With California now firmly in the grip of wildfire season – as much as there is any single season for it any longer – San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) this week touted years-long work to decrease wildfire risk in the southern portion of the state, through a mix of infrastructure changes and education.
While encouraging customers to prepare for possible wildfires and Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) during the Santa Ana wind season, which runs from September to December, SDG&E also highlighted its work on microgrid deployment, line undergrounding, line hardening, and deployment of new technologies to limit the size and scope of outages.
“Just one wildfire could significantly impact the health and safety of our customers, which is why our team works so hard to strengthen our electrical grid to help reduce the risk of wildfires and the impacts of Public Safety Power Shutoffs in our high fire-threat areas,” SDG&E CEO Caroline Winn said. “This work also benefits our entire region in that it helps to defend against other extreme weather conditions as we build a smart energy grid of the future that can support the clean energy transition.”
In the past two years, the company has successfully undergrounded more than 70 miles of what it dubbed its riskiest overhead infrastructure and plans to underground nearly 50 miles of lines this year alone. At the same time, the deployment of sectionalizing devices onto lines has picked up pace, which could reduce the impacts of necessary PSPS by isolating faults. In general, more than 430 miles of overhead power lines have also been replaced with steel poles.
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