Pacific Gas & Electric says grid holding stable so far

The utility is taking an all hands on deck approach to guard against incidental fires and keep residents powered up during the week long heatwave.

photo credit: Pacific Gas & Electric
PG&E staff provide an update from their Emergency Operations Center in Vacaville
on power grid status and safety precautions for the early July heatwave on July 3rd, 2024.

It’s an all hands on deck approach to the current heatwave in California; and that includes PG&E.

On Wednesday, the utility giant provided a briefing from its emergency operations center in Vacaville.

PG&E Meteorologist Scott Strenfel said the extreme heat smothering California could set new temperature records.

"What we're going to see over the next seven days rivals some of our biggest heat waves that we've ever experienced," Strenfel said. "So we're going back to and looking at July, 2006 and September of 2022 to get some comparisons."

Strenfel also said, "one of the things that we're very concerned about with this heat wave is just the prolonged nature."

Current emergency operations commander Mark Quinlan said the grid so far remains stable.

"The system load forecast on the PG&E grid is 22,106 megawatts, which is a big number," Quinlan said. "To put things in context, our all time system peak number was 22,684 megawatts, and that took place on September 6th, 2022. So we're bouncing right up against the all time system peak of PG&E."

Quinlan said PG&E is fully mobilized to keep the grid safely running.

"We've inspected all of our critical substations," Quinlan said. "We have flown helicopters on 50 transmission lines just to proactively patrol to make sure that we don't see any evidence of any type of a tree or anything that could come in contact with our lines and disrupt service. In total, we have over 3,300 PG&E coworkers and contractors on the system right now."

PG&E’s Tom Smith said not to worry if you haven't paid your bill.

"We are pausing residential customer disconnections for nonpayment," Smith said. "This began on June 28th, and so we really want to make sure that customers stay safe in this extreme weather."

So far the majority of outages are in the Oroville area, where the Thompson Fire has burned over 3,500 acres and caused widespread evacuations.

PG&E is showing small outages around Sonoma County and a limited Public Safety Power Shutoff along the northeastern border with Lake County. As of 3 P.M. July 3rd, fewer than 50 customers were affected.