same exact methodology that we are employing and using for that purpose.
Commissioner Randolph: Are there any other operational things?
You mentioned increasing the corridor on the subtransmission
lines. This fire season are their operational things that you can
do to help you be able to limit deenergization in certain areas?
Sumeet Singh: So those are the things I spoke of,
Commissioner, in regards to the continued installation
of the sectionalization devices, which we're doing
identifying areas within our substations because that's
a supply source that are not in high fire threat districts
and bring in mobile generation just like we did
for Calistoga. Just given the fact that a lot of the
infrastructure related upgrades to align with the
level of risk that we're seeing in the environment,
they take a bit of time because we go through the
permitting process. That's a planned execution of work,
including getting qualified personnel to do that work.
But outside of the elements that I talked about in terms
of the shorter term, which we're already employing,
the physical upgrade to the infrastructure is challenging
to do within this current short time period,
Commissioner Rechtschaffen: What about more weather,
more rapid deployment of weather stations? You have
three times the number of San Diego Gas & Electric,
but they're in one county in your 49 or 50 counties.
Sumeet Singh: Yes, sir. So, coming into last year, over the 12
months, we've installed 600 weather stations, 100 high definition
cameras, and we have plans to get to more than 1300 weather
stations, within the next 18 to 24 months or less, and get to
additional 500 cameras for a total of 600 within the next couple
of years as well. So those are elements in all of the things
that we're working on rapidly as well. And this year alone, in
nine months, we've installed 400 incremental weather stations.
President Batjer: Are those weather stations that are in this area of the
impact for the October 9 to 12 PSPS, were they all activated and useful?
Sumeet Singh: They were, President Batjer,
and we make all of that information that we
have, for situational awareness, available
publicly through our website pgedotcom backslash
weather. But we are actively using those weather stations, not just to inform our
forecasts, but also to monitor the actual wind
conditions and relative humidity conditions.
Commissioner Randolph: I have a question for Mr Visi. We've had a lot
of conversations, you know, with Aaron about communicating with the
counties, with Laurie about vulnerable populations, with Sumeet on the
operational issues. Where does the buck stop? Because everybody here has a
different has a job in addition to this that they're working on. So as
you are looking at all the things you want to do better, who is going to
be, like at the VP level or higher, who is gonna be responsible over the
next several weeks and months to make sure that this work gets done?
Andy Visi: Well, that lays, the buck stops with
me. That's my accountability working with this
team to make sure that all these things that
we are talking about are implemented correctly
Commissioner Randolph: . But you have a lot on your
plate too. So is there somebody who can just do this?
Andy Visi: Well, just doing this is a team effort.
You look at what's going on here. It is a close
coordination between the actual prosecution of our
wild safety, wildfire safety program, which sits with
Sumeet. With the engagement of the communities and
our customers and understanding their needs, it sits
with our Chief Customer Officer. Where it's the
overall day to day operations of our electric system,
it sits with Michael. With the supporting efforts
on IT, it sits with CIO. But I want to let you know
that this is a full out team effort. One of the things
in coming here to do this was the priority of this
effort in a big way. This is a major threat to our
customers and to the citizens of California. We’re
part of it. There is almost no higher priority that
I have than to make sure we're on top of this and
that we do it in a competent and we do it quickly. Quite
honestly. It's a lot of pieces. It's complicated.
It's also fully integrated into what we do day to
day. It's all about service to the customer that the
increasing interaction and growing intimacy with needs
of our customers supports our regular businesses
as well as it supports this. The quality and integrity
of our assets and increasing their flexibility
will not only serve us well in the prevention of
events like catastrophic wildfires, but as we move
to much more decentralized grid and more control
with the consumer, it will support that, having an
agile, flexible and resilient grid will support
that. Applying ourselves to increasing ability to
communicate with our customers through the Internet
and other means of communication which will support,
this supports the daily business. So many of the lessons
learned that we have in these kind of disruptive
events, there are learnings for the whole business,
so they're not separate and apart from, and it's
always on our mind. It's a coordinated effort. And
I will also tell you we don't limit it to just the
groups that you see here. During the PSPS event,
we utilize a number of our field people in the Gas
Operations to go on and knock on doors to get in touch
with the vulnerable customers, so it's a full-out
company effort. But that said, the buck stops with
me. The messages and the improvement opportunities
that we discussed here are my responsibility. This
is a high functioning team. They work together quite
well. There was an underlying cultural aspect of this
that we need to deal with. That it's a change from
past performance and we need to up our game, get
very focused and increase the speed by which we're
executing. It’s all in front of us. And the end of the
day is I have and hold for the operations of PG&E
that accountability. I'm accountable not only to my
shareholders, but our customers as well and to this
Commission, and I will stand to those accountabilities.
It's a lot of work. It's a big effort and you
asked the question, How do you prioritize? Well, it's
always about prioritization, and that's something
that we think about all the time, in terms of impact
that our ability to execute and to peel back risks
every day so we can get to a place where we can
operate and rebuild the confidence that our customers
have to have in our ability to perform our jobs.
So the answer, the questions that it sits with me.
Commissioner Guzman Aceves: And just a follow up to that. And it's a question on
prioritization that you just mentioned . Mr Visi, do you know where Roseland is?
Andy Visi: No, I do not.
Commissioner Guzman Aceves: Do you know where Agua Calliente is?
Andy Visi: No, I do not.
Commissioner Guzman Aceves: Okay. I'm just wondering why Calistoga was
chosen as one of the communities that received the backup power. Is
that your decision? Is there some prioritzation? Is wealth or accumulated
wealth a factor there, or is that just a on unforeseen correlation?
Sumeet Singh: ? It was not attributed to the wealth or
any of those elements driving that prioritization factor.
This was intended to be the opportunity for us to be able
to pilot the installation of the mobile generation through
preinstalled hubs, and this is a blueprint now that we are
establishing, and it also is, it speaks to the configuration
of the great itself. So having a mobile generator
interconnected in a substation that maybe in a high fire threat
district creates another potential ignition source through
that mobile generation. So we also have to look at the
configuration of the grid, the location of the electric supply,
and the ability for us and that specific station to be
able to take the infrastructure and the amount of upgrade
we have to make to the infrastructure to be able to connect
a mobile generator. So those were the primary elements that
were used to be able to help drive the prioritization.
<v Commissioner Guzman Aceves>When you report back,
please include what that decision making was in terms of
those limited resources on backup generation that you
were supplying and how you prioritize those. Thank you.
Sumeet Singh: Willl do.
President Batjer: Are there any other questions of Mr Singh or Mr Visi? Okay.
Seeing none. Thank you, gentlemen. We're going to move on to the next panel.
So our final panel is entitled Accountability
and Commitments. And like your
other colleagues, I would like you each to introduce yourselves and your titles.
Nora Mead Brownell: My name is Nora Mead Brownell, and I'm the Chair of the
corporation, and I'm happy to be here again. I've spent many hours in this room
as a matter of fact. On behalf of the board, I want to extend my personal
appreciation to the first responders and community leaders and to the governor
and the Commissioners and all of their staffs for the continued guidance and
oversight. And I want to thank our customers
for working with us in our efforts
to keep our community safe. I spent much of my professional life as a utility
regulator, both with the state and federal governments, and I realize the
importance of collaboration. And I think we've heard some good examples today and
I think we've heard some examples where we could do a vast improvement, and I
give you my personal commitment that we will be far more engaged in those community
efforts than we have been because that's gonna be critical. I understand
that we have a different job here and we all have a difficult job here. But I
deeply believe that safety is our common purpose. Safety is the primary mission
of PG&E and as a board, it's our responsibility to ensure that mission is
fulfilled, and I'm gonna go into some detail as we go on about how we're from
feeling that oversight role. We recognize the PG&E's operations have a significant
impact on the public life, public safety, health and personal health in the
communities that we serve, and that the issues we discuss here today are
critically important to millions of
Californians as we move into a new regime, a
new environment, and new critical customer importance needs. And that's why
my board colleagues and I, along with our CEO's Bill Johnson and Andy Visi,
joined this company. Collectively, we bring decades of experience in the energy
and technology industries to our roles, and we're here to use that experience
to help transform PG&E's culture, its
operational health, its financial stability,
and to restore the public's trust. We want to provide you with an increased
level of transparency that will allow all of us to do our jobs more effectively.
Building that trust depends on our actions and not mere words. We've taken
actions. In the last six months, we brought together 13 new board members to
our boards. Just two this week John Willard and Bill Smith, who bring deep
expertise on innovating and scaling world-class complex grid and network based
technologies which I think will help with a lot of the issues we've discussed
here today. As a board, safety is our most important oversight, and we've
intentionally assembled boards with the right experience to provide oversight and
guidance, maybe more guidance some days than they would like, to our new
management. Individual members of our boards
have a deep technical and operational
experience related to gas pipeline safety, electronic transmission and distribution
safety, electric generation safety, nuclear safety, and occupational safety.
