Assembly Standing Committee on Utilities and Energy

Good afternoon. Good afternoon and welcome. I am calling to order this hearing of the Assembly Committee on Utilities and Energy. We're here today for an oversight hearing to discuss utility wildfire preparedness and response. Before we begin, I have a couple of housekeeping items to go over. First, as is customary, we will not accept disruptive behavior.

We will apply all of the Assembly rules in order to maintain order and run a fair hearing. Second, public comment, as always, is welcome. We'll have an opportunity at the end of today's hearing for public comment in person, in the room, and for folks who are not in person and listening at home.

You can also provide public comment on the Committee's website. So with that, let's go ahead and turn to the topic at hand. On January 6th. Hard to believe just a little over a month ago, severe weather warnings went out all across Southern California.

Public safety power shutoffs began in many communities and and emergency response resources were pre positioned all across the southern part of our state. Despite these precautions, as we now all know, devastating wildfires began to rage all across Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles fires would grow to be the most destructive and the most costly natural disaster in our country's history.

I do want to take a moment to thank all of the first responders and essential public safety partners who worked long hours over many days and weeks to minimize the damage, protect our residents and do everything that they could to keep our community safe.

And also just want to note that our hearts go out to these communities, to our friends and our neighbors.

I live in Orange County, so thank near Los Angeles and as we watched those fire rage, as we were receiving warnings in our own communities, I think all of us know that but for the grace of God, it could have been any of us.

So as we work together to help the region rebuild and recover, we also want to make sure that we take an opportunity to reflect on the lessons that we've learned. This is certainly not the first catastrophic wildfire in our state's history, nor will it be the last.

In fact, as I was just sharing with my Committee staff, the insurance Commissioner just briefed our caucus and noted that in the time since he's taken office, which coincides with when I was elected in 2019, we've had 115 catastrophic wildfires across the State of California.

So the bottom line is that we have got to get smarter and we've got to get better at exercising our emergency response muscle. We know that this is a terrible part of the reality of California in 2025. So in today's hearing. There's a couple of specific things that I really want to dig into.

I think are top of mind questions for many Members. So number one, what more can be done to prevent future disasters? And number two, in the next emergency, how can we, and specifically utilities, improve their communication, their coordination and their collective emergency response?

We are pleased to be welcoming at some point my colleague, Assembly Member Ransom, who is the Chair of our Emergency Management Committee. She'll go ahead and provide some opening remarks when she joins us. But before we welcome our panelists to the dais, does anyone want to provide any opening comments? Okay.

Our Assembly Member Harabedian, who represents a number of the impacted communities.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

And I would just like to say to the first responders as well, thank you for the heroic efforts on behalf of my district, Altadena, where the Eaton fire was, and also numerous representatives here from various agencies and organizations, including Southern California Edison, the gas company, many of whom were in constant contact with us during this time and who have had crews, literally thousands of people in our district working around the clock on these issues and getting the systems back in order, helping our victims.

And I just want to say thank you for everything that has been done, all the efforts from both Southern California Edison and the gas company. And obviously this is going to be a long road. There's a lot of work.

And I appreciate the open conversation and the feedback that you've been receiving from us and our constituents, but also the feedback that we've been receiving from you. So I just wanted to say that to kick this off and I appreciate you guys being here and I appreciate the time.

Thank you, Assemblymember. All right, so with that, we'll go ahead and welcome our panelists up to the dais.

We are going to be joined today by Rachel Peterson, the Executive Director at the California Public Utilities Commission, as well as Lee Palmer from the CPUC, Rajdeep Roy, the Vice President of transmission substation and Operations from Southern California Edison, Tom Porter, the Director of Emergency Management from San Diego Gas and Electric, and Jason Rondou, who is the Assistant General Manager of Power Planning and Operations from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

So with that, thank you so much for joining us today. Welcome. And Ms. Peterson, I believe we will begin with you.

Good afternoon. Chair Petrie Norris and honorable Members of the Committee, thank you very much for the opportunity to be here this afternoon and brief you on the CPUC's oversight of electric utility wildfire preparedness and response. Is that better?

Yeah, maybe bring it a little closer and let's make sure that those are working.

Yeah. Is it on? I'm not positive that it's on. All good. Okay. As you said, I'm Rachel Peterson. I'm the Executive Director of the California Public Utilities Commission and I'm joined today by Lee Palmer, who's the Director of our Safety and Enforcement Division. We do have a slide deck that we prepared for today.

We'll be walking through it and we also meant it as a leap behind for you. And as you noted, we will be talking about events that occurred in January, including the public safety power shutoffs. We will do our very best to answer your questions.

There might be questions that touch on open investigations, in which case we'll have to answer to the best of our ability, but also let you know that there are certain things we can't speak about. If I could go to the next slide, please.

So the CPUC's overall mission is to regulate safe, reliable utility services at reasonable rates for Californians. As part of that mission, we do oversee electric utilities to ensure that they are mitigating wildfire risk. They're prepared and they respond appropriately. And on this slide, we showed one view into the work that we do in this area.

We broke it into three broad buckets. We set policy and rules to ensure that utilities know what the criteria are that they're meant to meet. We monitor their preparedness and their response.

And then we conduct investigations and enforcement in order to understand and investigate and enforce if a violation of our safety rules has occurred today, we'll be probably spending the most time on the center bubble in the middle.

We did just publish our annual report for all of the work that the CPUC did in 2024 across our regulatory portfolio. We put a link in the deck in case anyone would like to take a look at that. Next slide, please.

So California and the CPUC have a robust framework that aims to mitigate the risk and reduce the risk of utility ignited wildfires. And for today's hearing, we wanted to show you a portion of that framework with a focus on public safety power shutoffs.

I want to note that your background paper is very well written and well researched and points out a lot of the tensions and present day experiences and practices of public safety power shut offs. It's a really good resource. California requires utilities to prepare wildfire mitigation plans. In those plans they are required to. It's exciting. Thank you.

I'll take it whenever it comes. So the plans are the utilities vehicle for demonstrating how they are looking at over the long term the measures that they need to take in order to reduce that risk of catastrophic wildfire. They are reviewed by the Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety and if approved, they are then ratified by the Commission.

Within the wildfire mitigation plans is the strategy of public safety power shutoffs. And, and this is what Director Palmer will spend some time on. That is the safe execution of proactively shutting off power as a last resort tool in order to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire.

And then once, if a PSPS event occurs, and if wildfires occur, we do have an entire investigation and enforcement team to follow up on this framework and see how the utilities performed. And with that, I'll turn to Director Palmer to go into more detail on the shutoffs.

Good afternoon, Chair Petrie and honorable Members of the Committee. I'm Lee Palmer. I'm the Director of the Safety and Enforcement Division within the CPUC. Thank you. The core framework of the. Excuse me. Next slide.

Next slide please. Thank you. The core framework of PSPS is that is it an operational decision by the electric utilities and it is a tool of last resort executed to reduce the risk of utility ignited wildfires.

PSPS events have a public safety, have public safety implications and our oversight of utilities takes into account these numerous public safety considerations. The Safety and Enforcement Division coordinates and closely monitors electric utility operations during PSPS events, which I will describe more in detail shortly. Annually, each IOU submits a preseason and a post season report.

The preseason report serves to have electric IOU's demonstrate their preparedness for upcoming PSPS seasons and includes details about community resources and notification plans. The post season report serves to have the electric IOU's provide an overview of their PSPS performance for the previous season and details activities by circuit and customer impacts for the communities where PSPS was enacted.

Additionally, The CPSC requires IU's to conduct PSPs exercises, both tabletop and functional. For various events triggered when the utility decides it may de-energize. Also, the Electric IOU must file and serve annually its access and functional needs plan and quarterly updates, which include AFN customer statistics and participation data. Next slide please.

Because of the potential adverse consequences of PSPS events, the CPUC requires utilities to use PSPS only as a measure of last resort and establish guidelines for its implementation.

During PSPS events, SED is actively engaged with other state agencies to include Cal OES, CAL FIRE and other agencies that are impacted by it to include the IOU's conducting the PSPS event. SED Participates in daily state Executive calls with primary stakeholders and initiates its compliance oversight of the IOU during the event.

Prior to potential de-energization, the Electric IOU is required to perform a series of notifications to public safety partners, priority notification entities and in scope customers.

In accordance with CPUC decisions, the expectation is that every effort must be made by the Electric IOU to provide notice of potential de-energization as early as the IOU suspects and reasonably believes that a de-energization will occur. There is specific notification windows established to keep customers and safety partners informed when a de-energization is initiated, re-energization begins and re-energization is complete.

Notification of all affected customers is required. Medical baseline notifications require a positive notification which can include up to door knock to ensure that they have been notified. Next slide please.

Once a PSPS event has concluded, an Electric IOU has 10 days to file a post event report. SE reviews the post event report and party comments and issues unnecessary data requests as part of its compliance process. If violations are identified, a Notice of Violation is issued to the utility who will have 30 days to reply to the NOV, Notice of Violation.

SOD will review that NOV and determine if an enforcement action is based and pursue it. When we are looking at that information, we are considering the following information; the type and number of violations, the severity or gravity of the offense, the conduct of the utility, prior history of similar violations, financial resources of the utility, the totality of circumstances, and the role of precedent.

SED may elect to pursue a staff citation, request an administrative enforcement order, an administrative consent order, or may recommend an alternative course of action to the Commission. And on that chart you can see enforcement actions from 2019, 20 and 2021 and for a record for 2022 and 2023. All PSPS events have been issued notice of Violations and they are currently under review for the responses. Next slide please, pending your questions all.

Right, and what we're going to go ahead and do, Members, is hear from all of our panelists who will provide some brief opening comments and then we'll move to Member questions once we've heard from everyone. I think with that we will move to Mr. Roy.

Thank you Chairwoman Petrie-Norris and the honorable Members of the Committee. Thank you guys for including Southern California Edison to be part of this important discussion. My name is Raj Roy. I'm the Vice President of Transmission, Substation and Operations at SCE.

I'm also born and raised in Southern California and as mentioned earlier, the heartbreaking events that happened in early January also hit home with me. On behalf of SCE, our thoughts and prayers go out to everyone affected.

We are immensely grateful for our fire agencies, our first responders, everyone on the front lines that are working tirelessly to protect and restore our communities. I also want to thank my utility colleagues who have been working diligently to comb through the debris, make repairs and get power restored to the customers.

Even in the face of devastation, it's inspiring to witness how so many of us in this community from different groups, agencies and governing bodies come together to help those in need to overcome this crisis. This brings me to the week of January 6. Like the National Weather Service, our forecast also indicated this was going to be a very large wind event.

It ended up being the biggest, strongest we've seen since over a decade. Sustained winds of significant magnitude were seen across multiple counties and we also observed wind speeds up to 75 miles per hour with gusts reaching 100 mile per hour.

In the last two years SoCal benefited from wet winters. Although it was welcome to help with the drought period we had years prior, it also resulted with extra vegetation growth. Combining that with an abnormally dry winter gave conditions for potential wildfires.

Given the historic wildfire weather conditions that occurred, it led to SCE's largest public safety power shutoff event today Date. PSPS continues to be an essential tool for electric utilities in the Western United States to mitigate wildfire risk. We don't take the decision to de-energize customers lightly. We know how disruptive it can be.

Our current estimates for the January PSPS event is there was 747,000 customers that were in scope, and of those customers, 400,000 experienced at least one or more de-energizations. These PSPS outages themselves get most of the attention.

But what's also important to understand is how many situations when we patrol the lines afterwards, find situations that could have led to the next significant wildfire and they were prevented from these shutoffs. For example, vegetation in our lines.

To activate these PSPS events, we use internal and external forecasts to develop a list of circuits that could experience such wind speeds.

