Showing posts with label PG&E. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PG&E. Show all posts

Thursday, February 10, 2022

PG&E undergrounding project could potentially benefit with co-location of distribution fiber conduit

Planting wires underground is one of the most expensive wildfire-risk strategies any utility can undertake — and it remains to be seen if the $25 billion estimate is high enough to cover the entire 10,000 miles that are to be placed underground in the areas deemed at most risk to wildfire across PG&E’s territory. The price tag is based on PG&E’s belief that it can do the job for $2.5 million per mile. Yet PG&E plans to spend $3.75 million per mile this year, when it expects to complete 175 miles of work. And in a white paper published four years ago, PG&E said underground work costs $3 million per mile.

Nonetheless, Chief Executive Patti Poppe said she’s confident that as the project ramps up, economies of scale and new technologies will bring costs into line. The utility expects to be planting 1,200 miles a year underground by 2026. “We can dramatically reduce our costs every year,” she said on a conference call with Wall Street investment analysts. “With scale, we can improve the unit costs.” 

CA utility PG&E says underground wire project will cost $25B | The Sacramento Bee

PG&E could potentially gain additional economies of scale by partnering with local governments, utility districts and consumer utility cooperatives to co-locate fiber conduit as it buries its electric lines. PG&E is prioritizing areas of its mostly Northern California service territory where wildfire risk is the highest. 

These areas also have major telecommunications infrastructure deficiencies. Residents and businesses would doubly benefit from both reduced risk of wildfires sparked by overhead electrical distribution lines as well as access to fiber delivered advanced telecom services.

Such a partnership would also potentially benefit PG&E by speeding up its burial of electric distribution lines, demonstrating good faith effort to regulators. The partners could also potentially tap into funding in the recently enacted federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that appropriates funds for electrical infrastructure improvements as well as advanced telecommunications infrastructure.

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Wildfires pose potential crisis -- and opportunity -- for PG&E

Wildfires create worst crisis for PG&E since San Bruno gas disaster | The Sacramento Bee: California’s wildfires have left Pacific Gas and Electric Co. confronting its most serious financial crisis since the 2010 San Bruno gas explosion, a disaster that threatened the company with bankruptcy and ultimately cost the utility $1.6 billion in fines and other costs. Two state agencies, Cal Fire and the California Public Utilities Commission, have launched investigations into whether Northern California’s largest utility could be at least partly responsible for the fires that ignited Oct. 8, killing at least 41 people and destroying roughly 5,700 homes and businesses. So far, neither Cal Fire nor the CPUC has cited evidence that PG&E contributed to any the ignitions. But the stock price of parent company PG&E Corp. has plunged over the last week amid investor jitters that the utility could be held responsible. PG&E shares closed Monday at $53.43, a drop of $4.34. Since Friday the company’s stock market value has fallen by more than $5 billion.

The threat of wildfires sparked by electric power transmission lines in PG&E's Northern California service territory will continue into the future after the recent deadly wildfires that ravaged California’s wine country, killing more than 40 people and destroying several thousand homes and businesses. Some predict the hazard will worsen due to climate change and continued residential development near fire prone wildland areas.

Out of crisis, goes the adage, opportunity often follows. For PG&E, that opportunity is to vastly reduce the chance of its power lines starting destructive wildfires and subjecting the company and its shareholders to significant legal liability. How so? By placing its last mile distribution lines serving customer premises in buried underground conduit instead of suspended overhead on wooden poles close to combustible flora and other materials. 

There’s an additional bonus on top of the reduced maintenance and storm outage costs associated with above ground transmission poles and infrastructure. PG&E recently filed an application with California utility regulators to serve as a wholesale telecommunications provider using its fiber optic infrastructure. Conduit for underground electrical power cables could also house fiber for telecommunications and bring it close to residential, business and institutional PG&E customers. PG&E could lease that fiber to internet service providers, providing an additional revenue stream to help offset the cost of undergrounding its premise electrical service lines.