We also have members with expertise related to physical asset security and
cyber threats, enterprise risk management, safety culture, and restructuring
culture. We're working closely, cross functionally, to leverage the individual,
sorry, I'm just getting a little note here, individual expertise to add value
as a group. Having served on boards of other large energy companies, I can
tell you this board is exceptionally active and engaged, meeting as a board
at least once a week, meeting as committees and individuals more frequently,
some weeks, than that. We review on those meetings the decisions on issues
ranging from operations to wildfire safety to bankruptcy proceedings to
developing cultural change mechanisms and to dealing with compensation issues. We
understand the need to be more engaged than any usual board would be, working
with everyone at every level in PG&E in order to make those changes that are
desperately needed to improve the trajectory
of our performance. We’re absolutely
committed to taking the actions needed to accomplish that. We visited many
of the communities damaged by catastrophic wildfires, including Paradise, and
the cities in North Bay. We visited San Bruno, the site of the explosion caused
by our gas pipeline. We've met with community leaders, spoken to victims, and
seeing the lasting devastation firsthand. We have instituted a program of
field safety visits for each board member to inform our understanding of the
company's critical operations. This perspective is always with us as we make
important decisions and move the company forward. I'd like to take this opportunity
to speak briefly about the board's oversight function, our focused on wild
fire safety and our view of events last week. Our top priority as board members
is to get wildfire victims paid. One of our first actions was aboard was to
set up $100 million Housing Assistance Fund to support wildfire victims who had
lost their homes. We've settled with two of the three groups of victims and
we're committed to fairly resolving claims from the remaining group of individuals.
We’re guiding the company as it works through the Commission's regulatory
processes in order to emerge from bankruptcy
before the end of next June so we
can participate in the states Go Forward Wildfire Fund. We've increased the
board's oversight of our wildfire safety plan, and we do this as a full board and
also through our board committee structure. In addition to operating oversight
by our Safety and Nuclear Ops Committee, our Compliance and Public Policy
Committee receives regular reports from management on our progress implementing
and complying with that plan. And this is a good example of where there's a lot
of cross functional dialogue with the two committees to make sure that we're
covering all aspects of that, both from a safety and a performance perspective.
Critical part of that plan has been vastly improving our awareness of
weather conditions that create an unacceptably high threat of PG&E equipment
becoming damaged and starting fires. That information, as you know, informs our
PSPS decision making, which is guided by the most conservative framework we
feel is prudent as we balance public safety against the disruption of power
loss. With each PSPS events, and unfortunately
we've had three this fire season
alone, we're gaining critical insight into how we improve the process involved
in shutting down and restarting our core services efficiently. Operationally,
I think we have made progress. But as you clearly heard today, and I feel
your sense of urgency, our communications and coordination and that collaboration
needs to improve and it does need to improve now. Our PSPS event last week
was an example of some of these things. Along with other members of the board,
I was in the EOC during the shutdown, both before and during, observing and
drawing lessons from that event. We've executed our decision making implementation
of the safety shutdown according to the protocols and procedures outlined
in our wildfire safety management plan. That's obviously not enough. We were
able to restore power consistent with industry safety practices, but we want
to improve on that record. However, we obviously, as we've discussed, fell short
on our customer facing issues, and I've made this commitment again that we
will be more engaged in our oversight of those activities and more personally
involved in meeting with community members. It's incumbent upon the management
team to do better and for our boards to hold them accountable to do so. There
is no doubt there are many lessons from last week's events and the changes that
management must make. As you've heard, improvements have begun and we will be
monitoring very closely the commitments they've made in there filings with
you, but also the recommendations that the board has. To be clear, we do stand
behind management's decision to implement the PSPS event. That decision, though
very difficult and of major consequence to everyone, was the right one for
public safety. But we could do it better. Further, I'd like to reiterate our
board's confidence in our management team to run PG&E safely and responsibly,
both in making the tough operational decisions like the power shut off and in
making the needed changes for the future we've been discussing today and making
those changes in a timely and expedited fashion. None of us as Board members
or members of leadership came into these roles expecting to be able to fix PG&E
overnight. Our progress will come in stages, but those stages will move faster
than anyone would like. But it is our goal for all of us to move in the right
direction and to do so, as I said, expeditiously. Part of that is expanding
our communications with you, the Commission,
the community, government leaders,
as well as customers and employees. More importantly, we're expanding our
deployment of new technologies that give us better tools to manage and protect
our assets from wildfire threats. And we're including, in our review, both other
utilities throughout the country, other utilities here, but also the universities
and our advanced technology center that I had the opportunity to visit the
other day. As we move forward, we will continue to depend on the constructive
engagement of all of our stakeholders to prepare for future events and to
collaborate on long term solutions to the growing wildfire threat facing our
state. And we will hold our leadership team accountable for making improvements
we've talked about today. I commit to you that we can and we will do better
for our customers. But President Batjer, I'm very, very grateful that you
recognized our line employees who are working under a serious duress. They're
our neighbors, our friends, our families, and they're working hard and they
deserve our respect. And I hope that we can all give them a round of applause for
the extraordinary work that they're doing on behalf of all of us. Thank you.
President Batjer: Thank you, Miss Brownell.
Nora Mead Brownell: And I'd like to introduce Jeff, who
is my colleague, who is the chair of the Utility Board.
Jeff Bleich: Thank you. President Batjer. I'm
Jeff Bleich, a member of both the corporate board
and the utility board, and I chair the utility
board. I want to thank you and the other members
of the Commission for this opportunity to participate
in today's very important discussion. As a
longtime California resident, I'm also a longtime
customer of PG&E. I live in a town that was
affected by the recent public safety power shut
off. One that lost partial or complete power along
with many other towns here in California. And
like all my neighbors, I count on PG&E to provide
safe, reliable, clean and affordable energy. So I
depend on its long term success in doing that.
I joined the board this year and became chair
of the board of the utility with that mission
in mind. And now I'm responsible, along with Nora
and the other board members, to ensure that the
leadership of PG&E and he has the right skills,
resources, and incentives to make the changes
that we've talked about here today. Last week's
power shut off accomplished our primary goal, which
was to reduce the risk of catastrophic fire
during high risk conditions, but in part because
we're doing something that we've never done at
this scope or scale before, we had some real
system failures, particularly on our website, and
then the cascading effect that had on our call
centers. We know these failures caused major disruptions
in a large swath of the state. They created
confusion, anxiety, hardship and, in some cases,
justifiable anger. We've talked extensively
today about the changes we’re already making to
ensure that any future power shutoffs affect a
smaller number of customers, are limited in their
frequency, and are communicated early and clearly.
It's up to our leadership to execute those
changes, and it's up to all of us on the board, to
Nora, to me and our colleagues on the boards of
directors, to hold our leadership accountable,
and I can assure you that we will do that. As
to Bill Andy and the other top leaders of PG&E,
we have confidence that they are the right team
to lead the company into this future. This is
not the old PG&E as Nora mentioned nearly. Our
entire board is new. Bill and Andy are new and
they bring significant operational safety and
leadership experience to this critical task. The
scope and scale of last week's events is a reminder
of the complexity facing California. Most of
the system was built during the last climate.
Since then, temperatures here in California have
risen by twice the global average. And as Commissioner
Randolph pointed out, our wildfire seasons,
they used to be five months long. They've increased
by more than 50%. Now, they're eight plus
months long. As climate changes and the risk
profile in PG&E’s service area increases, PG&E
must continue to mitigate, found wildfire risk,
transform its grid and develop into the utility
that the people of this great state deserve. And
I take that as a solemn responsibility. So thank
you for holding today's proceeding and for
ensuring that we received your important feedback.
President Batjer: Thank you, sir. Are there comments to
be made by the president or the CEO? I mean, CEO and COO.
Nora Mead Brownell: They are always get the last word.
Bill Johnson: And they will be brief,
relatively brief. Bill Johnson, President and
CEO of PG&E. When I got in this business almost four decades ago, I was taught that
our mission was safe, reliable, affordable energy customers. That was the standard.
We then added the word clean into that
standard, safe, reliable, affordable, clean.
That started here in California. But it seems to be catching on elsewhere. And four
decades later, I still believe our mission as an industry and at PG&E is that: safe,
reliable, affordable, clean energy to our
customers. Those words of mission are actually
quite important to me. They're why I came the PG&E in California and those words
are why I'm still laboring in the vineyards at a time in an age when I would most
appropriately be retired. But I am here. I'm
a person who takes my accountability very
seriously. I'm accountable for this PSPS. I'm
accountable for the performance of PG&E.
