Timestamp: 12 November 2022 @ 0807 Pacific
Executives from Pacific Gas and Electric appeared before the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday to answer questions and offer updates about the utility's recently revealed electricity transmission limits, which threaten to hamstring economic and community development across Southern Humboldt.
There were some terse exchanges, though PG&E officials revealed that upper management recently approved tens of millions of dollars in additional infrastructure improvements that should shorten the timeline for resolving the most disastrous implications.
Planning and Building Director John Ford launched the proceedings with an overview of the "dire implications" of PG&E's electricity transmission limitations, which he said could stifle both residential and commercial development, impacting the county's compliance with state climate and housing regulations at a time when the local population is expected to surge to support Cal Poly Humboldt, offshore wind development and other industrial growth.
And he noted that PG&E hasn't been transparent about why they didn't see these problems coming and do something to prevent them.
"Today's discussion is the culmination of over six months of asking for answers," Ford said, adding that county staff has been asking, to no avail, for maps that show where in the county PG&E has capacity to support growth and where it does not.
Ford pulled no punches in his criticism of the utility's business model, which he said is essentially to provide service until capacity is used up, as it now appears to be across Southern Humboldt. This "first come, first served" model leaves important questions unanswered, he said.
For example, while PG&E has promised to spend tens of millions on infrastructure improvements over the next few years, providing upgrades to supply Fortuna, Rio Dell and a new hospital project in Garberville, "the basic question of what this will do for capacity has still not been answered," Ford said. "[W]here will we be in 10 years when we can no longer buy automobiles with internal combustion engines and there is no capacity to charge electric vehicles? What will happen when there's not sufficient power to address the housing need caused by offshore wind development?"
In meetings with PG&E, he said, the question often gets asked: How did this happen?
Ford theorized that PG&E may have known about the vulnerabilities of its system "and simply made a business decision to allow the capacity to be used up without making timely capacity improvements."
The utility, for its part, supplied a variety of local and regional employees to address the board's questions. Ronald Richardson, vice president of PG&E's north coast region, told the board that PG&E has developed a number of "mitigations and solutions" since August, including $300 million-worth of capacity upgrades in the Garberville and Petrolia areas.
Carl Schoenhofer, regional senior manager, pointed the finger at cannabis, saying new business applications in SoHum are seeking large amounts of electricity.
"Not that we have anything against cannabis," he said. But growth in that industry has not been factored into the state-approved load forecasting models, and in SoHum, new business applicants are requesting more than double the existing customer load from PG&E's Rio Dell, Garberville, Fruitland and Fort Seward substations.
Plus, cannabis operations are often in remote, rural locations, which requires significant capacity upgrades to distribution lines, transmission lines and substations, Schoenhofer said. PG&E's senior leadership recently approved $16 million-worth of capacity upgrades to serve new business applications in the Eel River Valley, and Schoenhofer said that work should be completed no later than 2024.
Residents in the more remote regions of SoHum, including Miranda, Blocksburg, Petrolia and Whitethorn, can expect to face a longer timeline, with transmission capacity upgrades not planned to be completed until the end of 2026. Schoenhofer called that an "aggressive" timeline.
Jon Stalllman, principal with a group called Grid Research Innovation and Development, said he's helping PG&E with its strategic capacity planning. He said the area from Garberville to Alderpoint "presents some of the most complicated engineering solutions that we have in our service area" with cannabis projects demanding big energy loads "on the outer edges of our distribution system."
Around Briceland, Honeydew and Petrolia, PG&E would need to spend $300 million to serve just 37 new business customers, Stallman said. This would entail engineering and construction through "extremely difficult mountainous terrain." The utility is exploring other options in the area but Stallman offered "no promises" because they're extremely complex.
"We really do want to serve the area; it's just extremely complicated," Stallman concluded.
First District Supervisor Rex Bohn was first up to grill the execs. He noted that while there may be 37 new customers seeking power hookups along one transmission, PG&E has a lot of existing customers there. And it's not like cannabis operations are a new phenomenon.
