PG&E says judge’s wildfire safety plan would cost at least $75 billion, lead to huge rate hike

SACRAMENTO - Pacific Gas and Electric Co. on Wednesday blasted a federal judge’s plan for wildfire safety as unrealistic, saying his proposal for the utility to inspect every inch of its electrical grid and remove dangerous trees would cost $75 billion to $150 billion and lead to staggering rate hikes.

The embattled California utility, which plans to file for bankruptcy because of wildfire claims, said it “does not have the ability to raise those funds” and would have to turn to ratepayers for more money. At the low end, a $75 billion increase in costs would generate a rate hike “of more than five times current rates in typical utility bills,” the company said in a filing in U.S. District Court.

The company has already asked state regulators for a $1 billion rate increase, in part to fund a more modest safety effort that it says is better suited for reducing California’s considerable wildfire risks than the judge’s plan.

“The proposal is not feasible,” the company said of the judge’s plan, adding that it would be impossible to recruit the huge army of tree trimmers needed to comply with the order before the June fire season begins.

It also said the plan amounts to a judicial over-reach that would “impermissibly intrude” on federal and state regulation of PG&E, including the state Public Utilities Commission.

PG&E’s filing marks the latest twist in the company’s run-up to Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which doesn’t begin until Tuesday but has already created enormous headaches for regulators and new Gov. Gavin Newsom. The bankruptcy raises the prospect that wildfire survivors won’t get paid in full for their damages.

Judge William Alsup, who oversees the criminal case against PG&E over the San Bruno pipeline explosion, on Jan. 9 proposed a stringent safety program designed to “reduce to zero” the number of wildfires caused by PG&E’s equipment this year. That included forcing PG&E to re-inspect its entire electrical grid, a stretch covering 100,000 miles of power lines, as well as trim or remove any tree that “could fall onto its power lines,” all before the start of the fire season in June.

Alsup also said he might require PG&E to impose deliberate blackouts during high winds or other dangerous conditions. That’s something the company already began doing last fall, when it cut power to 59,000 homes for two days in October, but it warned that Alsup is going overboard in his blackout plan.

“De-energizing power lines is a tool of last resort because it presents significant public safety risks,” the company said. Also, because PG&E’s transmission lines are part of a multistate grid, the judge’s order could lead to blackouts in “large parts of the Western United States and Canada,” the filing said.

The company also said Alsup’s tree-trimming program would force the removal of at least 100 million trees, which it called an enormous mistake. “Clear-cutting on such a drastic scale would have significant environmental consequences, including reducing watershed protection and increasing runoff, erosion and flooding,” PG&E’s lawyers wrote.

A watchdog group for ratepayers criticized PG&E’s response, saying the utility is acting in bad faith and should have taken the opportunity to explain to the judge and the public in detail what it is doing to reduce fire risk.

Critic Mark Toney, head of the Utility Reform Network, said he remains unconvinced that PG&E needs to file for bankruptcy. “What they have failed to do is to present a plan that shows their willingness to do as much as possible to follow the judge’s recommendations to reduce the wildfire risk,” Toney said. “That really doesn’t give the public a lot of confidence.”

Alsup is supervising the utility’s probation term imposed in 2017 after PG&E was convicted of felony charges in connection with the 2010 natural gas pipeline disaster in San Bruno. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has blamed PG&E equipment for a dozen of the 2017 North Bay wildfires. Those fires killed 24 people and destroyed more than 5,300 homes in Sonoma County, though Cal Fire is still investigating the cause of the Tubbs fire, at the time the most destructive blaze in state history. The agency also is investigating whether a faulty transmission tower was the cause of the November Camp fire, which killed 86 people and destroyed the town of Paradise in Butte County.

The judge is trying to determine whether the wildfires represent a violation of the probation terms. PG&E said, in effect, the judge should stand aside.

“The path forward to mitigating wildfire risk is best designed not through probation conditions, but rather through careful coordination with state and federal regulators, after appropriate consultation with other interested parties, based on the best science and engineering advice, with policy analysis that accounts for the full range of important but often conflicting social goals,” the company wrote.

Federal prosecutors seemed to side with PG&E. In a separate filing Wednesday, they said the judge should defer to the court-ordered monitor who has been overseeing the utility’s safety efforts since 2017. The monitor, a Chicago lawyer named Mark Filip, said in a court filing in early January that he is continuing his efforts “to push and drive PG&E to become a safer organization.”

The Public Utilities Commission, the primary regulator of PG&E, is expected to weigh in on the judge’s plan by Friday.