And I feel my highest accountability is safety. I believe PG&E, this Commission’s,
the state’s, our society's highest priority has to be safety, so I will do everything
I can to keep customers, employees, that
public, everyone safe. But those other words
reliable, affordable, clean and customer also have meaning to me. I believe focus on
and service to the customers the best course
of action for any business, including
this one. And in this event, we focused on the issue of safety with less focus on
the customer and the public. We focused on the important operational aspects with
insufficient attention to the customer in public
facing aspects. And for that I apologize.
Let me thank our customers for their patience
with us. Thank you to this Commission
and the governor for your unwavering focus on safety. And I wanna thank everybody who
helped this last week. You know, our decision
to turn out the power had consequences
for customers, for everybody. And we recognize
that California as a leader in technology
and so many other areas must have a utility position to power consistently and
reliably, even in the face of extraordinary wildfire risk and climate. I was asked, I
believe by Commissioner Randolph, how long a period before we're out of PSPS? I said
10 year answer. Now I didn't mean to say it will be doing that at this scale for 10
years. I think they'll decrease in size and
scope every year. But at the same time we're
doing this, the risk is not static. It's dynamic and it goes up every year. And you
saw from Sumeet’s presentation several programs that go on for 8 to 10 years. The
Wildfire Fund under AB1054 is a 10-year
construct, so I think our focus ought to be,
every year, reducing scope, reducing scale and giving California the utility it needs.
Andy Visi: Andy Visi, Chief Executive Officer PG&E Company. Let me briefly echo
Bill's comments on behalf of the utility. The
scope and scale of last week's operation
burdened our state and our local agencies, first responders, local businesses
and, of course, our customers. We thank you for your patience, last week, as our
employees and contractors worked tirelessly to inspect our lines, repair damage
from the wind event, and restore power as quickly as possible. In many cases, to
their own homes and communities. We thank you for your partnership and for your
constructive feedback as we work to improve our systems and processes to meet the
challenges facing California. As we discussed, we have a lot of hard work ahead
of us. It will take time for PG&E to harden its systems to the ever-increasing
risks in its service territory and to transform its assets into the flexible and
resilient grid this new reality demands. In the meantime, I commit to you that we
will work to narrow the scope of future PSPS events and minimize their impacts.
We appreciate the areas of focus the
Commission identified for improvement of the
PSPS program, and we're working to address them quickly and deliberately. We likewise
appreciate the opportunity to hear directly from the public today. Thank you.
President Batjer: Thank you, Mr Visi.Are there any questions of the
panel on by the Commissioner's at this time? Yes, Commissioner Shiroma?
Commissioner Shiroma: I'll start. Thank you very much.
Appreciate the introductory statements and I have a question
for our Chairwoman Brownell, and then also, for CEO Bill
Johnson. Miss Brownell, I really appreciate that you
have served on a Commission, just as this, and you've also
served on FERC as an appointee. And also you've been the
president or chair of the NARUC. And recently I had a chance
to attend the policy conference of NARUC, and we went
through a poverty simulation there. It was very insightful,
as far as walking in the shoes of people who are just
trying to survive, and oftentimes, don't even have a phone
to even know what's going on. And information is so
important. As someone who has sat in our chairs and held
utilities accountable, what specific advice or specific,
laser-like things. If if you're sitting here, you would be
telling PG&E to effectuate in the aftermath of thes PSPSs?
Nora Mead Brownell: Well, thanks for the question, and I wouldn't presume
to tell you how to do your jobs. But I think that the letters this week, for
example, and the ongoing focus on very specific outcome-based measures is
very, very, very important. I think it's one thing to talk platitudes. It's
another to actually measure people by the outcomes that you talked about and,
in fact, at NARUC, at FERC, even when I was a Pennsylvania State Commissioner,
we talked a lot about moving from that rate-based model to a business model
that was more performance-based. And in fact, as you may know, I served
on the Board of National Grid, which is headquartered, although they have a
lot of US assets, in the U. K. where they have a performance based business
model that focuses more on the outcomes that they have identified, the regulators
have identified, as important. Efficiency gains, operating excellence,
safety outcomes. So I'd be happy to follow up with you and talk about some more
specifics. I think one of the things that's a challenge as a Commissioner,
it certainly was for me, although I'd come from banking, which had undergone
a massive transformation in an IT early early days. If you remember
the first stages of ATMs, I'm that old. I think what we all have a challenge
about is learning and what is the best IT platform look like? What are the
technologies that can really make a difference? And we don't get as much
opportunity, I think, as Commissioners, as we should toe understand the tools
that are out there. One of the things that we did at the FERC, actually one of
the things we did when we co-chaired a Commission meeting with the California
Commission and the CEC, during the energy crisis in 2000, 2001, was hold
technical conferences to get really smart people with no vested interest
to give us a lot of information, to give us a lot of data about what was out there
to help solve this problem. Those were early days of artificial intelligence,
of massive databases, of hard wired technologies, but it was enormously
helpful. I'd encourage you to do that, or have your staff do that because
we learned a lot during that process and leveraged, as I said, a lot of very
expensive but free to us advice to do that. So those are some of the things
that that I think I would focus on. That help? And again, I'm happy to
follow up. I always have. I always have lots of ideas, sometimes too many.
President Batjer: are other questions?
Commissioner Shiroma: Yes, and this is for Mr Johnson now. Now, I'm
a lifetime PG&E customer. First, as child in Ocampo, just outside
of Lodi, and then in Davis, going to university, and then in
Sacramento, as a gas customer. Even as child growing up in poverty, on
a couple of occasions when the PG&E rep needed to come and turn off
our electricity because Mom didn't pay our bill, and thankfully,
we got it turned back on. That individual was very kind and just
really felt that person was a member of the community. And this leads
back to my question. You sent a letter to the governor today, October
18, and I appreciate that much responsibility has been taken
and expressed today, many apologies and so forth. But I'm perplexed
about one thing you say in this letter and I thought would you
clarify? Please? You said you want to be transparent with thought
process, that you've read and heard comments about PG&E’s motives in
instituting the PSPS and whether you could be trusted to do the
right thing. And in that vein, you want a policy conversation about
whether somebody else should make this decision. You're not trying to
shirk the responsibility, but you want to bolster public confidence.
Honestly, I'm just a human being, but I took that to mean that
you were looking to give somebody else the responsibility versus
digging down deep and looking at what meaningful changes need to be
made for the future. It's advanced communication. I mean, information
is a key thing. I was in (unclear) pre-earthquake 30 years ago.
I was here in San Francisco on the way to the airport to pick
up my father in law, and I’ll tell you information, real time
information was key for figuring out how did we get from the airport
back to Sacramento? And I'll tell you, the radio at that point in
time was really helpful. Which bridges were closed? Which parts of
San Francisco were on fire? So forth. So I just wanted you to clarify
that it's not that you were, you know, I mean, I know it's hard,
it stings. It stings to be criticized. But I surely hope you weren't
trying to say, well, never mind, you know, you guys take it.
Bill Johnson: Oh, no. I was absolutely not trying to say
that. And I'm not trying to evade liability or inverse
or any of those things at all. It just seems, in a
effort of this size, public confidence in the decision
is really important. That drives public safety. I think
it drives a number of things. There is commentary out
there that we can't be trusted to do this. I've actually
seen transcripts from legislative hearings where this
has been the issue. And I'm not suggesting that we won't
do it or not. I'm not suggesting if the decision authority
goes somewhere else, we would still all do all the
analysis and everything else. I do think in Australia
and perhaps in Europe, this is the way the system works.
But, you know, just a moment ago said I'd take my
accountability seriously and I will keep this one. I'm
really looking for the best answer here for the public.
President Batjer: Are there any other questions of this panel?
Commissioner Rechtschaffen: What are the cultural change
mechanisms and incentive changes you are referring to?
Nora Mead Brownell: I think, you mean, when
I talked about performance based outcomes?
Commissioner Rechtschaffen: You said we're looking
at cultural change mechanisms and compensation.
Nora Mead Brownell: Yes. So
Commissioner Rechtschaffen: As part of your supervision of management.
Nora Mead Brownell: Yes. So we have a pretty active compensation committee. In
fact, I met with them this morning looking to make sure that, even though we've made
changes, to make sure that objectives and payments are made in accordance with
performance-based safety outcomes. We want to
continue to fine tune that. So, compensation
is one way to do that. Training is another way to do that, that you invest in training
people to do the things that you need them to do. Making sure that we have tools
making sure all our linemen, for example, have electronic communications so that
they're not stuck with paperwork. And they can focus on the job more carefully.
Making sure superintendents are doing what Superintendents should be doing instead of
filling out paperwork. Rewarding people for making tough decisions. Rewarding people
for making sensitive decisions or those who are showing exemplary care for customers.
Finding reward systems that aren't necessarily monetary. That are recognizing
outstanding performance. Those are many of the ways. We're also talking to a number
of consultants about how we can more effectively lead cultural change. But I
think I've always been suspicious about programs because they end up being just
that, a program. How do you incorporate them into the everyday way you do business?
