ACTON — Southern California Edison updated its community members on its commitment to keep residents safe from wildfires earlier this week.
The electric company informed the residents of Acton, Agua Dulce, Green Valley and Lake Hughes through a virtual community meeting Tuesday covering SoCal Edison’s wildfire mitigation and public safety power shutoff action plans.
Erik Takayesu, vice president of PSPS Readiness, said the company is dedicated to reducing the need of outages.
“We don’t take lightly the use of PSPS to mitigate the risk of wildfires,” he said. “We’ve implemented these new measures and improvements to existing processes, procedures that will reduce the need for PSPS and the customer impacts.”
California saw five of its six largest wildfires last year and the company it working diligently to reduce the need of shutting off residents’ power by bolstering its infrastructure through grid hardening.
“The PSPS events we saw between November and December, and into mid-January was a much different experience than what we saw in 2019,” Takayesu said. “All of this underscores the importance of having a more resilient grid that will significantly reduce the risk of utility equipment sparking catastrophic wildfires and the need for PSPS as a measure of last resort.”
Director of Expedited Grid Hardening Terry Ohanian said the company’s effort is targeted at the hardest-hit communities which experienced the most shut-offs over the past couple of years.
“Our goal is to achieve reductions in the number of customers impacted, reductions in the number of PSPS events and reductions in the duration of an event should occur,” he said.
Ohanian also said it’s important for SoCal Edison to complete this work between now and Oct. 1, which is when the company sees its highest PSPS impacts.
The company’s scope of work to reinforce its grid includes replacing its bare-overhead wires which are exposed to the harsh weather of the high desert.
SoCal Edison crews are installing covered conductors. These conductors are insulated wires designed to withstand the elements.
“One of the challenges we have right now with those bare wires is when there’s interference with foreign objects because those wires up there,” Takayesu said. “There are things that can happen when things come into contact, but when you have insulated wire, (it) will be more resilient to things like that.”
Additionally, crews are working on segmenting its grid by installing remote-controlled automated switches that will allow SoCal Edison to turn power off in more specific, smaller areas of concern.
Ohanian said the benefit to segmentation is that the electric company can reduce the number of customers impacted.
“As we segment further and further into smaller areas, sometimes those areas result in a location that might traverse, let’s say, a parking lot or an area that may not have an ignition risk,” he said.
Although segmentation is a step in the right direction to help limit the impact of PSPS, it does has its flaws.
“If we had to turn off power in the very first segment out of the substation that first segment would turn off power for all the subsequent segments as well,” Ohanian said. “So, that is why some of those underground areas. … If that were to happen they could have their power turned off, even if they’re underground because the power comes from overhead lines before it goes underground.”
Along with SoCal Edison’s grid-hardening efforts, Takayesu said they are working to improve information sharing and coordination with its customers who would be affected by the outages.
“We’re also looking at some of the challenges we had, and getting customer feedback, and incorporating those in our improvements as well,” he said. “We’re hoping between that and the work that we’re doing with telecom providers, hopefully, customers will have a better experience.”
Takayesu also said they are working to improve its after-action reports and the data that goes into it.
During Tuesday’s meeting Ohanian said if these improvements were successfully implemented, the six PSPS outages for this particular area in 2020 would not have occurred due to increased wind speed thresholds.
“This represents an example of a circuit and obviously they’re all different, and the solutions are different, but our focus was, what can we do to reduce or eliminate the need for PSPS,” he said.
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