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California power outage


ggdad1951

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whom did it affect?   I feel for you who are, sounds like a totally avoidable situation if the power company did their job.  Meanwhile buy Cummins gens!

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Missed us in Santa Barbara County. Had outages to the north and south however.  I purchased a tri fuel generator 6 or 7 years ago thinking I would only need if we had a major earthquake down south that took out the power. (We have only one supply line coming in from the south over the mountains.). It's been getting plenty of use with the fires, floods, maintenance downtime and now the shutdowns!

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Depends on which company serves the area PG&E (SF Bay Area and much of the central part of the state) is particularly bad while San Diego Gas & Electric seems to be more on the ball.

 

Several major things makes SDG&E better: They have reworked their transmission system so that it is a grid rather than an octopus that means they can re-route power around transmission lines that may have an issue. They have also put in an extensive set of weather monitoring stations through their area so they know what is actually happening in the field. And they have fire weather forecasters on staff to help with predictions for the near future. PD&E, in their typical blundering fashion is way behind on all of that. Looks like SoCal Edison is somewhere in between the two.

 

An interesting read on that can be found in today's LA Times.

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7 hours ago, ggdad1951 said:

whom did it affect?   I feel for you who are, sounds like a totally avoidable situation if the power company did their job.  Meanwhile buy Cummins gens!

For sale items need to be on the classified listings ?

 

I always wanted to tell a moderator that. 

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It affected the Hospital I work at and quite a few of my friends. The lights (power) went out around 12:40 am.....The Hospital had just made the diesel gens state compliant with remote off switches......the state didn't turn the new switches back on after their test and of course, our guys didn't catch it either. The Hospital was dark for over an hour until engineering discovered the mistake. I video'd the whole event from my dept's perspective. Turns out that gets me an invite to the next eval meeting for future power deals. yea me. Hope they got donuts.

 

48D Battery  

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2 hours ago, 48Dodger said:

It affected the Hospital I work at and quite a few of my friends. The lights (power) went out around 12:40 am.....The Hospital had just made the diesel gens state compliant with remote off switches......the state didn't turn the new switches back on after their test and of course, our guys didn't catch it either. The Hospital was dark for over an hour until engineering discovered the mistake. I video'd the whole event from my dept's perspective. Turns out that gets me an invite to the next eval meeting for future power deals. yea me. Hope they got donuts.

 

48D Battery  

 

and prolly Generac or Kohler...not the good Cummins...

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Surprisingly no. We were all talking about that.....no critical pts. no vents, no surgeries, no codes.....crazy quiet for that time of night...dumb luck.

 

48D

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Here's what we saw from the opposite side of the continent.  The State of California sued PG&E for the Camp fire and won.  Everyone but PG&E cheered.  What we surmised from that was - if the State is going to blame someone specific for such an event, natural or otherwise, then that someone is going to take measures to prevent what the State said caused the fire, as in shutting off the power when it gets dry and windy.  Lo and behold, that's what they're doing. 

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16 minutes ago, Dan Hiebert said:

Here's what we saw from the opposite side of the continent.  The State of California sued PG&E for the Camp fire and won.  Everyone but PG&E cheered.  What we surmised from that was - if the State is going to blame someone specific for such an event, natural or otherwise, then that someone is going to take measures to prevent what the State said caused the fire, as in shutting off the power when it gets dry and windy.  Lo and behold, that's what they're doing. 

Here's what happened, PG&E raised rates many times over the years for maintenance and upgrades that never happened.  What did happen is:

1. they blew up 1/2 half of a neighborhood because they didn't do the maintenance they were supposed to do and said they did to a 3 foot gas line.  We got charged for it and they again raised rates to cover the settlement.

2. stopped maintaining their fire clearance and lines and said they did and wanted to raise rates to cover the fire lawsuits

3. Punish CA by cutting power 

 

Edited by Adam H P15 D30
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Always more to the story, as suspected.  As I said, that's what we could surmise from the info we had over here.  It's a tad surprising that we didn't get more info, power companies overcharging and underdelivering is an issue here, that would have made for good "con" reporting.