Commissioner Rechtschaffen: Well, it's it sounds pretty
unspecific, and we've been struggling to get the corporation to
change, so it would be very helpful if you could come back to us
and tell us, specifically, what you're doing that's different.
Nora Mead Brownell: Okay, I would be happy to. But I will
say one thing that I think is a difference from every other
corporation I've been involved in. Including when I worked
at one, and every other board I've served on, is we have a
continuous feedback loop, so that, in our weekly meetings, but
often five days a week, myself, Jeff and committee heads,
particularly, are communicating directly with management
and others about things that we need, we believe need to
change and need to change quickly. And it's a collaborative
effort, but it is one in which we are, I think, possibly
more actively involved in in day-to-day management decisions
than you otherwise would be. But we recognize, as does the
management with whom we're working pretty successfully,
understand this is different times, and and you have asked a
lot and frankly, haven't gotten as much as you would like
in return. But I'm happy to get back to you with details.
President Batjer: Chair Brownell, l I'd like to
follow up on what you just said. In that, you have a
feedback loop with with management. Does that work in
terms of conversations? Is it something that you get
in written form? How honest and open is the feedback
loop? And how deep into the organization does it go?
Is it just a C suite to the board? Is it everybody
with a VP title and above? And how open is that loop?
Nora Mead Brownell: You can ask the team. I think possibly they would
say it's more open and frequent than they're used to. That is typically
found, as I said, but they understand the commitment that this board has
made, and they understand the need to expand the kind of information
and feedback that you get. In a typical utility, there isn't a lot of
dialogue. It's a risk averse operation. The business model doesn't
lend itself to that. That's something that's changing along with the
externalities that are driving change, whether they be storms in the
Northeast, weather that which I experienced a lot of. Whether they be fires
in California, whether they be the need to communicate with customers
differently. So that involves different skill sets, different way of
looking at the world. So I think it's very open. It's very candid.
No, it's not written down, you must do this, you must do that. It's a,
look, I see this, I really feel we have to pay attention to it, let's
sit down and talk about it, let's put together a team. It's not limited
to any level. One of the things that we instituted as as soon as I
arrived is, we call them safety visits, but they're also visits just to
get to know employees at every level, to get their feedback, to give
observations. You know, when you walk by people working in the middle
of the street with equipment and an open manhole, as one of our board
members did the other day, and you see people on their cell phones. You
say, we need to work differently, can we talk about that? So it is,
it's an effort for all of us to improve every day and the only way you
do that, in my opinion, is to have very open conversations. And I think
you've all probably been through a situation where you have to give
evaluations to employees every year. Well, I learned pretty young, everybody
hates them. Nobody does them very well that. You have to consider it
as ongoing coaching and ongoing coaching does not happen once. We're
not hearing from you once. We shouldn't hear from you once. We're hearing
from you on a continuous basis. And we hope to. It's the same thing
that we really are working on with all of us. But ask the people who
are living the dream. So I don't know, Andy, how you feel, Or Bill.
President Batjer: Folks that are sitting behind you, and the folks
actually that are sitting behind them, and behind them, and I
mean that not literally. I mean that figuratively. So we won't
do that. We won't go there, I think. Martha, you had a question.
Commissioner Guzman Aceves: Thank you, President Batjer. Mr. Johnson,
you were mentioning that the primary driver for the calling of this
large scale PSPS was safety. And I certainly acknowledge that and
appreciate that difficult call. I think what we've heard from the local
governments and in their formal statements, even including the other
extreme of that, which is that you did not consider the safety impacts
of the PSPS and the lack of coordination with the local governments
that lead to near-deaths, as they stated, that there could have
been had another 24 or 48 hours elapsed, even more deaths than the
fires themselves. And that, of course, is another safety issue. I want
a couple that with a statement that was made by one of your board
members. And I'm sorry if I pronounce your last name wrong. Bleach?
That inherently spoke of the value of being a Californian, of being
connected to the communities who are being disconnected, and I can't
help but notice the three of you today don't, well, currently you live
here, but I'm not sure, Ms. Brownwell, if you live in California?
Nora Mead Brownell: I have family here with whom I've
been staying, and I have an apartment in Redwood City.
Commissioner Guzman Aceves: Thank you. This seems
to me like something that I would really see value
in a board, a PG&E board, that really reflected
California. That reflected in terms of the communities
that are impacted, and certainly reflected the
demographics of California. And I saw your noted the next
two board members. One is a Californian, and two
white men, but, well, at least one is Californian.
So I just, I want to, you know, ask the question,
is the board demographics and experience and
knowledge of California? I Asked Mr Visi earlier on
if he knew of the communities of Roseland and Agua
Calliente to communities in Sonoma County that are
low-resourced and and terribly important for the
economy of Sonoma County. How important is it to you
that your board be representative of California?
Bill Johnson: My personal opinion, and I'm gonna turn to the Chair because
I don't get to comment on the other board members. I think it's really
important to have a board that reflects the constituency of the customer
base, the state, and understands it, and I think eventually this board
will get there. I think this board was assembled in unusual circumstances,
having to do with the bankruptcy and some other things. But as to your
basic premise about how a board should look and should it be able to relate,
particularly utility board, to the utility customers, I agree with that.
Jeff Bleich: I'd liketo add to that 1
observation that I've had being a member of the
board. The other board members, those who are
not originally from California and I have been
traveling all over the state. We've been two
substations in counties up and down the state.
We have been, as Nora said, to places in
which disasters have occurred to which we're
connected. We have been everywhere from, you
know, Diablo Canyon to up in Orville and to the
CalIso, and we have spent a lot of time touring
the state of California together. And in
those conversations, we've had a chance to really
talk about the unique values and challenges
here in California, and the importance of
really understanding and being empathetic to
the people who are struggling to find confidence
in their energy system in a very stressed
environment. I think that I've seen tremendous,
the tremendous development in our board,
as one that is California focused, and have
great confidence in my colleagues to reflect
those values in our decision making and to be
aware of it. I think also just spending a lot
of time out there in the field and talking to
people who work day in, day out for PG&E on
the line. You know, either underground on the
gas operation or for up on the poles turning
wrenches with our linemen. I mean, these are
these are individuals who we're all getting
to know and becoming part of our family. And
I think that makes a big difference as well.
President Batjer: I appreciate your commenting on the fact that you
visited various places in the state and where you have facilities, and most
importantly, that you're visiting the hardworking folks that work for
PG&E out on the line. They have to have tough jobs, especially in this
atmosphere. But I don't need to be, I don't mean to be snarky, but you all
were ordered by a judge to go to Paradise. I just want to make that final
point, and I think you probably learned from that. But that was long before
I came here. I was reading in the paper like any other citizen. But I
Jeff Bleich: that's absolutely right. And I will say, though, that like many
of us, really, you know, we're already planning to go, and and some had already
visited. I know that Bill's been up there at least four times. This is, it's
not by compunction, I think, it's, you know, it's coming from the heart.
Nora Mead Brownell: President Batjer. I just would like to
comment. I appreciated the judge's order. The fact is, and there's
probably a note to somebody from this, the first thing I did, upon
joining the board was to say, we must go to these communities, but
more than that, we must go more extensively to all of the communities
and the facilities that we serve. So I respect his order and
we did learn a lot and continue to learn a lot. And I can't say
it any better than Jeff has said it. This is a group of people
with broad experience in various areas that we need, and they're
bringing those experiences to California with a goal of understanding
California. When I talked about cross-functional meetings and
work, that also includes really understanding the critical
issues that face California, that are unique, for example, in terms
of climate change. But we've had people trying to figure out
how to solve affordable housing, health care, on our trips. There's
a lot of commitment to really being part of this community.
President Batjer: Were there any other comments before
we go to closing? We are going to be taking public comment
shortly and I do ask, we all have been here a long time
this afternoon, but our public members have been waiting
a very long time to comment. So I do hope and trust that
you will remain until the public comment has finished
after we have made comments and then gone, move on to public
comments. So I really appreciate Chair Brownwell, you
pointing out how important the outcomes are. I think I said
earlier to Mr Johnson, that I really do believe you all,
we all, will be judged by the outcomes, not the plans. Not
all these plans, even in some ways, I must say, poorly
executed as they were. Again, I would like to express
my appreciation to my fellow Commissioners and all in
attendance and appreciate so much for the long afternoon
of staying here with us for this emergency meeting. In the
days, the weeks, and months to come, we will continue
to examine last week's events and monitor how well the
commitments made today and the corrective actions identified
are indeed implemented. Within a few days, we expect PG&E
to submit a detailed report on last week's power shut off
events, which will be followed by a staff report and
investigation. In addition, we will be working on advancing
the second phase of the PSPS proceedings here at the PUC.
And we're planning to update the wildfire mitigation
plans to be considered by the first half of next year.
However, despite the importance of these regulatory processes
and these actions, they are meaningless to the public
unless they translate into real world demonstrations that
the PG&E and other utilities are truly taking actions that
place the safety of the public before their financial
interests. Commissioners. I welcome your remarks as well.
