The overnight power outage on Point Dume last week is a just a taste of things to come, as the Southern California Edison power grid decays. This latest outage was a failure of an underground circuit. Many underground circuits in Malibu are 50 or 60 years old, like those in my neighborhood and in Malibu West. Technology has changed greatly since they were installed, and the old lines will not last forever. And the overhead poles are much, much worse.
It will be very interesting to find out just how bad the condition of our overhead poles is, as we just won money for a scientific survey of this critical issue. But in my years of attending depositions, technical work panels and other California Public Utilities Commission hearings following the Malibu Canyon fire, I have learned several major points.
Southern California Edison has a mathematical formula to judge the safety of its system, in terms of pole strength and load. This safety formula is “proprietary,” AKA secret. A very small number of CPUC inspectors “audit” pole safety, and do not release the data publicly.
The CPUC investigates fires and major outages, and keeps those investigations secret. The CPUC experts say releasing the information would mean the power companies would clam up during investigations, instead of the “cooperation” we get now. (Side note: SC Edison is charged by the CPUC with destroying evidence and essentially lying after the Malibu fire. So much for cooperation.)
Here’s what we know about the CPUC. This watchdog agency is prosecutor, judge and jury for utility rates and safety. Its chairman, Michael Peevey, is a former SC Edison president who was appointed by Gov. Schwarzenegger in 2002 with the mandate to keep the lights on after the rolling blackouts of 2000 which were caused by Enron and other companies gaming the system. The federal government examined the CPUC closely after the San Bruno natural gas explosion that killed 18 people. It found that the CPUC utterly failed to watch the giant utility companies’ safety and competency. It found the CPUC regulators to be over-matched by the bevy of utility company lawyers and technicians they deal with. It found the CPUC, as the combo rate-setting, safety and judicial agency, has a triple built-in conflict of interest.
I have seen this first-hand. The CPUC panel I am on just spent a half year trying to compose new power pole safety rules as a result of the 2007 Malibu and San Diego fires. But the CPUC rules prevented any of the technical panel members from discussing what exactly caused the Malibu pole collapse, because the formal investigation is still stuck at a different branch of the CPUC, five years after the fires.
I was not allowed to present any of the evidence at a CPUC rulemaking panel that CPUC investigators had already collected, at great expense, about the shoddy conditions that led to the Malibu conflagration, which caused $500 million in damages. CPUC rules prevent evidence about catastrophic failures from being introduced in rulemaking procedures for prevent future similar catastrophes. Brilliant.
The CPUC staff actually is fighting common sense safety proposals, like forbidding SC Edison’s common Malibu practice of letting its poles lean over.
It gets worse, much worse. The Los Angeles Times has revealed that every single man, woman and child in the SC Edison service area is paying $25 a month for electricity from the company’s conked-out San Onofre Nuclear Station, which hasn’t generated one single watt in eight months. That’s a total of $54 million a month, not including the millions needed for expensive replacement power.
Why? Edison International, the SC Edison parent company, elected to replace the aging steam generators with new “supersize” generators in a $770 million project. Edison would get “free” extra power courtesy of its ratepayers, under CPUC’s byzantine logic, and it would count as “green energy” under Gov. Schwarzenegger’s laughably misleading AB 32 Clean California law.
But SC Edison failed to ask for a new federal license, and it failed to do enough engineering and testing. On power-up, violent steam explosions inside the nuclear heat exchangers literally shook the devices to pieces.
San Onofre may never re-open. We are paying $25 per person per month for the biggest engineering mistake in California since St. Francis Dam collapsed in 1928 and killed 600 people. The CPUC approved this project, SC Edison blew it, and you and I are paying for it.
So, back to our faulty underground power circuits and overloaded, toppling wooden poles, where SC Edison pocketed millions from cell phone companies who needed permission to overload those 70-year-old spindly splinters with tons of cables and antennae. There was a state assembly hearing about the poles after the San Gabriel fiasco last fall, when 211 power poles fell over in one night.
The head of CPUC’s accounting wing said he had no way to guess if SCE was spending all of the rate money it collects for safety projects on actual safety projects. But that didn’t scare him. What scares him, he said, is that the CPUC does not have any clue if the amount of money being spent on power pole safety is even in the ballpark of being enough.
It’s going to cost billions to clean up the San Onofre mess, and the saggy, spindly delivery system. Your electricity is about to get very, very expensive. And as to reliability, my best suggestion is to tape the fridge door closed and hope they splice the line before the ice cream thaws.