This is your SolarWakeup for October 14th, 2019

PG&E Blackout AAR. The PG&E blackout is now over and it’s time to review how it went. First reports show that a medically dependent resident lost his ventilator and passed away 12 minutes after losing power and the City of Moraga went through a scary 70 acre wildfire hours after losing their electricity. Because PG&E systems and emergency systems were not working as planned, emergency responders went door to door to wake homeowners up in the middle of the night, grab their things and flee. For many of you, this may trigger a recall to my climate story from Hurricane Irma two years ago when we packed up and fled the State of Florida. That same waterproof box still holds the important items, passports, birth certificates etc but Friday morning my wife asked me if the waterproof box was still functional for a fire event. Moraga is less than 10 miles from our house in Walnut Creek and here we are buying a fireproof box. There are going to be a lot of stories about how PG&E did (not well) and what the solution is (solar/storage/microgrids) but also some editorials that give the Governor some much needed political cover to act.

Change The System To Solve The Problem. When PG&E filed bankruptcy they knew that the newly inaugurated Governor would have a hard time pushing his power so early on. With hundreds of thousands of union jobs and pensions on the line, breaking up PG&E is easier said than done. The Governor said it right on saying, “This is not a climate change story as much as a story about greed and mismanagement over the course of decades,” he said. “Neglect, a desire to advance not public safety but profits.” PG&E is a poorly managed utility that does too much, covers too diverse a service area and got comfortable. The management has always focused on the quarter end results and not the impact to consumers 5 years down the road. Why should they? Imagine if their CEO had said 5 years ago that they need to focus on electrifying buildings away from gas (they own a gas utility) and help ratepayers go solar with storage. In fact PG&E would incentivize the creation of microgrids in load centers with solar everywhere. They would become change from a centralized power model to a grid that gave priority access to local, clean power. That CEO would have been fired on the spot and would probably have been considered unhireable by other power companies. But the CEO would have been right and nothing to show for it. That’s the CEO that Newsom should push on the PG&E shareholders, the CEO that predicted the obvious future and acted on it and put their own career on the line because he knew and did something about it. Yes, such a (former) CEO exists and he currently spends his time as a member of the Vote Solar board amongst other things, David Crane is the CEO that PG&E needs. Not all shareholders will love it but they should because Crane would give the company and the Governor the cover they need to think longer term. The interests are finally aligned, PG&E cannot keep the current form of management in place, they are only there to restructure the company from bankruptcy and not service the ratepayers for the long term. More editorials will give more political power to the Governor to call the handful of hedge funds and make his demands.

National Grid Under Review. We’ve talked about the delay and uncertainty for developers in MA and I’m glad to see the DPU acting to make sure the right things are happened under SMART. 

Bad Headline Example 2,478. Solar panels work great in a blackout, just put a voltage meter on them. Grid protections require the inverter to isolate when the grid is down and therefore you need the right electrical configuration to get access to the energy from the panels which leads us to batteries. You all know this and the Bloomberg reporter does.

 Opinion

 

 

Best, Yann