Commissioner Randolph: I'll just be very brief
because I really do want to hear from the public.
We've had a lot of conversation about specific
things that went wrong and specific things that
we would like to see. And so I just want to reiterate
my earlier point that, you know, there needs
to be, there needs to be progress, someone needs
to be coordinating this group of people and
making sure to fulfill the commitments that have
been made here in front of us. And I recognize that
de energization is a safety imperative. But the
scope of it, the timing of it, the communication,
the implementation of it, all of those are areas
where we have not seen the performance that the
people of California deserve. And so I look forward
to seeing improvements in that performence.
Commissioner Rechtschaffen: I think it's important as we sit
here and talk about technical fixes, that we don't lose sight
of the impact, the human dimension of what the's power shutoffs
entail. They have potentially devastating consequences and
the poor and the vulnerable are the most at risk. As Commissioner
Guzman Aceves said, we're very, very lucky that people
didn't die or are suffer injury from this event. Some of the
failures that you've testified today are astonishing, given the
amount of time to prepare for this. These have to be executed
as well as possible, using the best technology, the state of
the art RT, and so forth. And, to the new the new board members,
I just want to say one thing. We had a hearing in April in
our safety culture proceeding, where we've been struggling
to figure out how to instill a safety culture at G&E because
traditional fines and penalties, even $1.5 billion fine after
the San Bruno accident, haven't deterred ongoing violations. In
April, we were dealing with Paradise, which was the most destructive
and deadly fire ever, as well as Revelations about 2017
fires where PG&E was the cause of 12 fires that caused 20
deaths as well as serious safety violations in the gasline, the
locate it and mark program, which included falsification of data.
And your predecessor Chair Kelly said, I absolutely commit
to you, it's different day, safety and compliance are at the
top of our list. So Mr Visi, when you, or Mr Johnson, when
you talk about your surprise or concern about the skepticism
surrounding the decision to do the power shut offs by the
public and others. That's why. You have a very, very long way
to go to rebuild the trust and confidence of the public, the
Legislature, and us as regulators. Because we have heard this
before multiple times. We heard it just four months ago from
your predecessor. So we really will expect you to deliver different
results in order for us to change our thinking. Thank you.
President Batjer: Commissioner Shiroma?
Commissioner Shiroma: I'll go next. Thank you. As I mentioned before,
your enterprise risk map surely must include the safety culture,
your customer service, your customer experience, and in having those
elements in your enterprise risk map, it means that real changes
must occur bottom to top, top to bottom. And there are specific metrics
along the way that have be met. That is how businesses and what
have you deal with risks. And I have no doubt that the people on the
ground, your employees, they know it, they live it, they're working
on it every single day. And I am just perplexed and astounded
that, why isn't there absolutely a viewpoint? But the system, the
utility, the various pieces of it, they're the crown jewels of the
utility. And why not? Why isn't there more and you're new and you're
expressing that you're committing to it and so forth. But they're the
crown jewels of the utility. It's what makes the whole thing work
and the customers are so key to it, and the customer satisfaction,
and the customer experience with you. I mentioned the very kind guy
who came by and was so sorry you had to turn off our electricity because
Mama couldn't pay the bill. These things all make a difference.
And your economic engine for the California as fifth largest economy
in the world, you have a key part in that. It's essential and
important, and, you know, I don't know how else to express it, but
the deep love of where we live, of California, and your role for
California is so essential. And a deep course correction needs to be
made and and the real tangible results from that. And we just had an en
banc in the Silicon Valley on the economic vitality of contracting.
And again, I'm from the San Joaquin Valley. You are there in the San
Joaquin Valley and the impact that you have with your contracting,
the people who work for you, and the buying power and so forth. It
is essential. So your ????, your enterprise risk map must include
these elements. And, as you've committed to, you must address these
things. I'm looking forward to hearing from the public. We're all
their gonna be here til the last person has spoken to us. Thank you.
President Batjer: Commissioner Guzman Aceves?
<v Commissioner Guzman Aceves>Thank you.
I'll be very brief and agree with everything
my fellow Commissioners have said. I believe, Jeff, excuse me, you mentioned
that customers are justifiably angry, and I heard an apology from all of you
acknowledging that justified anger. I would just call upon you again, particularly
as board members, to show a little, in the form of action, and provide the
rebate that the Governor is called for. As board members, that is a decision you
obviously can take and ensure happens quickly and justifiably. So I would ask
that you do that and not have to go down a longer route. Thank you very much.
President Batjer: Thank you. Thank you all very
much. If you could take your seats back in the
audience because staff needs to come now back to the
table for a public comment. Thank you very much.
President Batjer: Okay, We're now moving on
to the public comments section of our meeting
today. I'm going to call the elected officials
who were in the room first. G. Khalsa is
Chief Deputy County Council for Kern County.
Could you please come forward? The podium here,
and, sir, if you could just state your name and your title for the record. Thank you.
Gurujodha Khalsa: Good afternoon, Madam President. My name is
Gurujodha Khalsa. K H A L S A. As you said, I'm a chief deputy with
Kern County. I'd like to present some comments on behalf of Kern
county. We've also submitted some written comments as well. So let
me just jump in with Kern's experience, our principal concerns, and
some recommendations for remediation. Rather than rehashing all
of the things that have been said here today, I want to do, I
want to focus on communication as a key aspect of remedying this
situation and kind of the bad outcome that we've experienced at Kern
County. The conference calls that were scheduled, were scheduled
with too many people on the line. And the post event conference calls
had 18 to 20 counties on the line. One size really doesn't fit
all, so really, in terms of recommendations for remedy there really
does need to be an effort on behalf of PG&E to come to a more
granular level, to come to the county by county level because each
county has its own distinct demographics and geographic elements
that need to be addressed with respect to these power shut offs.
For example, in one of our communities, Bear Valley and Stallion
Springs, they lost their landline phone capability as a result of the
shut off. This was about 8000 people who were negatively affected
by the shut off. Again, knowing the grid, knowing the elements of
the community, is extremely important. Access to emergency medical
care. These are some concerns that my board wanted me to raise
with your board. We believe that PG&E needs to share their action
plan, their mitigation plan, with the counties in advance of submission
to allow us to comment on some of the elements that they plan
to implement to make sure that they're going to work in the various
geographic areas where they're going to be implemented. There
does need to be an adherence to the Standardized Emergency
Management System, SEMS. There was some inaccurate communication and
information that was given to Kern county, some of it in a critical
regard because some misinformation was given to a health care
provider, a large health care provider, and this was documented to my
office by our emergency services personnel. So again, the critical
need for clear information, accurate information, from PG&E can't
be underestimated. We've heard comments today about intimacy.
PG&E is already in everybody's house, in everybody's business,
so I think it's time for them to understand and get to know the
people they serve. This is going to require them to be on the ground,
have boots on the ground, talking to people, understanding the
needs of the community and addressing those needs in advance. This
fire emergency situation is not going away, it's relatively long
standing. It's an opportunity for a dialogue. Finally, I want to
focus on a better provision and planning for medically sensitive
residents. This is of extreme concern to Kern county. We have a
large county, perhaps the largest geographic county in California.
Many of our residents in far out places, in Ridgecrest, in Mojave,
they don't have access to emergency medical care, they're on their
own. If the power goes out, they're in dire circumstances. So again,
PG&E should consider, I think, several things. Consider circulating
a written authorization to their customers that can be responded
to as part of the building that gives PG&E the authority to
share their medical information with county providers, county
emergency folks so that they don't run into HIPA issues. They could
consider public service announcements on TV and radio, so that these
folks, many of whom watch hours and hours of television, could
be better prepared in the event of one of these emergencies. While
I don't want to suggest that your board, perhaps on it's website
or through another mechanism, developed a PG&E report card so that
the counties, thank you very much, so that the counties can give
their feedback substantively in a very clarified manner to many
of the action steps that PG&E has represented they're going to be
taking. We could give you a report as to whether or not those
things have actually been done. Thank you very much for your time.
President Batjer: Thank you, Mr Khalsa. I should have reminded the public
before I opened up comments that we do have limited time. I apologize. We're
two minutes? Three minutes? Three minutes. Three minutes for each speaker.
So Mark Checkalabain, please. Okay, you're going to pass. Okay. Diane Dylan.
Diane Dylan: Thank you. Diane Dylan, Napa County Supervisor. Thank you for the
opportunity. My board hasn't met, didn't have this agendaized for last Tuesday. So
I'm here on my own. But I've been very active with this issue over the last year.
