It is a simple fact that lightning does start fires, especially in places like the American west, where lightning is not always accompanied with much, or any, rainfall at ground level. The severity of any fire is determined by how it develops in the hours and days that follow its ignition, long after the storm has moved on or dissipated.
That's not disputed. But starting a fire in completely dry conditions is worse than starting one that potentially coincides with rainfall, all other things being equal.
The LNU and SCU lightning complex fires have burned about 750,000 acres. The August complex(also started by lighting) has already burned 796,000 acres.
Actually yes, since they have a huge incentive to Run to Failure. Chaos monkeys would provide a consistent source of failures to make them do their maintenance.
While I appreciate the merits of chaos engineering, this comment lacks an understanding of the impact of these incidents, particularly in rural areas with a history of forest mismanagement.
People die [like my neighbors here in Sonoma, CA] - it's not an EC2 instance that gets replaced.
Further, one does not just 'restore' the power grid after an outage:
You can do simulations, either run it in forward or reverse. Pick a random town, burn it down, run the flame front backwards and find the paths and lines that caused it. Then look at the probable failure rates of those lines.
Run it forwards, pick and event and allow it to run its course.
When designing simulation runs there are bunch of dimensions to consider
* Fidelity or simulation resolution, spatial and temporal
* Number of runs, it is a linear search, spatial search, random, gradient
* If you are testing specific parameters, like will this bridge hold this static load, multiple simulation runs are done with the inputs varied slightly, input sensitivity analysis. [1]
The simulations don't have to be entirely on the computer, they could also couple with them physical and human components. One could page k/n employees that might be on duty at the random time. Response times in real life could be inferred by response to the actual pages. But people were harmed, no actual failures occurred.
If society approached civilization seriously, we would apply the full power of science AND engineering while we fail horribly at the application of engineering and suffer its excesses.
Given other pro PG&E comments in this thread, and how so many factors were in play and this and that. It all boils down to money and acceptable risk and how to package that up in a way that PG&E gets a slap on the wrist. Well done!
It very well could be that we as a society, decide we are ok with these risks, but that we need mediation. And it could be that we A) turn off at risk lines during likely conditions, as shown in simulation or via direct perception B) Have fire bomber planes in the sky during high likely occurrences.
But money is cheaper. You gotta spend it to make it.
OK. I like the increased utilization of simulations idea.
Your Option A is basically how it is done already for Public safety power shutoffs: they (PGE) have an extensive forecasting department, and they de-energize certain areas for risk based on their analyses. It doesn't work all the time: E.g. Camp Fire [2].
B isn't really an option when many of these incidents occur overnight. Otherwise Cal Fire already fly's their spotters during the day during Red Flag events. And their is a network of remote cameras (alertwildfire.org) for surveillance.
This all is beside the point though: Controlled burns in CA have decreased by 50%+ since the 90s/2000s, and 90s era environmental policies killed logging operations in a lot of CA. Fuel built up, and after that, thermodynamics take over.
If we can get back to mitigating the fuel load - controlled burns [1], and require PG&E to put more budget towards brush clearance and line maintenance - instead of mandating they enter into losing renewable contracts [3] - then we can certainly avoid a lot of these issues.
These are all tactics, PG&E had no strategy other than decide by committee so they couldn't be responsible for the resulting deaths and losses.
There are so many folks trying to slip their agendas into the remedies in this discussion. All of those are literal smoke screens for the greed driven structure of PG&E.
PG&E didn't start doing meaningful shutdown on lines until after the Camp fire.
I suspect that the best results may come from simpler modeling, such as modeling the system with a physical model,like modeling aerodynamics in a wind tunnel, or boat hulls in a wave tank.
How much would it take to make a useful scale model in a warehouse somewhere? I'm certainly not knowledgeable enough to understand how the smaller scale would relate to real-life fires, but it certainly seems plausible that, for a relatively small outlay, we'd have an important tool for establishing a much better understanding of wilderness fires. Given how much CA alone spends fighting forest fires, a 10 or 20 million project to build facilities and fund researchers seems like an obvious and much needed project.
No, GP is saying you need to start doing controlled fires on a regular basis, to reduce the accumulation of flammable material. Power grid is not related to that.
PG&E isn't setting fires often enough to do that, so the downsides of every random fire they set strongly outweigh the upsides. If we need more fires, we should use carefully planned ones.
This is a ridiculous argument. Why don't we forcefully tear down all of PG&E's infra every few years. They'll be forced to rebuild it with the latest safety standards... smh
It lacks context, but the idea itself is not ridiculous. That's pretty much how original Australians dealt with fuel buildup. Move and burn often. Given specific ecosystem, in a very literal sense, 1000 fires are better than 10 in the same area over the same time period.
I lived in Africa. The parks used to run controlled burns, every year or two, of the savanna grass.
They tended to do this during the [very] wet season.
But PG&E is still on the hook for taking better care of their infrastructure.
It all comes down to dollars and [non]sense. Some actuary has determined that an occasional lawsuit and rotten press run is cheaper than maintaining the wires.
Here in New York, many of the buried water mains that transfer water to the city from upstate are well over a century old. Many are made of cast iron, and even wood.
There’s no plan to dig them up and replace them with more robust materials. They just wait for them to fail, then replace the small part that failed.
They do give city water some real taste, though. It’s probably actually nutritious.
> water mains that transfer water to the city from upstate are well over a century old. ... They just wait for them to fail, then replace the small part that failed.
At some point, all the older parts will get so old that it fails frequently and at a greater rate, that the fix cost will greatly exceed the budgeted amount.
Being a quite cynical person, I would say that up to that point management will have collected fat bonuses, then cry poverty and push for ruinous rate increases.
Along the same lines, CT just had an issue with a rate increase that doubled most bills.
The point being spreading out the cost over years and limiting "downtime" is a lot better than 1 huge event that leaves customers without. (re: Detroit and bottled water)
Yes, but that’s disingenuous. The largest civil engineering project in America right now is the new water tunnel for NYC. It’s been in progress for fifty years.
Thanks for that. I’d completely forgotten about it. Hopefully, it wasn’t planned by the same folks that planned East Side Access. I have three friends that have retired, while working on it, and it’s many, many years behind schedule. Each of them had planned to be still working for the MTA, when it was done.