And that's not all. In placing electric power lines in underground conduit, electric utilities can apply shielding to protect the grid from damaging electromagnetic flux from X-class solar flares or EMP weapons detonating at high altitude. 

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Potential game changer: PG&E could alter California telecom landscape


Image result for pg&e

An application by Pacific Gas & Electric to the California Public Utilities Commission to become a wholesale operator of fiber optic telecommunications infrastructure could be game changer in California where many customer premises nominally in the service territory of AT&T lack landline Internet connections or are limited to slow first generation DSL service over deteriorating copper cable plant.

PG&E’s vast 70,000 square mile northern and central California electric service territory overlaps regions of the Golden State where telecom infrastructure deficiencies are most prevalent: in and around the Central Valley municipalities of Modesto and Fresno, in the Sierra Nevada foothills east and northeast of the state capital of Sacramento in Placer and El Dorado counties and up the Interstate 5 corridor in Sutter, Butte and Yuba counties to the Shasta County seat of Redding in far northern part of the state. In addition to AT&T, PG&E’s electric service territory encompasses the telecom service territories of Frontier, Consolidated Communications and Citizens Telecommunications Company of California. All of these telcos could be customers of PG&E’s planned wholesale fiber as well as mobile wireless operators seeking backhaul bandwidth.

If approved by regulators, PG&E’s application could also attract new players who would like to provide fiber-based premise telecommunications service in areas lacking robust landline connections but can’t make the numbers work due to the high cost of building new fiber infrastructure. Having PG&E build it and lease it to them as competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) would solve that problem. PG&E would also be spared considerable deployment expense and delay since it owns utility poles that would provide the backbone for aerial fiber plant, the optimal infrastructure architecture to serve such a large and geographically diverse area, much of it with rugged terrain.

PG&E’s move holds the potential promise of universal service for northern and central California, which for many years has been a crazy quilt checkerboard of served, underserved and unserved areas, leaving many consumers to struggle with substandard, poor value dialup, legacy DSL, fixed and mobile wireless and satellite service.

For more background on PG&E’s application, Steve Blum’s Blog has more details here and here.

Friday, January 02, 2015

Electric power transmission towers and poles provide existing fiber to the premise infrastructure



Nearly two decades ago, investor-owned electric power provider Pacific Gas and Electric Co. considered installing fiber optic telecommunications cable on its poles and towers and leasing it to cooperatives, telephone and Internet service providers. In 2006, PG&E was in discussions with a startup, Current Communications, hoping to roll out new technology to deliver Internet over electrical lines known as Broadband over Power Lines (BPL).

The talks shorted out over money and BPL ultimately proved technologically unfeasible. Interestingly, one of the investors in Current Communications along with General Electric and EarthLink was Google.

Nearly a decade later, Google is building its own fiber to the premise network in two metro areas of the United States and is considering several others although recently put its expansion plans on hold, most likely until the U.S. Federal Communications Commission decides this year whether to regulate Internet service as a common carrier telecommunications utility. Should the FCC do so under Title II of the Communications Act, Google in a December 30, 2014 letter urged the FCC to enforce compliance with Section 224 of the statute requiring utilities such as PG&E to provide access to its poles, conduits and rights of way on reasonable terms and conditions.

controls poles, ducts, conduits, or rights-of-way used, - See more at: http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/uscode/47/5/II/I/224#sthash.YCBB6J1R.dpuf
In the meantime, Google Fiber and PG&E might consider exploring a joint venture that would give Google access to PG&E’s transmission towers and poles that provide existing infrastructure serving millions of premises to speed the deployment of its fiber network. PG&E itself should look not only at Google Fiber but also consider forming a subsidiary that would build an open access wholesale fiber to the premise network. It could then lease access to Google Fiber and other ISPs. (I'll even host the discussions -- off the record, of course --- and some fine Cabernet at an undisclosed winery location if the companies are interested).