As a local government representative, I can say that we felt that we were heard
by you when the decision came down about de energization last May. Unfortunately,
I don't think PG&E heard you because they were unable to carry out that directive
in the way that I think we all anticipated and hoped that they would do. So your
letter, Chair, last Monday night, was most welcome and most agreed with. And
so thank you very much. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention something that we don't
hear. We haven't heard it all afternoon, and it's the context in which, at least,
my constituents live. And that's the context
of having PG&E having four companies,
subcontractors, doing vegetation management work in our county on a continual
basis, almost in a frenzy since, for almost a year. Cutting hundreds of trees,
trimming thousands of others because of work
that hasn't been done for decades that,
yes, we've had, it's caused us to be in the situation we're in. It's not all about
climate change. So living in that context and hearing, oh, this is all just
for your safety. Well, yes, but it's because of actions that weren't taken that
should have been. The other thing I'd like to emphasize is that many of the things
that you've heard today, and many of the things we saw in your letter, are things
we have been asking PG&E to let us work with them on, and I'll give you a couple
of examples. We didn't anticipate media interest. We have been trying to engage
with PG&E for the last year about how to message what we anticipated would happen.
We experienced the first big PSPS last October and could foresee that a larger
one wouldn't go down very well. We have a lot of experience doing media work.
We had three fires happen simultaneously in our county two years ago and worldwide
media attention. And I dare say, and this is not boastful, that we handled it
a little better than PG&E handled three days last week. And I mentioned that to
say we've had experience, we know how to reach locals. And we we've asked PG&E
repeatedly to engage with us. Hearing eight years, 10 years, 14 years today? I don't
know how I'm going to convey that message to the small business owners, to the
people who live paycheck to paycheck, that these events are going to go on for
that long. Thank you so much for your actions taken on local government's behalf.
President Batjer: Thank you, Supervisor Dylan.
Appreciate it very much. We will now move
to the general public. I'm going to call
Miss Shaw and Miss Hall will be right after.
Marissa Shaw: My name is Marissa Straw. I live in Richmond. I need
to tell you that I'm deeply rooted within my community of people with
disabilities. And no one that I know received notification, either
written or phonecall or otherwise. Many years ago I was on medical
baseline. And so PG&E should have my documentation. Currently, though,
however, I live in a Section Eight development, so my landlord pays
the PG&E. It's part of my rent. The reason why I mentioned that is because
people like me and others like me, who live in different types of
housing, will wind up through the cracks unless something is done. We
had the administrator said that they reached out. I think 7000 people
and other people weren't home. My population wasn't in that at all, and
I live in Section Eight. If they had work closer with the counties,
in my case, Contra Costa County. And I know, also, in Berkeley. Berkeley
wanted PG&E's assistance and guidance and got nothing. So let me
also just say that their community resource centers, well, they didn't,
they don't serve people with disabilities. And why do I say that?
People with disabilities have, as you mentioned, specialized equipment
and need specialized care. And also the Oakland Center, which was in
the Hills, I can't get to. For specialized populations, there needs to
be centers near BART stations and major hubs of transportation. And
also there needs to be some sort of plan for people with disabilities.
I don't hear anything from any of execs saying that they will reach
out to populations, people with disabilities, or have any type of
special meetings regarding our needs or anything. And there needs to
be specialized plans for this specialized community of people with
disabilities. And also there needs to be a specialized group, sorry, I
got distracted, group and discussion for people on ventilators, because
without that people will die and PG&E will have further born on
their hands. And the other thing, I want to just say, that none of this
has happened and it could all be avoided. So this is ridiculous. I
don't support what PG&E is saying, that they've done their outreach
because it's absolutely ridiculous, and this could be totally fixed.
President Batjer: Thank you, Miss Shaw, very much. I appreciate that.
And I trust that the executives of PG&E have just heard that. That you
have a gap in your notifications, particularly with folks who are in the
baseline or critical care in Section Eight Housing. Could Marge Hall?
Marge Hall: I'm right here.
President Batjer: Oh, sorry.
Marge Hall: Yes, I am a disability climate activist. When my son was in high
school, in the principal's office, there was a sign. It said, your lack of
planning is not my emergency. I kind of feel like your lack of planning is now
our emergency. As we said to teenagers, you could have seen it coming. You could
have invested in a green infrastructure that would have been clean, resilient,
decentralized, democratic and safe. But here we are. I've collected three stories
from people with disabilities who live in the East Bay Hills who were affected
by this recent shut off. I really, really ask you please to take the time to
read them. I've just given them to you. I think that will open your eyes a little
bit to what I'm going to say, because my comments are based upon those stories.
The harsh reality is there's no infrastructure in place to help people with
disabilities. What everyone fails to understand is that backup batteries for
medical devices like ventilators only come with batteries that last several
hours. So then what? Dirty, noisy generators may be possible in certain rural
areas, but they're not appropriate for cities and apartments, and nor can many
people manage to operate them safely. Furthermore, there's wheelchair-accessible
shelter problems. It's very hard to find, especially in an emergency. Many people
who are low income have significant constraints. Not everyone can afford an
accessible hotel room. Some are even afraid to call 911 or go to the emergency
room because of the cost and stress. Besides, do you really want the emergency
room to be the default solution here? As you will see in these stories, the
PG&E Resource centers are a joke. More than that, they are, in fact, dangerous.
This is because they promote to the public the illusion of being able to
help people. But they really can't help you if you're running out of battery
life for your ventilator at 7 PM. Reliable information is important and
notification essential, but this is a very low bar. The discussion is through this
room is claustrophobic. Even if the notification was perfect, people with
disabilities and old people would be in a world of hurt. Expecting low income
people and people with disabilities to, quote, plan accordingly, when they have
limited options is disturbingly clueless and reeks of ableism and class tunnel
vision. This is a lot more than an inconvenience or, quote, hardship. It's
life threatening. This is naked abandonment of poor, disabled, and old people.
President Batjer: Oh, Will Abrams, please. And next will be Shirley Bennett.
Will Abrams: Thanks very much. My name is Will Abrams, I’m a resident of Sonoma
County, and I appreciate the Commission's
look at this. This certainly is an emergency
situation, and I appreciate you treating it as such. As I reach out to wildfire
survivors in my community, such as myself, there's a lot of sense that there's
incompetence from PG&E, and what I saw today
and what I've seen before is anything
but. I think there's a lot of competent folks
who are trying to get things done. But
what the public sees is a disparity. So in the communications plans, post-public shut
off, there was a lot of communications around pictures of all the trees that were
not trimmed prior to, that ended up in the
wires. There was a very deliberate strategic
public relations campaign around that. Prior to, I go to an open house in my
community to understand what's going to be in store for power safety shut offs, and
I asked, how are these going? Well, they're going pretty good, was the response. No
customer satisfaction survey, no understanding
of whether the message they were trying
to get across was received. Basic blocking and tackling for a communications plan,
not there. Similarly, on the dollars. I don't understand. On the one hand, you come
to the public and say we need a $21 billion fund of which we expect you to pay
half. 10.5 billion. On the other hand, you come today with a very reasonable request
from the governor for $100 rebate, oh, sorry, we have to, we have to talk about
that one. So when it's time for handouts, everything's okay. When it's time for
making good on your responsibilities, that isn't there. Then we look at your wildfire
mitigation plan. There is absolutely nothing
in that wildfire mitigation plan that
measures risk. Nothing that measures risk
reduction. I hear today, when you're talking
about covered conductors, I hear it referenced
that, well, yes, we think that's gonna
help some. Great. Help some. There needs to be more analytics around those things
for safety. The same way you're measuring things around your profitability. That
needs to come. Look, there are a lot of wonderful people who work for PG&E, and
certainly we respect the work that they provide, but it needs to be more targeted.
There needs to be measures. There needs to be responsibility built within PG&E. And
that's how they need to be coming forward. And the last statement I would say, so I
heard Mr. Singh talk about fire index areas,
and I certainly hope those aren't the
same fire index areas that are referenced in your plan, which were developed in the
1950s and last updated in 1962. So I'm happy
to hear that they weren't. Thank you.
Shirley Bennett: Good afternoon. My name is Shirley
Bennett. I am also a resident of Sonoma County,
Santa Rosa. And I know where Agua Calliente and
Roseland are. I'm also a ratepaying member of
the public, reliant upon PG&E, and I am a survivor
of the recent, disastrously conceived and
implemented shutdown by PG&E. And I am an angry
survivor. My State Senator, Mike Maguire, attempted
to coordinate with PG&E on this issue before,
during and after the PSPS. Remarks today have
concerned last week's event, but I believe a deeper
and broader review and restructuring of PG&E
is what we really need to look at. PG&E’s job
is to provide an essential, indeed existential,
service to the public. They also have the
responsibility to keep their equipment updated in safe
working order. They have failed miserably in this.