Once circuits are identified for a potential PSPS, SCE makes every attempt possible to notify public safety partners, officials and customers at approximately 72 hours, 48 hours, 24 hours, and even one to four hours before a potential de-energization.

During these PSPS events, we also try to support our customers through community resource centers in the areas most likely to experience these shutoffs.

These are locations where customers can meet with an actual SCE representative to get more information and more importantly, it provides an opportunity for us to receive some feedback to see how we can improve these events. And during January, we assisted over 14,000 customers in person at these resource centers.

After a PSPS event, as I mentioned earlier, every de-energized line has to be physically inspected by a line worker before it's re-energized to ensure it is safe. And what's important about that is sometimes it could take time depending on the situation. If we do find damage, we have to make repairs.

It may require daylight or helicopter to patrol, or whether onset of new weather conditions come in and we can't re-energize the line. What I can tell you though, in January we found over 50 instances of these items that could lead to an ignition.

However, what makes this event in January even more complex is the confluence of multiple situations. We were in a windstorm event, we had an active PSPS, and we also had active fires going through the service territory.

Therefore, some customers were de-energized under PSPS or were in scope for PSPS, but they were also on the same circuits that were potentially impacted by wildfires. This can lead to confusion with multiple notifications for different reasons.

To keep all those customers stay informed, we started providing daily updates about PSPS, as well as the storm to all customers. In parallel of executing these PSPS to keep our community safe, we also had to start preparing for the damage assessment from the windstorms and fires.

In areas impacted by the wildfires, we work closely with Federal, State and Local Officials to stay coordinated in those areas. As soon as we could gain safe access to each of these fire locations, we began to conduct damage assessment as soon as possible. We mobilized very quickly with about 3,500 personnel, our own crews, contract crews, as well as mutual assistance.

As of February 17th, our restoration work included over 600,000 power lines of conductor, which is about 122 miles. Over 1500 poles were set and over 500 transformers installed. And we're not just installing like for like, in areas where we can build back with more capacity to help enable more load growth for the bigger rebuild. We're doing that.

We're also exploring undergrounding in many places where it's feasible and that's not going to be everywhere. And it also has to coincide with what we're restoring today.

For more undergrounding, a lot more has to come together, including partnerships with with the utilities, the CPUC, as well as permitting agencies to move in an efficient manner so we can get the rebuild executed. I'd like to close with a few final comments with thoughts on the work ahead.

We follow protocols overseen by our regulators as established through Senate Bill 901, AB 1054 and subsequent CPUC rulings on wildfire mitigation. Since 2018, SCE has developed a comprehensive wildfire mitigation strategy to address the increased risk of wildfires in our communities.

There is always room to continuously improve, whether it's wildfire mitigation or PSPS execution, and that is one of the values we live by at our company, continuous improvement. We plan to take a hard look, like we do every year from all the lessons learned and continue to get better.

Wildfire risk, however, is going to increase due to climate change, and as this continues to increase, it is important we tackle this statewide risk comprehensively together as one team.

I know our utilities will do everything possible to continue to reduce the wildfire risk associated with our equipment, but complementing that with enforcing proper building fire code, investing in fire suppression, and developing defensible spaces for our communities is important. It's crucial that we continue to support one another and our community as we move forward.

Once again, thank you for having SCE here as part of this important discussion and look forward to answering any of your questions.

Thank you. We will now hear from our next speaker. Mr. Porter.

Thank you.

And thank you Chair Petrie-Norris and Honorable Members of this Committee for having us here today. Again, I'm Tom Porter. I'm the Director of Emergency management at SDG&E. And formerly I am the CAL FIRE Director. Previous to this job assignment I was the Director from 2019 or to 2021. Excuse me.

During the time when we had six of the seven largest and most damaging wildfires in California's history until today 2025. During, during this effort that we've been in as utilities to increase our collaboration and coordination and to do some of the things that SDG&E started more than 15 years ago. Now we work very closely.

All of the IOU's and utilities around the state meet regularly and share our experiences. We continue to learn from each other. We're learning often from the experiences of Southern California Edison. Now with multi peak events as we went through in January. And I want to bring us back to January after one moment of reflection.

2007 was our wake up in San Diego. And San Diego Gas and Electric had at the time the worst utility caused fire. Two lives were lost and thousands of homes. And in that experience coming out of that the determination of the company was to never again have this happen on our watch from our equipment.

And that continues to be daily what we work to and what we share our experience and hope that all of our utilities have that same record since that time. That said, we did see some of the worst conditions that we've seen in January way outside of the norm this year. And we broke records.

We have 215 weather stations. Of those 215 weather stations during the January events we broke 62 records, all time records in 15 years of data. And that's an extreme event. During that event we utilized some of the newer technology that we've employed to very granularly look at the weather.

We have a 200 weather model ensemble that averages 200 different weather models and gives us standard deviations and gives us a very clear idea of when and where those winds are likely to surface based on again that 15-17 in some cases, years worth of data.

And we also when it comes down to making the decision to de-energize we are watching 30 second reads. Weather stations typically read out on a 10 minute cycle. SDG&E has 30 second reads.

So we can very surgically make a decision on when and where we turn off power. And if that's going to be a peak, we might not have to turn off the power based on the AI that we're using on all of that data previously to determine if we have hit a peak or not.

That said, January pushed us we had over 77,000 customers in focus or in scope at the peak and our peak de-energization was over 20,000, which is the most we've had since 2020. And to the question of is it getting worse? Well, we had two years where we didn't have PSPS at all.

So worse, yes, 2025 so far is the worst year we've seen and we haven't gotten through it yet. Just north of us, Southern California Edison was seeing a lot more events that happened throughout the year than they just didn't surface in our area.

So I'm going to say yes, it is getting worse, but I don't know how much worse it's getting getting at this point in time. During the weather event, we had fires going in LA.

I'll call it the LA siege that was going typically that sucks up all the firefighting resources and was a situation that San Diego had to deal with in 2007 but also previous to that in 2003, which prompted a lot of changes and I have to thank our firefighters and our law enforcement for the quick response to numerous fires that were happening in San Diego, none of which became large and damaging because of those efforts during the wind event.

I'm not going to go into great depth in the notification because Director Palmer was very, very concise with that and we all are adhering to that and meeting those targets as we move through our notification processes. Staff report was wonderful, great depth and really brought me to my closing comments.

And while numerous breakages and different issues were found with our system from the wind damage that was occurring during that event, we were able to re-energize everybody within as short a period as we possibly could. And that is ultimately other than not having to shut the power off.

That is the most important thing to us is getting the power back on and in some cases only for 12 to 15 hours before we had to shut it off again.

But we need to get that power back on to, you know, cool, cool groceries, cool homes, warm homes in some cases during this past event. And to the PSPS as a last resort and a tool to only be used as that,

That is exactly the mantra and the words that were used when, when PSPS was developed. Even when San Diego Gas and Electric first developed PSPS under emergency power shut off as the name in 2009, that was the intent, last resort, and to not have to do it if we could do anything else to harden the system ahead of time.

And I reflect on that under the perspective that as state Director of CAL FIRE, one of the last things I remember saying walking out the door was every acre in California can and will burn someday. And we have to act that way. We have to do everything.

And it's the utilities as well as everybody else in the in the ecosystem of wildfire landscape. And I also have to say that SDG&E has embraced this since 2007 and has been working tirelessly to make sure that happens and sharing our experience with our with our partners. And I will leave it there.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Mr. Porter. Our last speaker, Mr. Rondou.

Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to share with the Committee. And thank you to Chair Petrie-Norris. Jason Rondou, Assistant General Manager of Power Planning and Operations at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. First, I'd like to express sympathies for all those folks that have been impacted.

I know many of you have been directly or indirectly impacted. Hundreds of our employees and our customers and our neighbors have been obviously very impacted. Our primary goal is to provide reliable and affordable power and in a manner that's safe to our customers and to our employees.

Many of you know this, but for those who don't, about 22 square miles is the Pacific Palisades area. And by scale, that's about the size of Manhattan. So the rebuilding effort that's in front of us is, you know, gargantuan. And this is going to be a very long and challenging recovery and rebuilding process.

I'd like to cover what LADWP did to prepare and to respond to the emergency and what we're going to be doing going forward to actually rebuild. Before I do, I'd like to note that no investigative authority has indicated that LADWP's equipment was the source of the ignition. And there's no lawsuits alleging that as well.

Preparations, so LADWP has been proactive in wildfire management for many years and that's evolved into more recently our Wildfire Mitigation Plan that includes vegetation management, but as I'll talk about in a moment, does not include power safety shutoffs. In conformance with Senate Bill 901, LADWP began releasing its annual Wildfire Mitigation Plan in 2019.

We're actually in the process of updating that this year and we'll release an updated Wildfire Mitigation Plan in mid year. We worked with CAL FIRE and the CPUC for two years to develop the Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 high fire threat map.

And that was in conjunction with Los Angeles very high fire hazard severity zones for LA fire department. We also have a Transmission Vegetation Management Program as well as a Line Clearance Tree Trimming program that results in us clearing approximately 362 trees and pruning about 185 trees per year. So it's a pretty significant effort for Los Angeles.

So leading up to the January 6 notification of the weather event, we began fully implementing and adhering to our Wildfire Mitigation Plan. What that means is we block automatic reclosers in our Tier 3 high fire threats.

What that means is for our power lines, if there is an incident that is detected, instead of automatically reclosing to maintain reliability, they stay open, they stay de-energized with the anticipation that there's potentially debris or something that might have caused it. And so that mitigates the risk of reignition or ignition in the first place.

We also have the elective discretion in our Tier 2 areas to identify areas where we might also want to block automatic reclosures. So it's different from the investor owned utilities approach of power safety shutoffs.

A lot of that is driven by our service territory. About 90% of our service territory and our assets, our electric assets, our transmission, our distribution is tier 2 or tier 1. So less than 10% is tier 3. Our service territory is about 99% tier 2 or tier 1.

But as we know from the events this last month, we live in a very different world than we lived in when our wildfire mitigation plans across the state were developed. We also paused all non essential maintenance work for all of our crews. Leading up to this event, we had over 100 crews on standby.

So all of our internal crews, all of our contract crews were on standby. On that Monday, the peak of our response included 150 crews that were from contractors, from LADWP, crews from Mutual Aid. We had PG&E support. We also had support from the Navajo Nation who drove out several days to support our crews.

The peak customer outages, if you add up all of the customers that were impacted by the wind or the fires over the course of the several weeks, the total outages was 400,000 customers. By comparison, we have 1.6 million customers in our service territory, so a big portion of our service territory was impacted.

The peak of that was 160,000, so about 10% of our service territory was out at the peak during the storms. Within about a week, all of the areas that were impacted by the storm from the wind were restored.

So we had a huge response and got all the customers that were impacted by the wind back within about a week. We had folks working seven days a week and we had all of the power to the remaining structures in the Palisades area back on power, nearly all by early last week.

What that entailed is us putting in, replacing about 30 miles of transmission conductors and replacing or installing temporary poles, about 500 temporary poles as well. What we did in the days following the fire is we stood up our unified response and recovery center.

And so that is a Center for all of our operations to rebuild and recover in the Palisades area.

And our vision for that is by the beginning of next month, for every permitting agency, every agency that has a hand in the rebuilding effort, to be a one stop shop for that community out there as well. We plan to underground where we can, as much as we can in the Palisades area.

Obviously there's a cost associated with that, but there's an opportunity where we do have significant damage to our distribution system. An opportunity if we're going to rebuild it, to rebuild it in a way that is hardened as much as possible.

We're also looking at a higher voltage in that area to support electrification for those that are rebuilding to support and encourage that as well. We're currently analyzing our wildfire plan. So what that will do is it'll incorporate all of our lessons learned, the best in class industry technology. We'll relook at our approach to blocking reclosers.

