|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
PG&E, one of the nation’s largest utility companies, presented challenges for the future and sought solutions at their Innovation Summit held Tuesday in San Ramon.
This was the first Innovation Summit in the company’s history. About 300 representatives of startups, government agencies and private industries attended the event at the Roundhouse Conference Center, with over 1,000 tuning in via Zoom.
“In the typical utility structure, people are so closed about what our problems are,” said Quinn Nakayama, PG&E’s director of grid research. “We are taking the opposite approach, because we think that by showing the world and industry, ‘here are the things that we’re looking to partner with,’ the industry will then respond and say, ‘I have a solution for these problems,’ and that’s so much more effective.”
Nakayama said that the company plans to hold the event every other year so that their efforts are not being duplicated.
“This is something that has been a long time coming in PG&E history. We first had to make sure that we dealt with fires. And then we had to make sure that we came out of bankruptcy,” said Nakayama. “Now that we’ve had a lot of innovation, and a lot of controls being put into place to manage wildfire-related risks, we can take a step back and say what are the other areas of the energy ecosystem that we should really be focusing on?”
A panel was held related to PG&E’s goal of moving 10,000 miles of overhead wires underground in order to reduce the risk of wildfires. The company said that in 2021 and 2022, 250 miles of wires were installed underground and it plans to add an additional 350 miles this year. Matt Pender and Trevor Fulks, who both work on the undergrounding project for PG&E, highlighted the challenges the company faces.
The company already has 30,000 miles of underground wires in its network, mostly in suburban or urban areas. Many of the wires the company plans to move underground are in rural areas with spotty cell service and difficult or uneven terrain that makes traditional tools and equipment unusable.
“We are trying to underground 10-20-mile segments of circuits. That’s a big project, it takes a long time,” said Pender. “It has big impacts for those communities based on road closures and things like that.”
Currently, the company has a default minimum depth of 30 inches, but the company is looking for ways to reduce the depth needed to protect the wires, displacing less soil and generating less waste. Occasionally, natural obstacles like creeks can require wires to be placed up to 70 feet underground. Fulks said that sometimes working with various counties leads to difficulties, including in one case where a county that Fulks left unnamed did not have a detailed map of their water lines, leaving PG&E to find and map them.
“I think it’s very humble of them to even hold a summit like this, instead of thinking they can figure it all out themselves,” said James Wingate, executive director of Underground Service Alert of Northern California and Nevada, more commonly known as 811.
Wingate said he is happy with the progress PG&E has made in their undergrounding effort but acknowledges the project will be a challenge.
“It’s starting off slowly, but I think they’re figuring out what’s working and what’s not. So, I think that’s a good plan,” said Wingate. “There’s a reason why these lines weren’t underground in the first place, because it’s a lot more expensive than to do it overhead.”
PG&E, which has paid millions in fines in recent years related to its role in wildfires in California, held a panel on their efforts to reduce the destructive and often deadly fires. According to the company, their efforts reduced major ignitions on primary distribution lines by 68% in 2022 compared to the 2018-2020 three-year-average.
James Tuccillo, the manager of distribution and asset planning for PG&E, showed off advancements the company has made in wildfire monitoring technology as well as automatic shutoff systems, which cut power to lines within a tenth of a second of it coming in contact with branches or other fuel sources for wildfires.
Bill Clerico, who runs Convective Capital, a firm that invests in wildfire technology, said he thought the event was a step in the right direction for the utility company.
“I think it’s amazing to see the largest utility in the U.S. opening up their doors, airing their big problems and asking for help from the startup and innovation community,” said Clerico.
PG&E projects a massive increase in demand for electricity over the next decade, thanks in part to California’s decision to phase out combustion engine vehicles in favor of electric vehicles. State regulators last year passed a rule that will require 100% of new cars and light trucks sold in California to be zero-emission vehicles by 2035.
The company says that 1.2 million EV charging stations will be needed by 2030 to support the change. The company hopes to increase the number of bi-directional charging stations in use, which PG&E says will increase the capacity of the electrical grid by several thousand megawatts.
Currently, these bi-directional chargers are costly to install and can cost as much as 16 times as a traditional one-way charger. During a panel on the challenges of expanding the EV charging grid, PG&E employees discussed potential incentives for homeowners to install these chargers, including reduced rates and cash rebates to offset the costs of installation.
During a keynote presentation with PG&E CEO Patti Poppe, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, praised the utility company’s support of Tesla’s bidirectional Powerwall chargers.
“If customers do get caught in a wildfire, or for some reason electricity is down, then we need to cut off home power from the grid so it’s contained and the power will come out of the house. It’s actually important from a safety standpoint, and I appreciate your help in enabling that,” he said.
Musk also predicted a massive increase in demand for electricity in California as EVs become more common.
“The mitigation is that long-term most electricity will be generated with solar batteries,” Musk said. “Fortunately, we have the sun which is throwing off energy and it’s zero maintenance and it just shows up every day.”
PG&E will host a Pitch Fest in September, seeking solutions from startups and tech companies to the problems presented at the Innovation Summit.
