Screenshot from Tuesday’s meeting.
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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.
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