Everything that we do. In light of the new reality that we have, which is the worst wildfire in the city's history, that happened in January, we're obviously going to update that with this new reality in place. But we also do need to look at things like expanding our customer programs.

We would like to continue to incentivize building electrification, particularly in areas that are going to be rebuilt. And that's what's sort of driving our approach to an increased level of distribution voltage.

And as we face the impacts of climate change and build climate resilience, we welcome a review of all the building codes that would go into effect for future updates across the state and at the local level.

To wrap up, I want to mention that immediately after the fires, our CEO initiated a third party review to report back on all the actions taken during the incident, to gather all the lessons learned, what went right, what we could do better in light of the new climate reality.

That independent investigation will help provide guidance to the Department on what worked and what can be improved moving forward. We've asked for a preliminary report as soon as in as soon as 30 days and the final report within about 180 days.

Again, I'd like to thank the Committee for the opportunity to share this and look forward to answering questions.

Thank you. We'll go ahead and open it up now for comments and questions from Members. We'll begin with Assemblymember Irwin, who represents the impacted communities. Thank you.

Thank you. Chair Petrie-Norris. And it's good to have everybody here. Of course, I am sort of focusing on Edison because that is most of my area, except for the part that's covered by DWP. This, with the 42nd district, the district I'm in, it is an extremely. Was an extremely complicated situation there. It's a very large area.

Two sides of the Santa Monica Mountains, winds that were blowing through Thousand Oaks, Simi, Agoura at 60 miles an hour, close to zero humidity, and then a fire in the Palisades. No fire in a good portion of Malibu, but they were obviously very much at risk.

So I was getting really two calls, people that were worried about evacuation and people that were concerned about Edison and the PSPS's and not quite understanding potentially the danger of re-energizing. So this was the biggest issue that we were hearing from our local elected officials. And it's basically there was not good enough communication.

They were calling me and they should have had more direct line to Edison.

And it's issues from Calabasas not knowing when the, when they could send kids back to school after four days of missing. Parts of Thousand Oaks that were off for four or five days didn't turn on. City hall that at one point had a bifurcated circuit where they were able to stay on. And this time that was.

That did not. That didn't happen. So a lot of frustration from the city from small businesses, lights that had backup generators, but they ran out after a few days. And then you had the car crashes that came after that. But I would never call up my utility as an elected official and say turn on the lights.

I would never take that type of liability. I assume you are looking at it very carefully when it's appropriate. But I do think that there could have been much better communication and much better transparency. I see in the background, basically, it's PSPS's are meant to be a stopgap until utilities harden their systems.

And it would make a huge difference if residents knew which of the circuits they were on. We looked everywhere to try to find the circuits that people were on. And why it was turning off. Hey, these lines are going through open space and right now the winds are at 60 miles an hour.

So that's why you're de-energized. There were long periods of time, maybe 12 hours, 15 hours straight, where there was no wind and people were calling, why can't it be, why can't the electricity be turned on for a little while to kind of cool things down?

We're in a very, we are in a very difficult time in my area. But I really do appreciate that San Diego Gas and Electric is so far ahead of the curve because they had their fire, I mean, their big fire, 15 years earlier. And I really hope that we get there at a certain point.

But for us, we really need to make sure that folks understand why this is happening because it affects them very negatively. You know, people that are on medical devices, people that have, you know, lose all the food in their refrigerator.

But if they know, hey, this line is going to be underground, that's on your circuit in five years and then you won't have this issue anymore. Maybe at that point they'll decide to get a generator or, you know, battery backup. So it's a complicated situation. I'm sure you have heard plenty of elected officials yelling at you.

I mean, I understand, I understand the situation, but when I was talking to the woman from a woman from PG&E, she said once the communication improved, their complaints went down by 40%.

And so I would say in the, in the aftermath of, of this, the After Action Report, how could you do better communicating and how can you be more transparent, so folks really understand what's going on. And I think that would bring the temperature way down.

And so I don't, I might want to comment on, I don't know if there's anything like that you might be able to add to that.

No, I appreciate the thoughtful comments you provided and I couldn't agree more. I think communication is something that is part of our After Action Report and I think hearing you loud and clear, can we give more information about why you're out and then plans for grid hardening going in the future?

Couple thoughts on that is that's something we're definitely going to look, you know, at all communities that are getting impacted by PSPS. We will harden infrastructure if it's not already hardened. But one thing to keep in mind, undergrounding may not be feasible in every location. So as you mentioned, there's so many.

Two different canyons, two different sides of the mountains. We'll have to look at each circuit. We will do everything possible to harden, elevate and reduce the impact of public safety. Power shut offs. But there may be times where you can't actually eliminate it.

But giving that communication and hopefully it's only used for extreme events like you were talking about, so the impact becomes less and less. The other thing is a lot of times, you know, every day we're communicating with fire agencies and so there's PSPS combined with active fire near your area.

Not knowing which directions the fire agencies are coming from. We have incident management teams constantly coordinating. So sometimes power can't come back on. It's not directly related to PSPS. That's also something I think we should be communicating to your point, so people kind of understand how we're all coordinating with different agencies. So I appreciate the feedback.

We definitely have many programs for backup generation for critical care, medical baseline customers. But communication is an important one. And I think, like you said, I appreciate the staff from PG&E improving communication, giving more information and even future plans to the extent possible.

If an area is just never in the plans to be undergrounded or the lines coded, I mean, maybe people need to be told that they have to get battery backup. I know with the medical necessity, yes, they have to get the generation.

But maybe we need to be honest that it's not going to take three or four or five years. It's never going to happen. They might always have PSPS's and make sure to plan accordingly. So I did have for DWP, just one clarification. So you have no lines that are undergrounded currently?

Oh no, we have a significant amount of lines that are undergrounded. Now the Palisades area is a mix of underground and overhead.

Now for the areas that are overhead in the Palisades area that are severely damaged that we're in the process of, we've got a significant amount of temporary power that's been built out to restore power to the customers where structures remain. The power is fed to areas that were not damaged by the fire.

But the distribution lines will sometimes travel through the area that was damaged. So for those areas, those have been temporarily restored. Now we have the opportunity for areas that have been severely damaged for overhead lines to underground them.

Normally the sort of cost benefit approach to undergrounding versus keeping something overhead is, you know, the traditional calculus for utilities to make that decision doesn't apply here because we have severely damaged infrastructure. So if we're going to rebuild it, we want to look at as a primary opportunity to underground where it's not already undergrounded.

And that's the same with Edison, right, on PCH? And I do have to compliment both. I mean, that PCH was a total disaster and it was cleaned up very quickly by your crews.

And so I have to give them kudos for that because I drove the first few days, there were poles all over the place, and they very quickly got electric going to where it needed to be. S, and hopefully undergrounding along PCH would be eah, would be great in that area.

Yeah. Thank you. Pass it on to the crews.

Thank you. And we're pleased to be joined by Assemblymember Ransom, who is the chair of our Emergency Management Committee. Assembly Member.

Thank you. I want to start by thanking our chair for inviting me to participate in this. And I definitely think we should take a moment to offer condolences to the victims of this most recent fire in Eaton and Palisades.

Our goal for the Emergency Management Committee, and clearly everyone's goal, is to ensure that we kind of have an understanding of what happened and that we are putting preventative efforts forward as we move forward. And unfortunately, utility equipment has been the source of some of the most deadly wildfires.

And so we want to do all that we can and hear from you so that we can clearly work together to reduce the wildfires.

And so focusing on utilities, we have, I kind of have some questions. And I'll try to, like, not bombard you with them all at one time, but as we look at prevention and kind of look at what happened, and I'm hearing about the systems, the PSPS system, the ability to shut off power. I'm wondering if you can clarify.

A few days after the fires took place, a delegation of us went down there, and as we were there, the crews were out shutting off gas. So they were doing it while we were there. It's my understanding that the system works for both electric and gas. The ability to shut it off is there.

What is the gap in your ability to remotely shut off the gas and electric from, you know, remotely.

How about I'll jump in. I'm the. I'm the only one that's gas and electric, and I'm emergency management, so I don't control either one of those switching types of mechanisms. On the electric side, we're very automated. On the gas side, and I'm not speaking for Southern California or SoCal Gas, but SDG&E, it's very manual.

There are some places where we can automatically switch gas in the bigger picture, but when it comes down to that at the house kind of location, generally that's done by crews.

Okay, so is there the ability or is there anywhere in our state where we do have a better ability to cut the gas off remotely the same way we would cut off electric, or does is it need to be manual?

And I am going to have to say I don't know the answer to that question, but we can, we can, we can come back to you with that answer.

Okay, so if there were the ability to shut it off remotely, would that have been helpful during these fires to potentially prevent. I know you don't have a crystal ball retroactively, but would that have been helpful to have the ability to shut off the gas remotely as well?

I'm going to speak briefly from my previous experience. This is not my SDG&E experience, but gas systems are not a problem during wildfire. They can continue to burn, but they continue to burn in a localized space. That's not something that wildland firefighters are overly concerned with. Now, conflagration is a different space and a different place.

And first responders need the gas turned off as quickly as possible to safely continue to do their work within communities once that has happened. But it's not a spreader of wildfire.

Thank you, that's helpful. Can you share with us how the utilities interact with Cal OES and CAL FIRE and local public agencies when considering the proactive power shutoff?

Anyone want to jump in? I would defer to the investor owned utilities that participate in power safety shut offs.

Thank you.

Sure. And again, Thom Porter from San Diego Gas and Electric, the way we. So, Director Palmer went through the kind of the notification process. In that first notification that we put out 72 hours ahead of an event that we can see coming, we are notifying our Public Safety Partners.

So gas, I mean, sorry, utilities as well as Cal OES, our local OES at the county level, fire, police, all the, all the responders. So Everybody gets a 72 hour notice and then they get all of the notifications as we get closer to the event as well.

And, and we have meetings to discuss and then also on a State Executive briefing that occurs daily once we've entered into that notification protocols.

So everyone's involved with the process. Yes. Okay. Thank you for that.

If I could, if you don't mind, if I could add to what Mr. Porter said. So everything he mentioned, we do. And one thing that I can speak for, at least for Southern California Edison, we send up what we call Incident Command Structure, which is based on the NIMS National Incident Management Team.

And so we have constant communication with our agencies, in addition to the notifications that we provide to everyone. And so when we're having a crisis like we're having here, we have our fire management personnel from SCE embedded with the fire management IMT structure and different.

So we're always constantly communicating and coordinating with each other to make sure that we're not stepping on each other's toe. And we're able to help as we're doing proactive shutoffs, but we're also responding to what they're seeing in the front lines from their respective agencies.

Okay, thank you for that. Just bear with me a little bit longer. Is there, can someone expand on media reports of the possibility of old unused power lines perhaps, you know, being involved in. And I think just to back up a little bit, what I'm looking to know is the inactive or decommissioned lines near active towers. How does that come into play in situations like this, and can we expand on that particular situation?

I think while folks are kind of thinking about their response to that, maybe I can share. I mentioned this at the beginning of my remarks, but at this time there's no investigative agency that believes that LADP was responsible or involved with ignition source of the Palisades fire. We, like many utilities, have aging infrastructure.

We've got a $1.6 billion annual program to replace and upgrade our infrastructure. And what I would imagine is part of the lessons learned from this. I mentioned earlier that 90% of our service territory is Tier 2 or Tier 1.

And I think we have as an organization historically taken a lot of pride in the fact that we don't participate in or we don't need to do power safety shutoffs like many of the utilities that have higher risk exposure have to do.

But I think we also have the humility to know that we live in a different world today than we did in December.