They insist that customers pay for the service,
and we paid for it. And indeed, they have a
request for a hike. At the moment. The structure
of PG&E needs to be totally overhauled. And the
CPUC should do its mandated job in overseeing and
regulating this unwieldy, irresponsible and
dangerous mega-company. The shutdown was far too
massive, ill-conceived, misimplemented, and put
thousands of people in an extremely difficult, if
not life and economy threatening situations. PG&E
did a horrendous job of interfacing before and
during the event with governmental entities on the
state, county and city levels. This is not what
a public utility should do. Both of PG&E's websites,
its primary and a hastily created secondary
one, crashed quickly, even though they had had
been advised earlier, more than once, to upgrade
to other, more powerful platforms. If there had
been a true natural rather than manufactured
disaster, like this one, how would they have been
communicated by PG&E? This is not what a public
utility should be. Going forward, I believe that
the monopoly needs to be broken up. I believe
that the, since PG&E was able to create a fund
for the victims of the wildfires, I believe they
should create a fund for the victims of PSPS. I
believe that profits and bonuses should be taxed
heavily and create a funding stream for lawsuits
and mismanagement. I know that AB1054 addresses
this issue, and it ties executive salaries to
safety records. The grid needs to be upgraded and
future-ized to adapt to the changing climate
impacts of droughts, weather and fires, as well as
reducing emissions, increasing the production
of on-site and neighborhood renewables, move to
100% clean energy, and make battery storage,
islanding and microgrid components common. Shutdowns
of this magnitude cannot continue. PG&E must find
ways to upgrade their equipment at their own
costs as soon as possible, not over five or 10
years, but now since it is PG&E, which has neglected
its duty for decades. They must also find a way
to update technology immediately, and they
should establish a dedicated safety department.
What they have done over the years is shameful
and needs to be totally revamped. That is what a
public utility should do. Thank you very much.
Melissa Kasnitz: Thank you, Commissioners,
for calling this meeting this afternoon. To
the PG&E executives, my name is Melissa
Kasnitz. I'm the legal director with the Center
for Accessible Technology, where I regularly
represent the interests of customers with
disabilities here before the Public Utilities
Commission. If you ask your attorneys
and regulatory staff, I believe you'll find I'm well known here, and I like to think
that they would say that while I'm willing to take PG&E to task, I'm also willing to
work constructively with the utility wherever
possible to advance the interests of the
people that I represent. I'm here today to express my deep frustration with what I'm
hearing, where all the executives are saying
that the problems that took place in the
recent power shut off were unanticipated. I'm
here to say that every problem that took
place not only was predictable but was actually predicted in filings before this
Commission, where numerous parties expressed
concern that exactly the types of harms that
people suffered were likely to take place
during an extended power shut off. Each time
someone today referenced the recent events as
a learning opportunity, they diminished the
actual harm suffered by people who suffered through extended power outages. People who
didn't have money to buy supplies, people who didn't know if their medical equipment
was going to continue to function, people who didn't know what was happening or what
they could do. It's not enough to do better in the future when the harms were predicted
and known and took place. Now, real people experienced real fear, real out-of-pocket
costs, real medical costs, lost wages, lost schooling for their children. And for every
executive to say, wow, now we know need to do better next time. You should have done
better this time. A lot of the conversation today was in abstractions, but the harms
people suffered were real. There were too few
resource centers with short hours and no
transportation. Support that wasn't accessible
to people with disabilities. We've heard
dismissive responses about customer losses and questions about whether reimbursement
would be possible. We heard one heartwarming
story about one generator provided for one
hospice customer. But we have no idea how many customers were in similar situations
and simply weren't able to access any
resources. The costs of the shut off are being
externalized on to people who aren't capable
of absorbing them. This isn't okay. Every
time PG&E considers turning off the power, they must think about the risks that come
with the shut off, and the real harm that people will suffer, as well as the risks of
keeping the power on. That needs to be a
fundamental part of any equation. Thank you.
President Batjer: Thank you. Next is Deborah
Kaplan, and she will be followed by Tom
Dalzell. Miss Kaplan. I believe she's left. Oh, she's right here. Thank you very much.
Deborah Kaplan: Thank you very much for holding this hearing.
I'm a person. I live in Oakland. A person with a disability. I
live in an apartment building where I get to my place in an
elevator. I have to power my electric wheelchair every night. I
sleep with a ventilator with oxygen in an electric bed. If a shutoff
happened to me, which it didn't, I honestly don't know what
I would have done, and I think my situation is not that unusual.
And in varying degrees, many people, even those who rely on
refrigeration for medications, I don't know what they would do.
So, I think the risks are very, very broad. People with a wide
variety of disabilities. I think it's a shame, though, that we need
to sort of parade our stories in trying to evoke attention, but
at the risk of evoking stereotypes about disabled people as
vulnerable and as victims, when the reality is we’re some of the best
solution providers, innovators, because we have to think outside
the box and solve problems every day. The problem of providing
alternative power storage and generation for people who need it,
who have no alternative, who can't just go somewhere else is
very, very complex one. It involves many actors in the state in
order to figure out what can be done and can be done quickly. I
think your job as Commissioners is to figure out what is possible
within your purview, within the authority that you currently
got. But I'm afraid that's probably fairly limited. I think you do,
though, have a major role to play as leaders in this state and
making sure that other state agencies, legislators, and people with
disabilities at the table to help figure out what the solutions
are and should be, all get together and act quickly and don't
forget about this when the public attention shifts elsewhere. That
really is the challenge that I think you have and that we expect
you to do. If you don't do it, we'll do it ourselves. But we
need help because we need a program that will guarantee that we
are not casualties during the next Shut off. Thank you very much.
President Batjer: Thank you Miss Kaplan. Moving to Tom Dalzell.
Tom Dalzell: Good afternoon. My name is Tom Dalzell. I am the business manager of
IBW Local 1245. We represent 12,000 PG&E employees and about 6000 members who are
working for contractors doing vegetation management and line work. Madam President,
I cannot thank you enough for your mention of the extraordinary job that our
members did. And, both the PG&E and contractor,
in the restoration, that was really
our role, and it's been largely missing in the public narrative, and several of
you have mentioned it, and we thank, on behalf of my members, I thank you for that.
I also appreciate the acknowledgement of the extremely difficult conditions under
which they did their job. It's tough work to start with, but then, when you add
to the normal hazards of the job, there was physical danger. Many of our members
were insulted and verbally abused in the field. One was shot at driving down Highway
55. The bullet lodged in the padding on the dashboard. That anger is misplaced
and counterproductive. Our members were there
to restore and should not be subjected
to threats, insults and bullets. What it points to is how careful we have to
be, and the Commission is, on the criticism.
That it's constructive criticism. It's
not just saying PG&E doesn't care about its customers. It's really, the letter
that you sent to PG&E was the most focused and articulate document that I've ever
seen from the Commission. It was really, really zeroed in. You can't cascade nuance.
And, I think your criticisms today have been fair and will not lead to angry
people taking it as their mission to avenge PG&E's wrongs. You know, significant
fast change is possible, and Commissioner Shiroma and I have talked about SMUD.
1978, the third worst nuclear accident in American history. 92% weight, set, rate
increase in one year, 39% capacity. Today, a brilliant utility. Big change, quickly.
And the same, way all hold San Diego up as the gold standard for the work they're
doing on their system. The parent company ? ??, We're not that far away from Aliso
Canyon. We're not that far away from the disaster at San Onofre. Now there's a
company that had made big mistakes and they're doing it, and I have confidence in
PG&E. Eternal vigilance by the Commission is really important. And the last thing
that I would say really quickly is you want to know how long the PSPS will go on.
I would look at San Diego because they know that they're the gold standard. And
for seven years, they've been doing it. They still have PSPS. But maybe there's
something to be learned from there on how quickly it can happen here. Thank you.
President Batjer: Thank you, sir. Miss Elkins. Followed by Eric Pain.
Lisa Elkins: Good afternoon. This is Lisa
Elkins. Senior Deputy City Attorney with the City
of San Jose. On behalf of the City of San Jose,
I want to thank the Commission for calling this
special meeting. San Jose is conducting a
comprehensive evaluation of the impact of the power
outage of last week and we will present written
comments in due time. At this time, we have
identified some preliminary issues I want to
present to you today. The power outage impacted
20,000 accounts in San Jose. About 60,000
residents. Many neighborhoods. San Jose has been
preparing for PSPS events since May of 2019,
convening an emergency task force and created a
power vulnerability plan. After receiving the
outage notification from PG&E last week, San Jose
activated the City's Emergency Operations Center
on Tuesday evening, and proceeded to implement
its Power Vulnerability plan. the City of Son
Jose coordinated with the county and with PG&E
to respond to the outage and undertook several
actions, such as contacting medical baseline
customers and school districts. Deploying police
Department and Department of Transportation
staff to aid with traffic flow. And launching a
special mobile app to crowd source information
from San Jose residents. San Jose spent about
half a million dollars in city staff overtime and
costs for fueling the emergency generators required
to maintain the city drinking water supply
and other vital services. This figure is likely
to be much higher as we unveil the actually
impacts of the power outage and does not include
the costs incurred by our residents to prepare
for and respond to the outage. PSPS events cannot
be used to protect PG&E from liability while
transferring costs to local governments and the
public. Also had there been an emergencies
such as a fire or earthquake, all the resources
deployed to protect it to protect citizens for
the, against the PSPS event would have been
already committed. The redirection of emergency
respond resources compounds local public safety
concerns. There were myriad operational problems
as well, as it has been discussed today. Some
areas where that were not in the projected area
were impacted. San Jose did not receive information
from PG&E. We received information from
the crowdsharing app. Other areas were impact,
were supposed to be impacted, but were not. That
meant that San Jose had to deploy resources to
those areas and those resources are scarce and
this wasn't necessary. Lack of precision and a
misinformation during a PSPS event is unacceptable.