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1 hour ago, Dan Hiebert said:

Always more to the story, as suspected.  As I said, that's what we could surmise from the info we had over here.  It's a tad surprising that we didn't get more info, power companies overcharging and underdelivering is an issue here, that would have made for good "con" reporting.

 

A while back number of communities in California decided they'd been (insert explicative here) by PG&E too many times and started setting up their own electrical utilities. Where this happened the costs usually dropped substantially and the service either stayed the same or improved. The "investor owned" utilities, primarily PG&E but also SoCal Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, decided this was a bad thing and paid enough signature collectors to get an initiative on the ballot to ban that in the state. When the election came, the vote from most of the state was mixed: People outside the PG&E service area didn't have much of an opinion one way or the other. But in the PG&E service area, where people had strong first hand experience, the votes were strongly against the ballot initiative and so it failed state wide. As I recall, some investigation after the fact indicated that the money PG&E spent to pass the measure had also been redirected from things like maintenance and safety.

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I’ve been seriously thinking about buying stock in PG&E. It’s extremely low right now. Would this be a foolish move???  My thoughts it can only go up, but I know there’s a risk of it going completely under. What’s the opinions of the Californians that know the facts.  

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1 hour ago, Todd B said:

I’ve been seriously thinking about buying stock in PG&E. It’s extremely low right now. Would this be a foolish move???  My thoughts it can only go up, but I know there’s a risk of it going completely under. What’s the opinions of the Californians that know the facts.  

 

My opinion is that every time I decided to invest in a specific company, or conversely avoid investing in a specific company, I guessed wrong. So I stick to broad market index funds.

 

As to PG&E, they've come out of things like this before with the stock holders doing well. On the other hand, they are in bankruptcy with a judge that seems to be unsympathetic to management and shareholders and there is some serious political pressure to break them up. Could go either way.

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Will all that is going on in CA - and I was born and raised there but left twenty years ago - I am amazed that the same type people keep get elected to governor and other decision-making posotions.  My brother was a high mucky-muck politician in CA government and I know what goes on behind the scenes. CA was such a beautiful state.

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wait...from reading this you are telling me there is graft in CA?  Things being charged for and not being done?  NO!  NO WAY!  <sarcasm horn>

Sadly it is starting in my wonderful state as well...

we spent 10's of MILLIONS on MNLARS (state licensing software) that didn't work when rolled out so they spend 10's of millions more to "fix" it....and it still doesn't work, now talking of scrapping it and starting over....

we've "lost" 130 million in welfare related monies....can't be found

our taxing gov wanted to tax us more to fix the roads....that we are already heavily taxed for....but we got some new shiny light rail only the metro area uses....which loses money each year, so let's EXPAND the system...

our taxing governor wants to push the same CARB laws as CA...to FORCE people to buy electric vehicles and stop driving trucks

 

Boondoggles all around.

 

just goes to show you can't trust anyone but a Dodge owner...

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3 hours ago, Plymouthy Adams said:

don't trust anyone that don't drink coffee.....question those that put pollutants in their cup...

 

Amen Brother! 

 

I find it best to tread lightly among those who adulterate the heavenly beverage with anything other than whiskey.  Heathens I tell ya, can't trust em' one bit :lol:.

 

Don't even get me started about ketchup on hot dogs... ;)

 

 

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22 hours ago, Old CWO said:

 

Amen Brother! 

 

I find it best to tread lightly among those who adulterate the heavenly beverage with anything other than whiskey.  Heathens I tell ya, can't trust em' one bit :lol:.

 

Don't even get me started about ketchup on hot dogs... ;)

 

 

I get it, 100%, about ketchup on hot dogs. Mustard only, preferably dark brown spicy. ?

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