41–50 of 58 posts
Bloomberg should hire writers that know how to proofread their writing: "He’s proposed a bill that would lesson utilities’ exposure to damages from fires, citing climate change." That tends to "lesson" their credibility.
Enlighten me, what's the typo?
Novel, but likely ultimately to fail. IIUC, the CEO is claiming liability to PG&E is negated by the overall affect of climate change. That would likely have to be argued in court but that undertaking sounds quite massive, and would require a tremendous amount of science. What I think is really going on here is that she's trying to find someone else to take the blame, financially, and probably pushing the state to ind…
She isn't setting this up as a court case. She's trying to manufacture enough political cover for the governor and various other cronies to plausibly save her firm from its self-imposed predicament. They can pass any law they want, if the voting public is confused enough.
Bloomberg should hire writers that know how to proofread their writing: "He’s proposed a bill that would lesson utilities’ exposure to damages from fires, citing climate change." That tends to "lesson" their credibility.
Enlighten me, what's the typo?
At a certain point, it's going to cost less to cover every sun facing surface in ultra low cost photovoltaics, and have on site battery storage, than to maintain, replace and repair last mile power lines and middle-mile + long distance high voltage lines. Imagine eliminating all of the salary and benefit costs for thousands of linemen, bucket trucks, insurance, consumables, transformers, substations, not to mention t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
PG&E needs to be doing a better job and California should consider bringing back its logging industry. I get burning wood isn’t the cleanest energy source but dead trees are going to burn no matter what. I’d rather someone harvest it and burn it in a controlled environment rather than it rage uncontrollably.
> PG&E needs to be doing a better job and California should consider bringing back its logging industry. The logging industry will happily wipe out nice, mature, profitable trees that are robust against fire and leave behind the unprofitable brush that serves as tinder. No thanks. Electricity infrastructure probably needs to be moved back to a core government function like roadways--especially considering that the in…
That wood waste used to power electric plants across the state before cheap renewables and solar were an option.
>Electricity infrastructure probably needs to be moved back to a core government function like roadways--especially considering that the infrastructure part is going to dominate more and more over the metered part as more renewables come online.
The forests will burn as long as Federal Lands are not managed and cut like they used to be. The Federal Forests will threaten private forests and the adjacent land will be impacted.
It’s simple, dead trees need to be cut down. Invest in as much renewable and clean energy as you want but if we don’t take care of these trees the air quality will be trashed. It’s happening right now.
PG&E has is not trimming vegetation back sufficiently. It is an infrastructure expense that is easy to defer -- for a while. In the Sonoma County fires, trees contacting power lines and either catching on fire directly, or causing a short leading to a transformer explosion sparked a lot of fires. Of course, 100kph winds will cause the fuel to burn wicked fast. I saw a photo of a melted cast metal BBQ grill after the…
PG&E needs to be doing a better job and California should consider bringing back its logging industry. I get burning wood isn’t the cleanest energy source but dead trees are going to burn no matter what. I’d rather someone harvest it and burn it in a controlled environment rather than it rage uncontrollably.
This is why the rest of the world has abandoned above-ground power lines in favor of secure underground power lines. Fewer fires, fewer black outs...
There is nowhere in the world that power lines are put underground unless there is a reason they can't go above ground: dense urban area, unable to secure a right-of-way, crossing another piece of linear infrastructure like a highway, etc.. It's way more expensive to go underground, it causes technical challenges at high voltage necessitating additional, expensive infrastructure like capacitor banks and point-on-wave…
Do you know if the existence of other relatively large, underground facilities, namely subway railways, is a factor?
Is it a common/reasonable practice to use a rail tunnel for (non-rail) power distribution? I can imagine it would the advantage of not having to dig for inspectin/maintenance but a disadvantage of needing to coordinate with rail operation instead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
PG&E needs to be doing a better job and California should consider bringing back its logging industry. I get burning wood isn’t the cleanest energy source but dead trees are going to burn no matter what. I’d rather someone harvest it and burn it in a controlled environment rather than it rage uncontrollably.
There's plenty of western states on fire right now with robust logging industries.
Anthropogenic climate change is a real and significant threat to the current state of our planet. That being said... It is likely a fairly minor player in the uptick in major wildfires over the past few decades. That is more due to mismanagement of forests, and a "zero tolerance" policy towards fires allowing a huge build up of fuel loads.
What uptick? A 2016 study by the Royal Society has shown that 'Global burned area have dropped by about 25 percent over the previous 18 years'. 'Even in California, which for years has wrestled with fire devastation, a study in the International Journal of Wildland Fire found that the number of wildfires burning more than 300 acres per year has been tailing off since a peak in 1980.' Stefan H. Doerr, Cristina Santín.…
If you have less forest fires you build up fuel for the fire and the rare fire that DOES happen will be much more violent and extreme.
Natural forest fires burn away a lot of fuel for the next fires so it's smaller.