So we what I do think will come from this is potentially a reprioritization of where those $1.6 billion get spent every year in an in a way that doesn't just focus on reliability, but also focuses on or refocuses on safety risks that we previously maybe didn't realize that we had and now realize that we do have.

Beyond that, I would defer to the rest of the folks at the table.

To expand on that and I can offer a little bit. Assembly Member so first, unfortunately, what I can offer is that there are open investigations and so we can't comment very much. We have had past enforcement investigations and resulting enforcement actions come stem from the role of abandoned power lines in a fire.

And Director Palmer was the lead on enforcing the Kincaid fire. And that's an example of where abandoned power lines did play a role. And so perhaps he can comment a little bit on that, knowing that every single situation is highly fact specific. So by speaking about that, we are not in any way drawing any analogies here.

Do you want to speak a little?

So just with abandoned power lines, transmission lines. Excuse me, thank you. Sorry. So with abandoned transmission lines, so it's on the utilities to identify if they have a future use for those lines or not. And so they work with the CISO to identify a future use for those lines.

Once they determine they no longer have a use for them, they have a responsibility working with the Caiso to remove those lines. So in the case of Kincaid, lines that had been abandoned were found to have caused an incident and which they were held accountable for through the CPUC.

And then as Director Peterson stated, the other one's currently under investigation, so we can't speak to it.

Okay, thank you. So I get there's an active investigation, but there is a clear risk associated with the inactive power lines that are not in use. Am I understanding that correctly?

Yes. Okay.

I'm hesitant to say that because there was one instance in California in which abandoned power lines were involved. I would, I can't say, extrapolate that to say that there's a generalized risk from them.

Okay, thank you.

I think Assemblymember Schiavo just has a follow up related to this point.

Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. So I had a question on this. You know, from what I'm hearing, there's an abandoned line in the Eaton fire that was sitting right next to an energized line that hadn't been used since the Vietnam War.

And I also understand that the CPUC has a General Order 95, Section 31.6 that requires abandoned power lines. Maybe that's what you were referencing, abandoned power lines to be removed so it doesn't become a nuisance or a hazard. And you referenced the Kincaid fire.

And in that it was acknowledged that the permanently abandoned lines were an induction concern and can, quote, pose a significant wildfire and safety risk. And PGE also identified permanently abandoned lines as any lines that have no near future risk. So I guess, you know, I represent Santa Clarita Valley and the North San Fernando Valley.

Santa Clarita Valley is the area that all the firefighters thought was going to burn in these wind events. And you know, we regularly have fires in that area. We know it's a high fire danger area. And is there a map of these abandoned lines? Do we know where they are?

What is the time frame in which the utilities are expected to remove those? Because this one reportedly is since the Vietnam War. Maybe that's not. Hopefully that's not true. Is that true? And when is the trigger pulled? About you haven't done this. And so now there's some kind of penalty or is there any penalty?

How are we holding the utilities accountable for actually removing these lines? That can be incredibly dangerous and problematic.

So I'll start with the end of your question. And then I think it's actually my colleague from Edison is better positioned to answer some of the current infrastructure questions that you're asking. So again, in an investigation, all such facts are explored and reviewed and our safety rules are applied to them.

So Director Palmer's discussion of the Kincaid fire is an example of us learning through an investigation that abandoned power lines had a role in a fire. We applied our General order safety rules to it and penalized PGE for it.

So that, again, I can't say at all whether facts are analogous here, but that's the course of the investigation and the enforcement action that follows.

And is there a timeline requirement for them to remove abandoned lines generally, or does it only happen when, you know, those kinds of cases come before you?

There's not a timeline.

There's no timeline.

Okay.

There's a General responsibility to operate their systems safely. And so they have a large system with numerous risks that they're facing. And so they prioritize and work on their risks according to their assessment.

So obviously, there's nothing specific to the Eaton fire that I could share because obviously the investigations ongoing. But to your specific question, you know, idle lines, there's a difference. You're using the term abandoned. There's also idle lines, which. There is an idle line near that area and that we maintain and inspect regularly for potential use.

And that's what we do and maintain. But the investigation is going on. And you know that that's something we have to think about in the State of California, where a lot of transmission is needed for building out the goals of the state.

And that's pretty much all I can kind of comment on with that without getting into any specifics.

So can you please define the difference between abandon and Eidl lines? Does it just mean Eidl lines? Means it's something you might use in the future?

That's correct. That's my understanding.

And is there a time. I mean, my understanding of these lines is wires were hanging from them like it did not look like anything that was going to be used in the near future. So is there any independent investigation of these lines, or is it all left up to the utility?

And the utility is the only one who determines whether these are idle or abandoned and safe or not.

Just to try to make sure. I'm answering your question. Assemblymember that. Whether the utility is responsible for knowing its service territory, knowing its infrastructure and the risks. And you're asking whether anyone conducts an independent review of their risk modeling and their overall work plan.

So perhaps Edison does bring in independent review itself in order to make sure that its own risk modeling and its work plan are consistent with industry standards, consistent with what's happening in California.

Now, the way that the CPUC examines those utility plans and programs is through the General rate case, which occurs every four years, where the utilities are responsible to present to the CPUC and all the parties who participate the results of their latest risk modeling effort and the work program that flows from that.

So they present here's what our risks are because our model shows us here's what's happening on the ground and therefore we would like to propose investment or management or removal over the next four years and here's how much it will cost and here's the cost effectiveness of that risk reduction work that is reviewed by numerous parties and then results in a four year budget decision by the Commission telling the utility, yes, go perform that work program.

So it's a little different. I feel like I'm answering with a slightly different take on what you're asking, but that's the structure that we use to make sure that they have a transparent, litigated, vetted work program that addresses safety and risk.

And so I guess Edison can answer for themselves though if there's any independent review or any of the utilities have independent reviews of their infrastructure and safety concerns or use.

I mean we have. I'll go first. We have many independent reviews. I think we mentioned we have a wildfire mitigation plan that we gets reviewed by the Office of Energy of Infrastructure Safety rigorously every year. We provide updates and as the CPUC mentioned, I think you've seen only one maybe ignition in the history related to some facility.

So we have to risk prioritize and that is key in terms of how we evaluate our wildfire mitigation. And we get oversight for everything we do from the Commission, from Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety as well as the wecc. We get audited for a lot of the practices and maintenances that we're doing for many different bodies.

But no one comes out and actually looks at your infrastructure.

They do, they do. They all do. Each one of those entities do.

And if I can add real Fast through the CPOCs, the electric safety and Reliability Branch. So we audit approximately every five years is the goal. We audit every electric facility to include substations, transmission and distribution for the electric IOUS. So audit reports are available, we post them online and that includes anything that's covered in a grc.

Okay, thank you. I mean, I guess then I'm concerned if there's all of these other reviews that happen and something like this was missed. In fact, it's a big concern.

All right, I think Assemblymember ransom one more.

I'm going to try to move quickly given that we are aware that these lines exist and that there's a requirement for safety plans and prevention plans.

Are these lines part of the prevention and safety plans, the handling of the inactive decommissioned idle I don't know what the proper term is for these lines, but are they already part of your safety plans? And I guess my questions is for SoCal Edison and San Diego.

You want to finish? Okay, sorry.

Yeah. So in our wildfire mitigation plans, we have, you know, we focus on our high fire risk areas. And so within those areas, the structures of all of our infrastructure, including these lines, have certain mitigations that apply to them, including inspections and maintenance that we do above and beyond the normal compliance.

That's required for those particular lines for. All infrastructure located in our high fire.

Risk areas and for SDG and E. Unfortunately, I am the emergency manager with a fire background and not an engineer or part of our asset management group. We can get that information for you, though, and follow up.

Okay. And I guess my question for PUC, is there a registry of all of these? Are. Is there a requirement for us to have a registry or where can I get a list regarding, you know, if we wanted to know where all of the inactive lines are, is there a place where we can get that information?

Not as of today, Assemblymember. And I would, I guess I'd say in part because the service territories are so large and the pieces of equipment are so numerous that a registry of a specific element may or may not exist. However, we'll take that back and look at it.

We'll ask our probably expert teams inside the Commission to see what kind of data exists about idle or abandoned lines.

Okay. So I learned a new term in my Committee, y'all, so bear with me. It's. Has there been a hot washing, I guess, of this fire incidents, the Palisades and Eaton fires and Hearst that the informal kind of lessons learned is my understanding of what that is.

Where you all get together and figure out what the urgent action is, has that already happened for these fires?

So from the regulator's perspective, these are open investigations and so no hot wash at the moment. Not yet. Okay.

No one else. Okay. And looking forward, what are the priorities that we should. That we can help you with in regards to hazard mitigation? How can the Legislature. What are your priorities that you know, would be helpful for us to know?

I believe that's directed to our utility witnesses.

Yes. Go first. Again. Tom Porter, San Diego Gas and Electric Emergency Management from our perspective, continuing to work toward what. What the staff work really clearly identifies as this is a last resort tool and one that we should be working our way out of. My colleague from SoCal Edison is very.

He's very much correct in that there are certain places and spaces where undergrounding may not be possible. But undergrounding is the only way to get to a no PSPS situation. It is the only way to get there.

Thank you.

Yeah. So, you know, I think a couple things where the Legislature can help us kind of in my referring back to my opening remarks, I think we're in this. We know the wildfire risk in the state is increasing. Climate change is going to continue to potentially make this worse year over year.

So how we battle this together as one team, Utility infrastructure, like you said, is one source. These ignitions can start from anything. And all of us live in these. A lot of us live in these communities. And so making sure fire code is being implemented can really help protect infrastructure.

Making sure we can get defensible spaces, investing in our fire agencies and then during the rebuild process, looking for other sources of funding for these folks that might have been displaced from their homes.

There's going to be customers that have homes in between these that may need, you know, support in order for when the rebuild happens, in order to help them, you know, get across the finish line.

So I just. Very quickly, before I answer that, I want to touch on a question you just asked about after action. Our internal after action report is underway. We had a Department wide after action meeting yesterday. There's another one this afternoon. There's going to be a comprehensive lessons learned.

We're doing an intern investigation into what we did right, what we could have done better. We're supporting a third party investigation as well. So that effort is well underway.

Our CEO, who started about eight months ago, brought in prior to the fire, our first chief emergency management officer, the first time that we've had that position in our department's history. And that's again with our relatively historical Low fire risk. But obviously we know that that's a different landscape now.

We also brought on a chief risk and compliance officer to assess different risks, not just wildfire risk, but different climate risks. The reality that we can harden our systems, we can underground, we could have steel poles we can maintain, we can inspect.

And if there's, you know, a tree branch that impacts a line, we're two of 50 states that have inverse condemnation. And so that still continues to present a risk. Areas that I think where more attention or more discussion can be had is potentially around climate resilience and inverse condemnation funding for hardening.

We've estimated that, and this is a very, very, very preliminary estimate that all of the rebuilding infrastructure of LADWPs infrastructure in the Palisades area may cost between 500 million and $1 billion to rebuild the power infrastructure in that 20 square mile area. So a massive undertaking for us.

So you know, things like we recently launched our resiliency center. Resiliency centers in our service territory where we build solar storage, EV charging and we're targeting ADA compliant recreation centers with our rec and parks. So expanding that, you know, potential funding for that.

So in some of our most vulnerable communities and sincere appreciation for offering us the opportunity to share what our needs are too. Thank you.

Okay, thank you. I'm going to turn it back over to the Chair. Thank you very much.

Thank you. And before I turn it to Assemblymember Zbur, I just have one question. So I believe, Ms. Peterson, in your opening comments you said that IOUs must file post event reports related to PSPS events and you said those are supposed to be filed when they have a.

