Wildfires

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) on Wednesday launched a statewide investigation of how major utilities have used preventive power shutoffs to curb wildfires, noting that it intends to hold the power companies accountable for their actions during those increasingly controversial events.

The bottom line for San Francisco-based Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) in 3Q2019 bled red, with $1.6 billion in losses, with up to $2.2 billion in one-time charges.

California’s largest oil and gas producer, Los Angeles-based California Resources Corp. (CRC), said it has emerged generally unaffected by three weeks of rampant wildfires and a state government crosswise with fossil fuels over efforts to mitigate climate change.

Bankruptcy bound Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) told a federal district court judge in San Francisco that its equipment, or operations, could have been involved in at least nine fires in Northern California this year.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) announced last week that it had reached an $11 billion settlement on about 85% of claims tied to wildfires across Northern California in 2017 and 2018.

Bankruptcy-immersed Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) last week committed to a five-year program undergrounding its distribution electricity system in Paradise, CA, and establishing a $105 million housing fund for victims of the state’s severe wildfires in 2017 and 2018.

Southern California Edison Co. (SCE) on Thursday asked FERC to raise the authorized return on its transmission operations as a hedge against the Edison International (EIX) utility’s “extraordinary wildfire risk.”

Credit rating agencies are keeping an eye on California’s utilities because of the financial issues associated with wildfires, with some noting there’s a chance that the state may have no major private-sector electricity provider with an investment-grade credit rating by year’s end.

A federal district judge supervising Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s (PG&E) five-year probation for earlier criminal convictions has concluded that the utility’s faulty equipment is tied to almost all of the Northern California wildfires in the past two years, including the Camp Fire last year.