"How many cannabis applications have you fulfilled already, and did you see a trend maybe starting?" he asked. "Because there has to be hundreds of those out there already." Bohn cited the utility's well-document failures to maintain its aging infrastructure. "So some of that $300 million would be tied into normal rehabilitation of the lines from years of service, I would think," he said.
Fortuna City Manager Merritt Perry and Planning Director Kevin Caldwell appeared at the meeting, and they criticized PG&E for its lack of transparency, saying city officials only recently realized there was a problem when local developers were denied hookups despite having received "will serve" letters from the utility.
"So, things weren't adding up," Perry said. In August, city officials finally got an assessment from PG&E, whose reps said it would take $900 million and nine years to get new connections.
"I really can't overstate the impact of that assessment," Perry said. "Essentially what it was doing was putting a building moratorium on the City of Fortuna and telling anybody who wanted to invest, whether it's in homes or in businesses in the city, that they needed to go elsewhere."
The city has developers ready to start projects in the old Fortuna mill site and more than 150 residential housing projects approved or at some stage of the planning process, Perry said. Plus, the city's wastewater treatment plant needs high-power energy upgrades to comply with regulatory permits, a new senior center is in the works and existing businesses need to expand their power usage.
"I think it's really important that we understand the circumstances that led to this," Perry said. "We still haven't heard exactly why everything was business as usual and then we ran up against a wall."
Second District Supervisor Michelle Bushnell said that she appreciates the $30 million investment to serve the new Garberville hospital and its associated housing, but she asked, "Where's that leave everybody else in Southern Humboldt?" There's no room for growth in Garberville proper, she added.
"So, for people that are investing a lot of money, we need better answers," Bushnell said. "And I understand you guys are trying to get there [but] we need to get there quicker."
Later in the meeting, following a public comment period, Third District Supervisor Mike Wilson said our culture's belief in constant growth has led to infrastructure problems beyond just electricity to include delayed maintenance on roads, water and wastewater systems. Centralized energy generation may need to give way to micro-grid technology and distributed systems, he said.
PG&E's execs had brought up the concept of equity, saying the utility must do right by all of its ratepayers across the state, which means that expensive upgrades in remote locations don't make the most sense.
Wilson pointed out that land use decisions are also implicated in our current predicament because PG&E is now responding to legal requirements to supply service in these remote areas, which were approved for development at the local level. But Wilson added that there's a key difference.
"We're the transparent organization; you are not," he told the PG&E execs.
The board wound up simply accepting the informational report before moving on to other matters.
Keywords: Fortuna Humboldt California US STEM utility hospital power consumption
Source: https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2022/nov/2/pge-execs-gets-earful-offer-update-capacity-proble/
Comment: People move up to Humboldt County to get away from the grid, to go off grid. Northern California is a leader in solar power systems - or, at least, we were. Who else remembers Home Power magazine? We subscribed to it for over a decade.
As we assess matters there are people in Humboldt County who have been effectively using solar power to operate their homes for at least fifty years. These people were all successful because they did the basic math that was required to estimate one's power consumption and engineer an infrastructure to deliver and store that power.
Now we have a new generation of inhabitants coming into Humboldt County, but they want it all: they want to be so far away from civilization that they can grow marijuana without fear of discovery, AND they also want the convenience of being able to flip a switch and have reliable power from Pacific Gas & Electric.
We suspect they are all morons with more money than brains - people who don't like dealing with generators and don't like all that noise. They moved here for the peace and quiet! To them, power is something you wield, to make others do what you want.
The real estate developers are stuck in the middle. They want to develop huge private plots of land and build huge houses for wealthy assholes with more money than brains. The wealthy assholes buying these lands want AC power to their property, even though they spent enormous amounts of money buying and locating a piece of property that was, more likely than not, being marketed to buyers with the phrase "off-grid" being mentioned, repeatedly, in the sales literature.
This has all remained subterranean and invisible, until Southern Humboldt's growing pains led them to start talking about adding to Jerold Phelps Hospital - the aging medical facility in Garberville, with just one emergency room. Growing Jerold Phelps Hospital makes perfect sense because it is the only medical facility between Fortuna and Willits.
Hospitals have special requirements for electrical power these days. This is because hospitals contain equipment that requires a smooth and steady supply of spike-free electricity - computers, and networking equipment - but also equipment that periodically draws enormous amounts of power. Medical imagery equipment, mostly - Xrays, CAT, PET, and MRI.