Certain number of days. We have granted Edison an extension. We've granted them two extensions essentially because when they're in the midst of an emergency, we'd prefer that they focus on incident command and addressing the complex situation. So they're meant to come in with the extensions granted March 3rd and March 10th. They'll come in.

Okay. So Edison, you have not filed those reports because you're still in the midst of what you would define as emergency response.

Yeah, that's correct. So the PSPS events in January, I think they activated on the second, don't quote me on exact, but I think it went all the way through like the 27th of the month. And then you can imagine the magnitude of this event is much larger.

So combing through all the data and we thankful to get the extension to make sure we get all the data compiled because it's a lot of information for each post event report.

And I would say, I guess just as a follow up comment, I really appreciate. Let's see, Mr. Rondou, you I think did a really good job articulating for all of us the process that LADWP has begun and is going to go through in order to assess what worked, what didn't. Lessons learned.

I'll tell you, I'm a lot less clear about what SoCal Edison's plan is. You talked in broad generalities about a commitment to continuous improvement. There were a lot of issues with this response. Assemblymember Erwin articulated some of those.

I think it would go a very long way for me and for the rest of the Committee to understand in more detail, recognizing you don't have all the answers today, what is the process that you are going through in order to identify the things that didn't work and what you need to do differently moving forward.

Appreciate the question. So we've already set up a wildfire task force to be dedicated. I'm actually leading the task force and we're going to focus on PSPs as one of those verticals going back to the hot wash.

We're also going to look at what did we learn from a lot of these fires and is there anything else we can do in our wildfire mitigation plans? Incremental. A lot of the things that was mentioned by LEDWP is already in our plans. We do recloser blocking. We have expanded vegetation management.

We're benchmarking always with our peer IOUs. So a lot of the things that were mentioned are already in place. So we're trying to go above and beyond to do exactly what LEDWP mentioned is what did we learn from this multifaceted event?

And then looking at risk modeling, I also do think there was a lot of Non-HFRA that was non high fire risk area, but that our fire agencies identified that was damaged. So is there a risk beyond where we actually provide our wildfire mitigation? So we're looking at everything and taking it very seriously.

And our company's committed to look through everything once we're getting through this restoration phase right here and look through it and see what we can do to get even better.

Okay, thank you. That's helpful. All right, Assemblymember Zbur.

So first of all, I want to thank the Chair and the Chair of the Assembly, Member Ransom, also the Chair of their. The other Committee for organizing this today and our staff. And I thought the presentations were really helpful.

I think some of my questions were sort of partially answered already by, in response to some of the questions that Assemblymember Ransom and Schiavo had. But one of the questions I had originally was is there any way to completely eliminate the public safety power shutoffs during these high wind events? And I heard from Mr.

Porter that the only way of eliminating those would be complete undergrounding. I'm wondering if you could give us a sense of what that really would mean if there's. If there's ways of eliminating the risk in, you know, higher density areas.

If you should just sort of talk a little bit about what can be done to eliminate or significantly reduce the power shutoffs.

Well, thank you for the question, Member Zbur. And I did say that that's the way we could eliminate in those areas where we do the undergrounding. Not all areas are conducive to undergrounding. Some areas it may be cost, some, some areas it might be environmental or underground concerns.

That being said, I still believe that that is our best bet for moving beyond PSPS. In most areas, any place we have overhead is going to be subject to wind and dry conditions. And that's when we have conditions that warrant PSPS. The caveat to what I just said is I'm talking mostly distribution.

And transmission is becoming a bigger concern with the kind of winds that we're having. And transmission is also a very different picture when you go to undergrounding transmission. So we can't look at it all. I said a broad statement.

Now I'm narrowing that down to there are some areas that will be very difficult or cost prohibitive or other prohibitive from getting to that space of undergrounding.

Has anyone started trying to get their arms around what those costs might look like?

And again, I'm not on the engineering side, but I know that we've been able to bring our costs for undergrounding from well over $2 million a mile down to less than a million and a half a mile.

And when you go to the ongoing costs of vegetation management that you no longer have to do and drop that out of the equation and then add into the equation on the particularly on the covered conductor side of things, if you're looking at those two elements, the covered conductor is just the wire is covered.

All the other apparatus that's on poles and that's still susceptible to damage. So looking at that replacement cost and different things, that's kind of the scale that I can talk to.

If you wanted to add something, then I just have one other quick question.

Sure. So I actually wanted to go back to the Assembly Members question about ideas for assistance and touch on two things that Chief Porter and our colleague from Edison have said that yes, undergrounding is an approach that dramatically reduces ignition risk. It is also by far the most expensive, by far the most time consuming approach.

And so where the Legislature might be able to assist is, as Raj said, alternative sources of financing other than ratepayers. The undergrounding contributes to the entire fixed thing costs of the system. And ratepayers have to pay those fixed costs. And so taking the most expensive approach will raise the overall system cost and everybody will pay more.

And I nodded when you asked if anyone has done a cost estimate because we just posted our response to Governor Newsom's affordability Executive order yesterday, and we did a very rough calculation in one footnote and it's highly uncertain, but if we were looking at distribution lines only, the cost is 2.3 to 5.6 million per mile.

And there are 40,000 miles of above ground utility distribution lines in California's high fire threat districts. And so, as Chief Porter says, the costs are attempting to come down, but those are the most recent costs in IOU filings with the CPUC. Transmission is even more.

We actually have examples from Edison that Tehachapi renewable transmission project cost 139 million per mile to underground it's a 500kV line and undergrounding it is no simple matter. And so we wanted to show those as potential cost estimates. The broader point being electric ratepayers are already experiencing escalating rates.

And so one thing that the CPUC is very focused on is the cost effectiveness of any of all of the range of wildfire approaches that can contribute here. Undergrounding is one and absolutely is very effective when it's located and can be paid for in a good way. But there are other approaches.

They're not as effective in reducing risk, but they also contribute less to the overall fixed costs that ratepayers have to pay. Lengthy answer before your quick question.

I mean, that was, I think it corroborated what I thought, which is of course we've got sort of different values we have to weigh and cost of ratepayers versus certainty on an ability to sort of eliminate these cost shutdowns. Second question I had is for Mr. Roy.

And some of this I think follows the response to the questions that somebody Assemblymember Schiavo had. I had always assumed that the wildfire mitigation plans were one of the chief components for addressing some of the issues that Assemblymember Schiavo could raise.

Could you just give me a bit more of a flavor of what's in those plans and what kind of engagement there is with the PUC related to review and you know, and what's in them.

Yeah. So maybe, maybe I'll just start with what's in it. It's a very comprehensive document that we've started, you know, developing. I'm going to say we had our own plan that we proactively submitted called the Grid Safety resiliency plan in 2018.

And then with SB901 passing in 2019, I think we started our first wildfire mitigation plaque back in submitted in February of 2020. And in those plans, we look at a comprehensive look at all facets of how we maintain our system. And I could probably summarize it in three big pillars.

First is how do we strengthen the grid to reduce ignition risk. So one of the biggest drivers for that is looking at every ignition. And we have a process now to look at the root cause because ignition can occur anywhere on your system.

It's just when it happens at the wrong place, at the wrong time with the wrong conditions. So you want to know what are the root causes. So we do a lot of analysis on the drivers of ignition risk from our equipment.

And then we go out and say, hey, what type of technology and equipment can we deploy in our system to mitigate that risk? And you've heard of two big ones that all the utilities are using. Cover conductor as well as targeted undergrounding. Right. And there's many other smaller items that you can complement those with.

The second piece is how do we build our situational awareness to the wildfire weather. You've heard about the weather stations, fire modeling. So just building that capability, I think all the utilities have come a long way in the last five years. San Diego clearly has pioneered it many years back. And so that's the second big piece.

How we keep getting better at more granular, which ties back to the shutoffs. Because when we pair that with sectionalization devices, we can now get more targeted in where we shut off and where we can bring customers back on the last is enhancing our operational practices.

What I mean by that is how do we go above the minimum requirements in veg management, look for trees that are falling in to remove, expand our clearances around the lines, enhance our inspections. We have a lot more detailed questions when we're inspecting the lines based on all those ignitions.

We've learned, hey, what can we be looking for that we've learned from that and continue to improve every year. We're always looking at. And we do 360 inspections. Now we have drone at the top because a lot of times on those tall poles you can't see things from the bottom. Another thing we learned from the ignition.

So we do a full 360 on each one of our structures that are risk prioritized because there's only so much resource and manpower and obviously affordability. And so we. The biggest thing that we do is all risk informed. We're trying to make sure we're hitting the highest risk items possible.

And one thing, I'll maybe just comment here because we're talking a lot about target underground. I wholeheartedly agree. Would, you know, eliminate PSPS if it was feasible. But the wildfire risk, I mean, another thing we look at vaults explode.

So I just want all of us to just keep in mind that it will reduce the ignition risk a lot. But you could have ignitions from underground Systems. It's not 100%.

So that's why I think looking at our communities, defensible space, other things that we can do to protect the communities is important in combination with all the things we're talking about from the utility side. So I just, I just want to make sure we're all it's not a bulletproof ignition source. Helpful.

Yeah. I think the last thing I'll sort of that I'm gleaning from all of this is that the wildlife wildfire mitigation plans would also have your policies related to inspections for abandoned lines and that kind of thing. Is that, is that accurate or not?

So we don't target it specifically. It's all infrastructure within it. And so those are all risk prioritized and inspected accordingly. And they do get the incremental treatment in our hi, fire risk areas. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Assemblymember Boerner.

Thank you. Thank you. And I want to thank all my colleagues in the chair for convening this hearing and thank all the questions that have been asked ahead of time. I think I want to start off with saying we're acting. I think there was a statement made in light of the new climate reality.

The new climate reality has been here for a while. This isn't new. Every time there's a big fire, we're like, zero, we didn't expect this. We didn't expect. Well, we should expect all the things we haven't expected before because we have the climate crisis and we're going to see more and it's going to be more often.

The other thing I want to start out with saying is San Diego's big fire was in 2007. It is 2025 and we should have learned the lesson. San Diego until recently had some of the highest rates in the country. And that's because our ratepayers have covered the cost of the undergrounding of the things that we do.

So that, and to be fair, our fire and SDG, SDG and E did a great job. When we had the high fire risks recently in January of we had fires and they were contained very, very quickly. And La Jolla had broken out with one.

And if you know La Jolla, you have one road that goes through and if everybody evacuated at the time, no one would get out. And so these are real risks. But it's not like we don't know and it's not like we don't. We can't predict that they're going to happen.

We can't predict the humidity, the wind speed, the location. But we know this is all going to happen. It's a little frustrating to sit here and know that San Diego went through this in 2007, and people are acting like this is new information. It's not new information, and we shouldn't act like it's new information.

When I think about this, you know, I almost didn't vote for the Bill in 2019 that bailed out the IOUS because San Diego already pays the highest cost, because we did not have a Fund to go through to pull from to help defer our costs in San Diego.

So I was like, Oh, our ratepayers are now paying for PG and E territory. We may have to pay for SoCal Edison territory, and we already pay the high, some of the highest rates in the country.

And so I think I just want to bring that perspective to this hearing and saying we should be predicting the unpredictable or the unexpected. Just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean it won't. And the thing that I worry about most is what if we have multiple emergencies at one time?

What if San Diego had the LA fires at the same time we had the LA fires? Because it could have happened, right? Like, if those fires hadn't been contained, it could have been something very, very different. What if my district on coastal San Diego, we have tsunamis?

What if we got a tsunami while we had LA wildfires, while there was atmospheric river flooding, Northern California? All of that can happen because this is our climate reality. Are we prepared for that? And are the IOUs and the CPUCs looking forward to that future?

Because that is the reality that we have to live with, that our children have to live with. I get a little bit frustrated when I hear we're just now doing this, or in the last five years we've done this because it was 18 years ago that San Diego had the crisis of our fires.

