|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Tensions were high during Monday evening’s PG&E informational session where dozens of residents gathered inside the Pleasanton Senior Center to voice their frustrations over the years of unplanned power outages.
Power outages have been a hot-button issue around town for quite some time, with many people saying they have experienced multiple outages every month — particularly during the hot summer months.
The Pleasanton City Council previously discussed these outages during an October 2024 council meeting where Jake Zigelman, the vice president of the Bay Area region at PG&E, explained some of the reasons behind the outages and what the company was doing to address the issues in Pleasanton.
Zigelman was also present at Monday’s event and said, in addition to infrastructure and maintenance issues that he brought up last year, one of the main reasons residents have been seeing more power outages, particularly over the last three to four years, is the installation of Enhance Powerline Safety Settings (EPSS).
PG&E installed these safety settings on powerlines in and near high fire risk areas to help prevent wildfires — if a hazard is detected on a powerline, the settings shut off the power quickly in order to prevent ignitions that may cause wildfires.
But Zigelman said what has happened in Pleasanton is that certain residents have been caught up in some of those outages, even if they are not located in that high fire risk area.
Zigelman noted that overall though, when looking at the total metrics for Pleasanton, outage minutes have decreased from last year to this year.
According to one of the informational displays at the event, in just one of the power grids in the Vineyard area, the number of outages has reduced from 24 last year to 16 this year.
While some residents at the meeting appreciated the numbers being displayed, others were left skeptical about the work PG&E is doing to address these outages.
Karen Hallett, a Pleasanton resident who lives in the Mission Hills Park neighborhood, was among the residents displeased with how the event was set up because she was expecting more of a town hall where people from PG&E would present and then take questions from the audience.Â
“The set up is bad, very bad … all of these people are trying to have their voices heard and they’re not,” Hallett said.
Phyllis Couper, a resident of the Happy Valley neighborhood, said she has experienced up to three to five outages a month and was also hoping to speak with some of the decision-makers for PG&E to express to them just how impactful these outages are to residents like her who, at one point, experienced an outage for up to four days.Â
She said that as a retired senior on a fixed income, she isn’t able to afford throwing away food in her fridge after every single outage.
“PG&E just doesn’t … understand the problems they’re causing to individuals,” she said. “They’re not big problems to many of these guys who manage the towers but they’re big problems to us.”
Couper also expected a different type of meeting format and was disappointed that employees kept answering the same questions throughout the night but couldn’t answer specific questions that she had regarding her bill.
“An event like this is not necessarily going to change their outage history. It’s not meant to do that,” Zigelman said. “It’s meant to explain the facts to them and be here, have a listening ear and show them that we do care, we are listening, we are taking this seriously and that we have a plan that is going to improve things.”
Pleasanton Mayor Jack Balch was one of the few elected officials, along with Councilmember Julie Testa, who were engaging with residents at the meeting.
Balch said he understands there is a high level of frustration coming from residents who constantly experience these power outages and that the point of Monday’s event was to hear from as many people as possible; however, he said that town halls can sometimes become unruly, which the city wanted to avoid for the session.
Balch also said he believes there has been improvement on PG&E’s part over the past year to address power outage concerns, it just hasn’t “yielded the results yet that people may be expecting”.
As an example, he referenced PG&E’s replacement of 3,700 feet of cable and the installment of an EPSS protection device as one of the projects they’ve done to address the ongoing issues. However, he acknowledged there are still more important projects in the pipeline.
Zigelman mentioned that the company is planning to break up the power grid into smaller chunks so that the safety settings only serve customers who are in those high-fire threat areas and leave others in the city who are not in those areas out of those outages.
“The goal here is to protect all of the customers who are most at risk from a wildfire perspective but remove everyone who is not and make sure their reliability is as good as it can be,” Zigelman said.
State Sen. Jerry McNerney, who represents parts of the Tri-Valley, also attended the event both as an elected official and as a Pleasanton resident who has experienced numerous power outages and wanted to voice his concerns as a PG&E customer.
One of the many points McNerney made during his comments was that the power company’s past deferred maintenance should have been addressed earlier in order to mitigate some of the infrastructure issues.
But even while being critical of the company, McNerney also said he’s aware that PG&E is working to invest in future projects to improve overall reliability.
“It’s in their interest to do that because they are very unpopular as a corporation and (it’s) not in their best interest to be that unpopular,” McNerney said.