MRI - magnetic resonance imaging - is probably the biggest consumer of power - magnetic resonance imaging requires intense magnetic fields which are formed using superconducting materials which need to be kept at sub-zero temperatures in order to superconduct electricity and form and shape those powerful magnetic fields.
It is our suspicion that the power requirements of magnetic resonance imaging are forming the bulk of the problem that is obstructing the improvements at Jerold Phelps Hospital. The news articles don't say this, but anyone with experience in building electrical infrastructures for hospitals would immediately zero in upon the power requirements of the medical equipment.
We are not electrical engineers ... but we did support computer-based imaging for the San Francisco Veterans Administration Medical Center's Radiology Department for a year or two ... spent some time installing medical imaging servers, for Kaiser, in the 00s ... and we have over thirty years of experience designing, building, and using large computing facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Very large hospitals have very large generators and very large fuel tanks so they can keep the hospital operating even after catastrophic events. However, even these generators have limitations, in terms of how much raw amperage they can produce, and it is entirely possible that even the SF VA Medical Center doesn't use their MRI equipment when they are on backup power, because it draws just too much power.
And so what is the solution?
We think that Humboldt County should take a look at Tesla Power Walls.
Tesla produces Power Walls, Power Packs, and Mega Packs, which serve as local reservoirs for electrical energy and can, perhaps, deliver the sort of short burst of sustained amperage required by magnetic resonance imaging equipment.
Obligatory statement: We have no investments in Tesla or any of its vendors.
You may be wondering about our credentials. We have been living in Humboldt County for over fifteen years. We have repeatedly applied to jobs with Humboldt County, attempting to share our vast expertise with the government of the region where we tried to raise our children. To no avail. Humboldt County prefers to hire young adults with no experience who have just graduated from College of the Redwoods with certificates from Microsoft. There are no people with broad or deep information or technology industrial experience, in Humboldt County. Such people are regarded as a threat, we think, to management.
And that is why you are reading about the solution, here, on this little backwater website - because Humboldt County systematically declines to employ people smart enough and experienced enough to solve simple problems like providing power for a growing hospital while staving off demands for equivalent service from stupid, wealthy, wannabe homeowners.
To make matters worse, your humble editor is also a high school dropout, with no college degree. This is why your humble author remains unemployed, even while Humboldt State University searches for competent technical support personnel - because even though your humble editor teaches himself new computer languages with ease, his lack of a college degree is seen as unimpeachable proof that he is not smart enough to be employed by Humboldt State University, either.
So, there's your solution, morons. From a high school dropout that none of you would be caught dead employing. A Really Big Battery. Duh.
Sure, it's going to be expensive. That's why you'll need one of your hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of non-profit agencies to get to work and drum up some grants, to buy and maintain your Power Wall.
You could also employ a half a dozen college students from College of the Redwoods to build a Power Wall. The Power Walls are just a bunch of 18650 batteries arrayed in groups of three with each group of three batteries having a charger circuit that doubles as a temperature sensor. It's just a big battery pack - the edgy part is, that those battery packs represent a fire hazard, and so you're going to need someone intelligent and detail-oriented, on site, in shifts, seven days a week, to manage the Power Wall and make sure it's not about to burst into flame - and finding someone intelligent and detail-oriented who will work for the sort of shitty wages that are offered in Humboldt County, may be a challenge.
We are reminded of an incident that happened at Genentech back in the 1990s when there was a power outage and Genentech lost over a million dollars of product because someone did not check the generator's fuel tank and the generator ran out of fuel. Details are important. You need to hire someone competent. Not your brother-in-law.
When all is said and done, however, the questions, "How much power does a house need? How much power does a hospital need? How much power does Southern Humboldt need?" are all fairly basic questions that can be answered with a little addition and maybe some division, and it reflects poorly upon the Humboldt County government and the local newspapers that nobody has managed to produce these basic numbers - instead, preferring to engage in finger-pointing and grandstanding and drama-queenery.
Maybe Humboldt County needs a new government. One that can do simple math.
Food for thought.