So they better start maintaining them at a rate higher than 100-200 miles per year. They need to do 1000 miles per year to keep up with 100,000 miles of lines that have a 100 year life expectancy.
They’ve promised to spend $40 billion over the next five years on the grid, ~$8 billion of which is wildfire risk mitigation. It’s hard to say that will be in any way “sufficient”.
Because ensuring safety of the lines during very high risk days is impossible, a big part of the strategy was to add local generation redundancy so that they can switch off the transmission lines during high risk events but still keep the power on. These redundant stations would have to be natural-gas plants though, and CA has carbon-free mandates that prohibit them, so they have been prevented from implementing this strategy.
Frankly, it’s not clear that demand for this unreliable grid electricity can support the growth of the ratebase (the property being maintained).
At some point the ROI on switching to solar and batteries is net positive in the first month (based on financing the cost at a reasonable rate), and I’m not sure that point is much higher than $0.50/kWh for a household using 600kWh+ per month.
The more people that just opt-out of a grid connection entirely, the fewer people the ratebase is divided across, the higher rates must be set for those that remain.
Luckily the lithium-ion supply is fairly limited right now, but over the next 10-20 years that won’t remain the case.
PG&E currently has about $40 billion of debt, and recently issued $5 billion of debt at a B1 rating (junk). These issues also drive up their borrowing costs, which further shows up in the rates.
This is a good overview of the challenges they face;
I predict that in 10-15 years we could hear calls to outlaw or prohibitively tax any new battery/solar systems that take new houses in CA off-grid, because the grid will be in “solar death spiral”.