We've had 18 years that all the other areas could have learned. Instead, we just have massive wildfire after massive wildfire with people losing lives, losing their memories, losing their livelihoods. So when we think about that. And then the other thing I heard was we knew we had a very two years of a very wet winter.

If, you know you have a very wet winter. I talked to my CAL FIRE guys and they were very concerned for fire risk. So why was it? What were the IOUs doing to mitigate or LADWP? You're not an IOU, but you have been very informative in your testimony today. What did you do beforehand?

Knowing that we had two very wet winters, knowing that there was a huge risk. How were we mitigating that before this happened? The last thing I want to ask is around staffing. This is for SoCal Edison staffing. If we could go through and everybody can kind of.

There was a lot of very generalized comments, and you can hear the frustration in my voice, which I think represents the frustration of most of our constituents of knowing that something was happening. No one believes us when we say we didn't predict this.

We didn't predict the humidity and the winds and the location, but everybody could have predicted something like this would happen. So how are we handling multiple risks and multiple things happening in our state at the same time or in your territories at the same time?

Why haven't we learned the lessons from 18 years since the San Diego 2007 fire? Why do we keep acting like this is something new? Because it's new in each event that happens, but it's not new in itself.

If SoCal Edison can also talk about the staffing issues that have been reported, that they were understaffed for this type of response, because I am concerned that PSPS events are. Are. We're doing PSPS, we're overusing them. Right? Like, we got. And I want to say it was in December. I don't know. I texted Mitchell.

We always get very good communication from SDG&E, by the way. We always get informed. This is. The area's in danger. We have this weather event. There was a weather event in East County, and it was sent out and there was literally no. And everybody got a PSPS warning in San Diego. Everybody's like, zero, there's a big event.

Not a single leaf fell off the tree in front of my house. Everybody was like, it's like the boy who cried Wolf. And so it feels like sometimes the PSPS events are overused to mediate risk, and then people aren't being prepared.

So I like what Assemblymember Erwin was saying is, how can we communicate and let people know, hey, your line's never going to be undergrounded, and then maybe have an incentive program for getting people with battery or generator, because if they're.

If you're barely making it and you lose all the food in your fridge, you have to ask yourself how those kids are going to be fed. So lots of thoughts and feelings right there. So I'll let you guys comment on all of that.

And the CPUC can also comment on how we're going to get ahead of the problem that we have known for decades is here.

All right, maybe I'll go first for the SoCal specific question. So I know I've seen the reports to. I think you're referring to maybe the NPR article don't know the radio traffic who the person has spoke to so I can't really comment on that. But we were fully staffed for the event. We did not have shortages.

That's the short answer to, to that to that reporting. There was a lot more sets trying.

To so so specifically the San Diego fire happened in 2007. We've known this has been a risk Y the difference was the humidity, the location and the severity of winds. But we knew it was a had been two wet winters. We knew there was lots of brush. We knew our risk was high.

We've been planning in San Diego very for a long time for this. There's been 18 years for SoCal, Edison, LADWP, PG&E to prepare for this and yet we have these huge, we have these, this huge destruction. What.

Why haven't we learned the lessons and why haven't we prepared for the events that are inevitable and what are we doing proactively to look forward to multiple catastrophes happening at the same time?

Yes. So I'll start with the last piece you said even in my comments I wholeheartedly agree with you that we should expect the worst case scenario and combination events are happening and be proactive.

That's the theme I'm hearing from what you're saying and I wholeheartedly agree we all have to do something collectively, together and continue moving that forward. To your comment about 2007 so I can't tell you that I was in this space to know the details and the thought process back then.

Maybe the only comment I could tell you is we do learn from each other. We're always benchmarking. I'm sure we did probably implement at that time. Not being in this role at that time, we probably took some action.

But we also have a process where we look at the risks and I'm assuming if PG&E and this is just speculative is you know, if PGE and SCE came out with a multi $1.0 billion plan for our ratepayers, we'd be laughed out of the door of why would our ratepayers pay for something like this at that time?

That's just, I would just say Roger's opinion. But those are the things that we have to prioritize and justify.

And I think, unfortunately, and I sympathize with what you're saying is it's until we see the risks on our own systems and show that, hey, we need to start investing on these risks, we try to be proactive as much as possible and learn from each other.

And you know, and we, we did a little bit later than as you're, you're suggesting. So that's, that's kind of my short answer to that, that comment.

I think I'll jump in. Thom Porter, San Diego Gas and Electric. And I'm going to hit a bunch of items, and if I don't hit all of them, please let me know. On what did we do. We knew, and yes, we did know. And our crews were coming back in the spring telling us that they were walking through head high grass and they were afraid to go to certain places once that grass dried out.

So we worked with our crews at all of our districts to identify those areas and expand our vegetation management in those areas or to bring fire contract fire resources out to those areas. So a private fire engine to go along with them, sometimes wetting down the path forward to a facility they needed to get to or work they needed to do. And that continued all summer long. And we knew that that was an important piece of our protection for our crews as well as for the public and our community.

We also did that on a risk based approach. So that was part of the risk that we were assessing in our risk based approach to doing our inspections across the landscape. Drones, as was mentioned by my colleague at SoCal Edison, we use very extensively for our inspection programs. And then system protections, early fault detection, we have fallen conductor, shut off before conductor would actually hit the ground enabled in many areas.

And then sensitive relay settings that we turn on and off. We don't do it in a seasonal basis. We turn them on and off based on the conditions that are that are presenting themselves. And that's all through our meteorology department watching regularly all of that. On the climate side side, we've embraced this wholeheartedly and all of the IOUs are required to have a climate action plan. And it might be by a different name, but I'm calling it the Climate Action Plan.

To really work toward what our systems need in that next generation to be resilient to not only wildfire, wind, heat domes, and heat effects, extended heat events, as well as for our coastal areas, tsunamis, inundation, sea level rise. All of that is in part of those plans that we're developing, each and every one of us as IOUs.

And then let's see, oh, on the notifications. So there are a couple of things that happen during notifications where over notification can happen. One of those is, or can be perceived, I'm going to say. One of those is circuits go through areas where the wind is blowing to get to your circuit that the wind's not blowing in.

That can happen. There are other times when an event is coming so fast and furious and we can see it with our meteorologists to the point where we know we aren't going to be able to switch fast enough to get the power off where it needs to be off at the time it needs to be off.

We're going to be behind the power curve, and we need to step a little bit forward and lean in and say okay, this is going to happen. We need to shut off power a little bit ahead of time. That can happen as well. So both of those can seem like notification that didn't need to happen.

And then these multi-peak events is something that we're really trying to learn actually from SoCal Edison in San Diego. They have had many more multi-peak events than we have in San Diego since we've been doing PSPS and have ways of looking at that and dealing with that scenario that we haven't yet been able to employ.

When we have multi-peak events there's we go into a circular cycle of the notification process that Director Palmer was talking about earlier. 72 hours, 48 hours, 24 hours, and then 12 and 0 to 4 or 1 to 4. So those are all messages that we might be going through, as well as re-energization notifications that might be happening in those multi-peak events. So as the as again as the climate starts doling out these conditions on more regular basis really close together, we're going to have to figure out how we better deal with that and have notifications that cover a bigger picture than we currently do.

Do you think we're prepared for multiple events? I mean I know you can only speak for SDG&E, but do you think we're prepared for multiple events that would affect the power grid right now?

Thank you for asking and bringing me back to that. So from the emergency management perspective, I can't speak to the grid resilience in that, but from the, from the emergency management perspective, yes, I do think we are ready. We are very well coordinated.

Like Cal OES coordinates the state, we coordinate under the California Emergency Management, California Utility Emergency Management Association, CUEA, and we meet regularly with that group to make sure that as all utilities, not only gas and electric, but also water utilities, wastewater, and others are working together to be a part of that Cal OES system and manage toward the multi-event and all hazards type.

And for Mr. Roy, I understand your answer to the question was until your customers experience a devastating fire there isn't a will to to innovate and change? That's how I took your answer. Let you clarify that because if that leaves a scary room.

No. I, yeah, no, I definitely did not mean to say that. What I'm saying is we're continuously learning from each other, right? And we're probably doing it more so, you know. And just to be clear, I probably can't know what was the discussion after the San Diego fire because I wasn't in the capacity I am today.

My comment was more so, if we propose similar items, we have to look at our risk. That's how our state regulator works. We put investments in our general rate case and we have to risk prioritize. We need to demonstrate the risks on our system and proactively propose investments that our rate payers have to pay for.

So at that time, I'm sure the company risk prioritized. We have a risk register that we're always monitoring and depending, and each utility could have different risks. I don't know what it looked like at that time, and we made investments based on that risk prioritization is kind of what I was trying to say.

And one thing I want to add, I think you talked about the two wet winters. It's like, hey, how come we didn't know? But I want to say is all the hardening, you know, that we've done, I think we've done over 6,000 miles to date in our high fire risk areas, target undergrounding, expanded veg management.

If we didn't do all that work in the last five years, this event would have been probably a lot worse. I think it's important to say, I think you hit record wind speeds in 15 years that you've seen that this event was very unique. And I think all the work that all the utilities have done, I think has reduced for what we would have seen, but for all those mitigations and investments that were made, and the utilities are working tirelessly every year doing more and more.

And I think even in your chart, you see we had more PSPSs last year because we knew the risk was higher. I know that's not the preferred solution, but we did realize that it was riskier last year because of the fuels. So just wanted to add that in there because I don't think I addressed that part of the question.

So in addition to a lot of the preventative and proactive measures that San Diego and Southern California just mentioned, I do want to underscore two areas that you brought up, which is the growing frequency and severity of climate impacts in the utility industry.

In the last several years, we have had many wildfires that have impacted us in different ways. In 2017, we had the... Sorry. 2019, we had the Saddleridge Fire, which impacted LADBP's ability to import power into the basin. So that was a wildfire that was not started by electric infrastructure, but it dramatically impacted our electric infrastructure.

10 years prior to that, a similar fire in the exact same area happened. In 2017, we had the Blue Cut Fire that took out transmission lines that took weeks to repair. And so from an operational perspective, it has changed the way that we do business. I think historically a lot of utilities in Southern California will upgrade transmission, upgrade, do major upgrades and outages in the wintertime, assuming and expecting that to be more of a time where there's less disruption, less high heat, less heat storms. And that's obviously changed. So it's impacted our operations.

We've had to do things like extend demand response programs late into the year, things that historically we haven't had to do. The last thing that I'll mention is the importance of mutual aid. I mentioned earlier that we had PG&E and the Navajo Nation provide mutual aid and many, many others offer that.

And I say that that's particularly important for LADWP as a municipally owned utility. We are the largest municipally owned utility in the country, and I think we have a leadership role to play here. And we have begun discussions with our partner utilities in Southern California on ways that we can collaborate on emergency management.

And the last thing that I'll mention in addition to preparation is we do have a number of open water reservoirs. We have 5 to 6 billion gallons of water in reservoirs that not part of our water system that we've kept and maintained for emergency operations. And so that's an area where in our history we have elected to maintain those for emergency purposes. So these are some of the things that we've had to do proactively in an effort to make sure that we are prepared for emergencies like this.

So I'll ask the same question. Do you think LADWP's prepared for multiple emergencies at the same time? Large fires, earthquake, tsunami.

I would say that by saying to handle that, we would have to rely on mutual aid. We would have to rely on our partners in the utility industry to make sure that we can do that. And I say that because with the windstorm and the wildfire in Palisades, we had all of our power crews, all of our contract crews working seven days a week, 24/7. And we, and we also accepted the mutual aid from other utilities to support us in that effort as well.

I'm happy to, if you'd like, but also happy for the Chair to move us along.

