Behind the ‘Grid Emergency’A new book explains how California’s power system went so wrong.
Helen Andrews
Sep 7, 2022
California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas & Electric and What It Means for America’s Power Grid, by Katherine Blunt, (Portfolio: August 2022), 368 pages.
Reporter Katherine Blunt of the Wall Street Journal was lucky in the timing of her new book, California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas & Electric and What It Means for America’s Power Grid. Within 24 hours of its release, California declared a “grid emergency” and customers were warned to avoid using major appliances or charging electric cars between 4 and 10 p.m. in order to avert blackouts. It was a clear sign that the dysfunction detailed in Blunt’s book is an ongoing concern.
How did we get here? Or, more accurately, how did we get here again?
Reading about the California energy crisis brings on déjà vu in those who remember the last one, which wracked the state in 2000 and 2001. That episode also involved rising prices and rolling blackouts. It led to the downfall of a governor, the shuttering of the California Power Exchange, the state’s privatized electricity marketplace, and the bankruptcy of the utility company that serves northern California, Pacific Gas & Electric.
Now PG&E is fresh out of bankruptcy proceedings again, for the second time in less than two decades. The deeper problems with its grid have not yet been fixed. Why can’t California keep the lights on?
The two electricity crises had different superficial causes but the fundamental problem in both cases was the same. The ideological commitments of politicians and regulators blinded them to the depredations of parasitic actors who extracted huge amounts of money from the system and introduced instability that ultimately led to disaster.
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This leads to the second explanation for why California is less able to cope with electricity problems today, which is that it is further along in its ongoing Third Worldization. What it means to be Third World has no precise definition but it has to do with losing the capacity to keep basic things functioning. Standards slip, fewer people every year remember how to maintain legacy systems, and eventually those systems collapse.
A telling episode in Blunt’s book is the search for a new CEO that PG&E undertook in 2016. One of the finalists was Nick Stavropoulos, who had performed an incredible feat in bringing the gas division up to industry standards after the 2010 San Bruno explosion, in the face of widespread employee demoralization after an unpopular CEO’s flat-footed reforms. Stavropoulos was going to work the same magic on the electricity division, which, if anything, needed it more.
Instead, the company went with a woman named Geisha Williams, born in Cuba, who became the first Latina to head a Fortune 500 company. Her resume was impressive on paper. On the other hand, a leaked email from a staffer at the California Public Utilities Commission referred to Williams as “senior vice president of bullshittery.” Stavropoulos was “bitterly disappointed” at being passed over, according to Blunt, and soon left the company. The board forced Williams to resign in 2019, as the company was on the brink of filing for bankruptcy.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/behind-the-grid-emergency/