Medical baseline customers information was not shared with impacted series. Only with
counties. The counties resources where overwhelmed
at the time. Just one second, thank you, and,
San Jose spend a lot of time trying to reach
medical baseline customers. Unjustified delays
in transferring critical PG&E Medical Baseline
information to cities is unacceptable. We will
present further comment with a report as filed,
but thank you very much for this opportunity.
President Batjer: Thank you very much. Eric
Pain, and you will be followed by Jessica Tovar.
Eric Paine: Good evening, Commissioners, Madam
Chair, and to the other Commissioners, thank you
for calling this emergency meeting today. My name
is Eric Pain, Executive Director with the Central
Valley Urban Institute in Fresno, California. I will
be speaking from a place of Kern County, today,
as one of the impacted jurisdictions from the emergency
response plan. Some of our concerns have been
mentioned, specifically around greater investment
opportunities for procurement in the Central Valley
for the vegetation management issues that we are
experiencing. And also, looking at taking a deep
reflection around being more, creating a culture
of diversity and inclusion within management and
within the board. And I think those executives and
the board members that were present today that were
able to hear that and take it as a takeaway, as
something that is actionable, that can be measured
in the future. But also looking at the Emergency
Response Impact Mitigation fund that could possibly
include the purchase of generators for those local
municipalities. And we also would concur with the
Commission as looking further into some type of
restitution for those ratepayers that have been
impacted by the series of events that have taken
place over the last month. We'd also encourage or
offer, to the executive leadership, the prioritization
of counties that are like Kern County for the
expansion of those resource centers. Specifically in
our rule communities to give them greater access.
I’d like to thank the Commission for their time
today and for offering public comment. Thank you.
President Batjer: Thank you. Jessica?
Jessica Tovar: Jessica Tovar, Local Clean Energy Alliance. Also, I have
an invisible illness. So I also depend on electricity to feel healthy and
not be disabled. And one of the things I want to note is that I waited over
four hours to make my comments, which I think is absolutely ridiculous.
You know, last November, we came in here pretty much after the fires to
pretty much say that enough was enough and that what we wanted to see was a
public takeover of our electrical system. That we were done with PG&E and
that we didn't want to see any more any more deaths as a result of their
negligence. This last January, the CPUC unanimously voted to approve a $6
billion loan to, for PG&E to move forward with its bankruptcy protection.
And the excuse was to keep the lights on, and here we are, now, dealing with
power shut offs. Again at the hands of PG&E. I feel like you're serious
not taking this seriously and not getting to the root of the problem,
because if you would, you would actually acknowledge that PG&E is only
beholden to their shareholders, and that they don't care about how they
affect people. Literally leaving us in the dark. One of the things that has
been mentioned today is about microgrids and decentralized energy. Yes, those
are solutions to the problem, but they should not be through PG&E. They
should be owned and operated by the people so that it’s accountable to the
people so that we don't leave our vulnerable communities in the dark when
they need energy the most. We live in the communities where the dirtiest
energy is processed. We live in the communities that struggle to make ends
meet and have to make choices between buying groceries and paying our energy
bills. This corporation has shown no mercy to any of us, to the point
where, after murdering 85 people, we have to bear the brunt and pay for
that and to continue having this discussion like, oh, what are you going
to do, what's your plan, you know, for the next 10 years? That's not taking
it seriously. There are people who have to rely on electricity just to
breathe. Those are the lives that are at stake. And if you don't do something
about it now, you're never gonna do it. We're gonna be coming back here
over and over again. How many times do we have to say we need a public
takeover of our electrical system so that it’s accountable to the people?
President Batjer: Thank you, Ms Tovar. Next
will be Walter Park, followed by Mindy Spatt.
Walter Park: Thank you, Commissioners, for holding
this meeting in timely. At about 345 today,
your telecommunications provider said that there
were about 200 people on your call-in line. I would
guess that many of them are people with disabilities
because of course, it's more difficult for many
people disabilities to come here. Actually, I
don't know if you're going to take testimony from
that line. In any case, I want to let you know
that there's a high interest in what you're doing
today. I'm not so concerned about 95%, unfortunately,
of what PG&E talked about today. In terms of
earlier warning, narrower, more accurate maps and so
on. What I'm concerned about and what the community
is concerned about is continuous power, which
is something that PG&E is not providing. And is
now saying, well, 8, 10, 12 years, we'll do it
everywhere, and we'll do it in a lot of places before
then. During that time period of 10 years, we need
local power generation, solar power generators,
whatever. There are some people with disabilities
who cannot survive without their electrical power,
and PG&E sending out notice after notice after
notice that has the word Safety written on the
top doesn't help. Because they're not providing
anything that will help people. As you probably read
in the paper, one person died during this last
emergency. This person-made emergency. Of chronic
heart failure when his oxygen stopped. It only
took 13 minutes for the first responders to get
there, but that was too long. So that wasn't even
the worst case. A friend of mine who lives in the
Berkeley Hills, when her power went off, she has
cancer. She has medications that have to be kept
cool. She could move down the Hill and spend the
night at a friend's house. She was in an urban area
where she had that support in rural areas, we do
not have that kind of support. We need continuous
power. PG&E, wrote a letter to OES on September 27,
saying that they do not have any plan to provide
generation, local generators, that is household
generators because of potential liabilities, their
potential danger, danger problems with a gas-powered
generator, for instance, if that were the way
that was gone. And so I'm interested to hear the
story that they did provide one for someone who
needed it. I have to say that given the letter
of September 27th, I don't think that's, I think
that's the exception, not the rule. We need to see
a full out company effort. When you asked about
who was the person, who's the point person who's
responsible here, you did not get an answer. You
were told the buck stops here. Well, sure, the
buck stops at the top. But if there's not a team
leader who is in charge of this day to day whose
primary job is coordinating all of this, I don't
have a lot of hope for that. I would like to see PG&E
have a real Disability Advisory Council Committee
that they group with a task force. And frankly,
I would like to have the CPUC have a disability
advisory council that you talked to regularly
because we have a lot of details to talk about that
are vital to the way we live our lives. And we
can't do it three minutes at a time. Thank you.
President Batjer: Thank you, Mr Park. Mindy Spatt.
Mindy Spatt: Thank you, Commissioners. Hello again. I’m
Mindy Spatt with TURN, the Utility Reform Network. It's
sadly appropriate that the public is going last today
because the public comes last with PG&E again and again
and again. And that's been true since 1994 which is the
first time they were found criminally negligent in tree
trimming. So it's sort of stunning to hear the latest
round of top brass talking about this like it's a new
problem. It's an old problem. And if PG&E wants to get
intimate with its customers, I have an idea how to do
it. Pay their claims. That's how you can make your
customers like you is pay their claims. How can you allow
this company to put another two point five billion of
damages onto the rest of the state? This is something
they've done over and over again. They did it in their
bankruptcy. They've done it with their wildfire expenses.
Customers want this Commission to stop approving rate
hikes and get this company under control. So I'm here to
ask you, Commissioners, where's your authority here and
what are you going to do about this? But the planed
shutoffs were authorized by this Commission. Do you
expect us customers to pay the costs of that program, the
cost of prime time ads directing us to a Web site that
doesn't work, the cost of a customer information service
that our members are telling us was not reachable at all,
period, over the phone? Not at all. So we think that,
of course, shareholders should pay every dime for this
debacle. Not only the damages the customers experienced,
but also the costs of the program itself. And this
Commission should send a much stronger message to PG&E that
they need to start operating, not only safely, reliably,
but competently. Because they're not. Thank you.
President Batjer: Thank you, Mindy. Is
there anyone else in the audience that would
like to address on the Commission at this time? Anybody that wants to speak to the
public comment? Okay, I see none. Is there
any other comments from the Commissioners at
this time? Okay, I want to thank you all for
coming today. I appreciate very much your
attendance and the time that you took away from your busy lives. I want in particular
thank the PUC staff that helped us put this emergency meeting together. Elizaveta
Malashenko, Ed Randolph, Saul Gomez and Rohama
Mali, for all of their hard work in a very
expedited manner. Again, thank you all very much for coming. This meeting is adjourned