Did you have a question for PUC?

I don't know if the CPUC wanted to talk about how they've, since 2007 been looking at the lessons that we have borne the cost for in San Diego to the rest of the state in prioritizing what we know is coming. And somehow at the beginning of this it sounded like we didn't know this was coming. We knew it was coming.

Yes. I appreciate the question, Assembly Member Boerner. We get asked nearly daily by all the other states in the United States to provide them with webinars and information on all the nation leading structural elements that California has set up. I'll take through some of them the way that Chief Porter did.

We have the most robust public safety power shutoff guidelines of any state in the nation. We have the most robust wildfire mitigation plan structure and framework in the nation. We have one of the leading climate, as you mentioned, climate adaptation requirements for utilities to not just take a four year look, but to take a 50 year look at how climate change is going to impact their systems and bring to their communities and the CPUC plans for adapting to climate change.

So absolutely we are all constantly learning from these events and working to improve the structures that we have in place. But California has the most robust framework and set of tools that any state in the nation has. And so we are never kind of resting on oh, we know what tomorrow is going to deliver.

But instead between the wildfire mitigation plans, the climate adaptation proceedings, our general rate cases, the risk tools that we require the utilities to consist to constantly develop and press forward. Never resting on saying, oh, yesterday's event is the harbinger of the future. As we all know, Southern California was overwhelmed by what happened in January. That is not a reason at all to stop pressing ourselves forward.

Thank you. All right. Assembly Member Harabedian.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Let me just build off that last point, Ms. Peterson, on the framework. And we will, I know some of my other colleagues have questions, so I do want to move this along. That regulatory framework, do you think, and I want to hear from the IOUs and the PUC. Do you think it actually leads to the most effective and efficient PSPS shut off decisions? And I ask that because the discretion for PSPs is with is within the discretion of the IOUs.

The PUC, however, gives clear direction that it should be a last resort decision, but it also retains the effect of saying we can assess the reasonableness of your decisions, which there's some tension there. It puts the IOUs in a weird position and there's tension on both sides. Right.

Making sure that we don't have catastrophic wildfires and making sure we on the other end aren't compromising connectivity of our rate payers. Do you think that this regulatory system is actually working? Because from just hearing this, it seems as though there's clear tension during these decisions, and there has to be a regulatory question, legislative question, as to whether we keep it as is or we make changes to improve it. So I'd like to hear from both parties as to whether you think it's working, and if not, what we need to do to fix it.

Mr. Roy? Yeah. You can go first.

I'll go first. Yeah, I do think it's working. You know, there's room for improvement. And I think the area that we touched upon earlier is the notification and communication. You know, it's complex. Right. Every circuit in our service territory is different from others.

We have a lot of different types of terrain and magnitude that we have to encounter. And we have to know our areas through our equipment. And we have guidelines we have to follow and we really analyze and take this very seriously.

So maybe to give you kind of a little bit background on how we determine to De energize, we'll give a little bit more color. We rely on the National Weather Service high wind advisory, which talks about when things will start to blow into. Debris will start blowing in.

That's 31 mile per hour sustained in 46 mile per hour gusts. So approximately around that time is when we start thinking, hey, things could blow into our lines, potentially cause sparks. So when we have that forecasted, we're activating public safety power shutoffs and we have to start monitoring, you know, which lines could get that.

And if they're covered, they're hardened. That goes up to the National Weather Service high wind warning, which is 40 mile per hour sustained, 58 mile per hour gusts. And that reduces a lot of PSPs. Right. For a lot of those circuits, if it never gets to that high level wind speeds. But then for distribution, not transmission.

This is for distribution. That's correct. For transmission, they're built way differently. Right. They're much taller. Spacing along the wires are a lot broader and two to three times broader. So having contact that will go across two lines is a lot less likely. And then you're really dependent on the structure itself for having damage.

And so then you get to thresholds of maybe 60 to 90 mile per hour with winds and it ranges. And then you overlay factors that may reduce that based on what's the consequence in the area. Based on your fire modeling, is there maintenance items that still need to be repaired that could be damaged due to wind?

There's a lot of different factors that go in afterwards, case by case by circuit in order to develop that. And we've had a PSPS rulemaking. We've shared this publicly inherent feedback. And there's been lots of dialogue between the Wildfire mitigation plans and with the CPUC.

So going, going back to your question, I think it's a very thoughtful, rigorous process. It's a lot more complex than it probably seems. Probably from the other side. It seems very complex. Yes, it's very. It's. It's not. It's not something that we take lightly. And it's. It's a lot of communication and benchmarking and sharing goes on.

And so I. I do think there's. They keep us accountable and we. We keep sharing how we implement. Even though there's an ability to have slight differences among utilities. We're learning based off a lot of it from San Diego and how they've implemented it from the beginning.

And that's what the foundation of how our public safety power shut off because we don't want to reinvent the wheel. And so I do think it's working.

We'll go to the PUC. No offense to San Diego Gas and Electric, but I would love to hear from PUC.

I think you've asked a very thoughtful question and you're right. There is a core of tension and judgment calls that are happening in the incident command centers of the utilities. I think that it's the correct system in the sense that the regulator doesn't know the utility system the way the utility does.

That is for them to know and operate and make their decisions based on all the factors and criteria that Mr. Roy just laid out. What we have done over the last several years is lay out the hard and fast criteria that we know we can use to evaluate those judgment calls.

And so that's when Director Palmer walked through the enforcement actions that we took. It was because they didn't meet those hard criteria that we had set out. Still at the core of it, there is still human judgment going on.

And for any regulator to want to take out close look at that judgment would practically require an entire second shadow incident command structure. Right. So I'm loath to suggest anything like that because of the amount of resources that would take for the regulator to have. Now with all that said, where.

And I think the background paper does a great job of laying out these tensions too. Where what we can see going towards continuing to evolve the model is to keep on developing more criteria so that the utilities keep on sharpening their tools and developing better situational awareness, better communication with customers with emergency response, et cetera.

So there's certainly progress we can keep making. Pursuing a. Like backtracking on judgment calls would be exceedingly difficult.

Yep, I appreciate that. I'm going to turn it back to the chair. I would just leave all parties with some food for thought. I do think that the background paper was excellent and one of the points that it made was this idea of using AI machine learning technology to help these decisions.

Because I do think that reducing human beings being at the center of this, I think is key. And it's no offense to the human beings making these decisions in these rooms, but we are fallible. Technology is too. But they can work together, I think to make this process better.

And I think as we move forward to the extent the PUC can incentivize the IOUS to actually encourage, incorporate and continue to build upon the technology they are using for these events, I think keeps everyone safer and. And it reduces the amount of time and burden on the constituents and the ratepayers.

So I appreciate the answers and thank you for being here.

Thank you. Assembly Member Rogers.

Thank you so much. First of all, I want to thank all of you for the presentation. My colleagues know this. I served on the City Council in Santa Rosa for eight years in my first term. We had Tubbs in 2017, Kincaid in 2018, got a break in 2019 and then had wall, bridge and glass in 2020.

And one of the things that was particularly helpful in getting out of the emergency response phase and starting to think about what comes next was actually touring San Diego Gas and Electric, being able to go down and seeing the hot EOC and the sophisticated topographical map that informed decisions about pre placement of personnel and about response.

Does SoCal Edison have something similar? As I know PG&E has just started to build it after the tubs fire and now has it operational.

Do you have something as well that you can point to that allows you to not just make some, some of those calls around PSPs, but also pull in other actors like local first responders and policymakers?

Yeah, so we, we have our EOC as well. And we also did the tour at the Hawk and we have, you know, a wildfire science group that has our fire scientists that are using supercomputers computing. I think we're down to 1km by 1km grids on the fuel.

It's very sophisticated and very complex, leveraging all the work that San Diego did and we're monitoring that and we have live field observers out in the field and we pre patrol the lines before when we have the forecast and they're going out there and sometimes they may notice stuff blowing because these weather stations, which I think the AI is referring to, is located at discrete points along the circuit.

And so having that second set of eyes out there, they may notice something prior to wind speeds coming up or post like hey, you know, it looks fine. So we are always getting feedback and they have handheld weather stations at the locations they're at. So we're doing all of that where we're positioning people across the service territory.

It's not just if you're envisioning a group of folks in a room making these decisions, there's people in an incident command structure all over the service territory pre patrolling the lines before the event, come in during the event and even post event like we talked about earlier.

Great. I appreciate that you talked a little bit about the undergrounding, particularly for Palisades is what I heard. You know, I actually had the chance a month before Tubs to meet with a couple of the CPUC commissioners.

And one of the things that they brought up at the time that didn't age as well, but I think is still something for us to consider as you move towards undergrounding was that in some of our areas, Wildfire is a huge threat, but so is earthquake.

And if you underground all the utilities, do you have a plan for the nexus between how quickly you can stand up infrastructure that's above ground versus how long people would be without power if you underground in those areas?

Yeah. So I think there's a proceeding, the CAVA proceeding, climate adaptation vulnerability, and that's Tom. All the utilities, we're looking at seismic risk in addition to climate, all the climate related risks. And so as we build that out, that's the type of infrastructure that we're already thinking about.

And hopefully as we rebuild here, we'll be implementing some of those thought processes. And we also have temporary towers, like just even now when we're doing mass restoration, before we get the actual rebuild, there's ways to get temporary tower up, temporary poles.

That's kind of how we get a lot of these customers back up very quickly before we come back with the official reconstruction.

Right. I would encourage local officials also to be asking some of that question around as they become more resilient and as they build their community. How does their, their response need to change for each of these incidents based on. On those capabilities? That's really helpful.

One of the things that we have seen is the Office of Infrastructure Safety as you mentioned, they just sign off on whether or not the improvements are going to be safer. Not necessarily if it's the most cost effective way to do things. Have you explored other options for safety in some of those areas?

For instance, micro grids or. I know PG&E is implementing fast trip systems that we can get into a little bit outside of the PSPs, but are you considering those as well in.

Your rebuild yeah, and we've actually implemented. We just. It's a different terminology. We call it fast curve settings and I think you've referred to it sensitive relay settings. They're all the same thing. We've had them implemented before, I think. Epss I think is what PGE calls it.

So when we have high fire risk area, high fire conditions, we enable our protection settings to be more sensitive. And like we talked about earlier, we also make sure the reclosing is blocked so we don't have that second potential for reignition if there was an ignition caused from the first incident.

So those, those are all, those are all implemented? Yeah. So my familiarity is mostly with pge. We had specific areas of our community that we saw were being De energized more frequently than they should have because they were fed by transformers that were in high fire areas, even though that part of the community wasn't.

And this is a question across the board. How are you making that data available to your additional partners so that they could look and see perhaps undergrounding strategically or. We have a place called Pepperwood Preserve in my district that is a research facility. That sounds exactly what it is. It's a.

It's a preserve that after the Tubbs fire, it didn't really make sense to rebuild the infrastructure to go two miles away to this facility. And so instead we're able to do the microgrid.

But is that data public about how often you're having to De energize each of the individual transformers so that people can start to have those conversations about alternative means?

Yeah, I'll go first and let others chime in. So yeah, we definitely, like we said I already mentioned earlier, we set up a task force, we do this anyway. But we're going to take a harder look at what we call our frequently impacted circuits. I do think that data is available in our post event reports.

If you took that data, you could easily get with. Circuits are being impacted multiple times.

So I mean, so for instance, we've got a chart that was a couple of hours ago, we went over that showed how many times PSPS events have happened each year.

Do you have a breakout that the public can see or that local policymakers can see about each transformer to see which ones are De energized in an inordinate amount compared to the others?

Yeah, we don't, we don't have it at the transformer level. We De energize by circuit or sectionalization device, sub circuit. So we wouldn't have it by transformer that Would obviously require extensive. Because there's multiple.

But you have it per circuit?

Yeah, per circuit definitely is.

That's publicly available. Yes.

Yeah, we file it in each of those events, every circuit that was potentially impacted. And, and we are looking exactly what you're talking about. And I think it was assemblymember Irwin that talked about it. How do we get that information back out to the customer so they understand what is the plan?

Is there anything or is there nothing possible? Which hope. We hope it's not the answer. We're going to look really hard to figure out micro grids, other things that we talked about, what is possible. And so we have to take a hard look and we have. We have to risk prioritize. Right. Because there's, there's a lot of.

Lot of, lot of things that the utilities are tackling at the same time. And, and this is important. This one's top of the list. And we're trying, we're going to do our best to try to mitigate by looking at each of these individually and what's possible.

So this might be a question for the Puc. So when a fast trip event happens, whatever the other terms are for it, how does that get reported? Does that get reported as a public safety power shutoff or does it have its own category that people can pull from?

It's the latter. It's its own category because it's not a planned event. It's because something hit the wire and the wire trips off instantaneously.

So you mentioned sort of the. When a PSPS event happens, you then have the regulatory authority to look at whether or not the conditions warranted a psps. First question for that is there's state law that has what the utility is required to build their infrastructure to maintain.

I don't remember what the term, what it is off the top of my head, but it's a certain miles per hour, for instance, for wind that their equipment is required to be able to withstand. So load standards under Geo95. Yeah.

So if you have forecasted winds, for instance, that are below that threshold, do you automatically review whether or not that was prudent or is that a De facto admission from the IOU that they have not met state law in terms of what that standard is?

No, we would review the event as a whole.

Okay. And then so for the. With the fast twitches, fast trips, when they go off. Sorry.

I like the new brand. Yeah.

Are you looking at how frequently that is happening and what caused it?

I can start and then perhaps Director Palmer will add some Details so specifically with pge because it a couple of years ago the settings were set to a very highly sensitive level and we began hearing, and you probably heard from many communities that fastrip was causing outages at many, many times a day at very uneven, uneven patterns.

So we required PGE to first off communicate with the communities that are being impacted. Do a lot of the things that have been spoken about here today explain why, explain the sensitivity settings that get turned higher during wildfire season, which is unfortunately more times of the year. But we also require them to submit data.

So they submit quarterly data to us on what's happening with EPS. I've been saying PSPs so much, but EPSs, which is different. Right. And so they submit that quarterly data and it is available publicly too.

Yeah. The EPS seems to have at least a lot of promise that even as we go through these conversations about how to make pspss more efficient, more tailored, or even with the underground and other types of safety measures, this seems like it's a system that has at least functionality so long as we have the data.

And so I guess my last question for you is is there anything additional that would make your life easier in terms of oversight of this new kind of technology that's being implemented if you had access to data to or if there was a reporting for that was available.

So for a fast trip, we are already tracking. The utility also reports to us once they go out to patrol the line and scan whether any damage occurred, that is often portrayed as an ignition that was avoided. And so they are reporting this to us. But we can get back to you with more.

But perhaps there's something there with requiring utilities to conduct more damage and potentially avoided ignition events and explain how those technology approaches helped reduce the risk of wildfire.

That'd be really helpful. And again, more familiar with PG and E. But I do appreciate that from the first iteration of public safety power shutoffs, how much more tailored they've been able to make them by breaking up their circuits by incorporating this other technology.

And so if that's an avenue that the state should explore as a risk reduction model, I'm open to it, but want to make sure that the public has access to the data that they need to see whether or not this is a good investment of time and resources. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Assemblymember Schiavo.

Thank you. If I could just follow up on that point because I think there's been a lot of discussion today about undergrounding means the holy Grail that's going to solve it all for us. zero, I should turn on my mic. I think there's been a lot of discussion today about, you know, undergrounding being the holy grail.

That's going to solve it all for us. And. And I think if we're gonna talk about undergrounding, we have to, in the next sentence, say that it costs 2 to 3 $1.0 million a mile or 139 miles. $1.0 million a mile for transmission lines, and ratepayers are the ones who are stuck covering that Bill. Right.

And so we have to be honest about the cost of undergrounding and the reality of whether or not we can really balance that against ratepayers who are already suffering under these rates. And so, you know, I think the point that my colleague is bringing up right now around the circuits is a really important one.

We in Santa Clarita have been, you know, the mayor, when he was mayor last time, back in the fall of 2021, had a meeting with Edison, talking about concerns around specific circuits at. At that time that were already, we felt in our community being neglected.

And our community really was one of the hardest hit, I think, in the PSPS shutoffs. We had people who had their power off for basically half of January.

So with very little communication, I think the frustrations that were expressed by my colleague, Assemblymember Erwin, so people couldn't plan right, do I go buy a gallon of milk or do I buy a pint of milk?

We had a mother talking about her child with a chronic condition that affects failure to thrive and brain development, that their medication has to be refrigerated, and they couldn't refrigerate the medicine, their child was vomiting is a very tragic situation. And. And they weren't able to get a. A. What's it called? The generator. Thank you. Generator, too.

Because I guess Edison was out of generators. And so, you know, so our, like, our community really suffered. We had schools that were out of session for six days over the last couple months, which means they may have to extend the school year, extra costs that schools can't absorb, loss of learning. There were huge, huge impacts.

And our community, as I said earlier, was expected to be the one that burned. So I understand the difficult balance of wanting to prevent horrific fires like we just saw happen, but also I think the point to Assembly Manager Berner's point about this is the norm, right?

We know this is going to be happening, and we have to have a better system. And it feels like our constituents are the ones who are always the one paying for it, whether it's through their pocketbooks or through the power shutoffs. And, you know, and there has to be a better way.

And I know that there are examples of, you know, where you make something, you determine something as a critical load like a hospital or some, you know, kind of commercial zone where you have multiple power sources and, and, you know, break and you can break up the circuit so that if something fails, then then something else can pop up and provide power for that.

And so are there ways for us to be more creative in doing that? I think schools should be a part of that, that they should have power. We can't put dirty diesel generators on schools where kids are learning. And so there's not a lot of alternatives. And, you know, how do we.

Like, how are you planning for that? Because we can't have the PSPs, the power shutoffs be just the norm now. We're just gonna do it all the time to prevent these fires. And everybody's gonna be out of power and their food's gonna go bad and they're gonna have to just eat it. Eat that cost.

That can't be the solution. And we know that we're gonna be having these fires. I don't think that we are prepared for a multiple emergency event.

The fire that happened in Santa Clarita or in Castaic, the Hughes fire, also in my district, if we hadn't had all of the resources that were there, the mutual aid, as you mentioned, they had models that showed that fire burning through Castaic and into Ventura County.

And luckily there were 40 planes in the area to help stop that fire. So we know this is happening and we have to figure out how to prevent these fires and keep the lights on. What are the other solutions around kind of breaking up these circuits, finding multiple power sources, other things.

Do you have plans and what are they to do that when we cannot afford to underground for billions of dollars, all of the power lines?

Yeah, no, I appreciate your comments. And this is probably an area where we can probably partner with you. So like I mentioned the task force we just stood up. We're going to. One of the pillars is to look really hard at these impacted circuits. And I appreciate your comments from the community.

And I think each area is going to be specific, like the schools is another one that's on our hot wash list of, you know, because this was a historic event and, you know, we did learn a lot of things and that schools were on that list.

And I know we've had bills in the past for solar and other things for schools. And so maybe that's something we work with to figure how do we build resiliency so we don't. It's not just our, it's not just undergrounding, but there's other things we can partner on to get resiliency in these communities.

We are going to look at the electrical infrastructure based on sectionalization and other things like that. But after a certain point to your point, we have to think outside the box and how do we help these areas ride through it with power for as much as long as possible if there is going to be extended outages?

Because I do think when you have multiple fires and winds and other things going on, it could be days like you said before power gets back, not just because of PSPs and we got to prepare. I think as well said we are going to have more multiple faceted hazards with climate adaptation.

And I think the more we can partner on that, that would be great.

And I can tell you which circuits we've been talking about for years, the Hillfield, the Mamba and the Python circuits, if you want to check them out for us, we would love that and we hope that they will be prioritized because we were fortunate this time in Santa Clarita, but we don't know the next time if we will be.

And so we want to be prepared and not having this conversation in a much more tragic tone. One of the other questions I know we were talking about kind of how is determined the PSPS shutoff.

And my understanding is that there's supposed to be a risk comparison tool that you have that's published and we haven't been able to find where it's pointed to. We see where it's pointed to but we haven't been able to find it.

Is there a document that you can point us to on how these decisions are made or what the criteria is?

I believe it's also in our post, we publish that in our post event report as well, which is the same one I was referring to. So it uses the same risk framework that we use what we call in our ramp filing, which it's called.

It's going to be Mars multi attribute risk scoring where you can take two different types of risks, public safety power shutoff and wildfire and compare the two to see, you know, is the risk of the power outage greater than the risk of the wildfire for that circuit and that gets evaluated.

That's part of our process before we move forward with the public safety power shutoff.

Okay, and last question, it does feel like, and I know the CPUC just approved the rate hike to cover the Thomas fire.

It feels like ratepayers and our constituents are on the hook consistently for not only the fire mitigation, not only covering everything that's involved in providing power, but also covering these disasters that happen, which sometimes are not their fault. Right. Or definitely are not their fault.

And you know, if we have, I guess a couple questions, if we have instances where we know that there are issues like at what point do.

Does it become the fault if there's ongoing neglect of certain areas or certain dangers, you know, because I, I understand and I think it goes back to the tension that was talked about earlier. Right. Utilities have to figure out and prioritize what they're going to do.

You have some rules about what they got to do, but no timelines on some of this stuff.

And so, you know, how, how long are we going to let them just figure it out and maybe not figure it out, maybe cause some huge disasters before they have some skin in the game too, you know, if it feels like they're giving dividends to their investors and raising rates on our constituents and then we have to cover, you know, honestly, what seems like some negligence on semi regular basis at least.

And rate payers are so frustrated. We are all very frustrated.

And so I feel like we have this kind of codependent relationship where we have to Prop up the utilities because they're providing power and there's important things and we want them to be able to borrow money at a certain rate and all of these things, but it means that our constituents are suffering and paying the bills.

And I feel like we have to rebalance this equation. And I hope that the utilities will start to realize that it is in their interest to invest in these things, in these preventative things, because we see how much it can cost when you don't.

And I don't think that's good for the company either at the end of the day. But if utilities are going to continue to show higher profits and give more and more money to their investors, we are getting to a breaking point. This is unsustainable.

And there has to be a reality check at the level of utilities to decide that they are going to have skin in the game as well. Just like the mother who could not keep her medicine cold for her daughter. We need to see that in a real way.

I think for any of us to feel like we need to be super helpful on these issues because it is very frustrating to continue to give leeway and opportunity and support and remove red tape and do all of these things to support all of the things we have to do related to our grid.

And then the bills just keep going up and the costs just keep going up and all of the suffering that is happening in our community continues to increase. And it feels like a breaking point. It feels unsustainable. And I don't, I hope that this EPUC will help us rein this in.

I can respond briefly if you'd like.

I think that would be helpful. Yes.

Okay. Yes. Assembly Member first, thank you for the multiple points that you expressed. And I did want to share with you a couple of things. Just first, on a very local level, Director Palmer met with the mayor and team of Santa Clarita recently and is in constant discussion with them about those three circuits that you identified.

And then second, as far as the Thomas Fire settlement, it was a settlement prepared and presented to the commission between the Public Advocates Office, which is the ratepayer advocacy group inside the CPUC, and Edison. And it's a, I'm not going to remember the proportion exactly, but it was a split between the Edison shareholders and ratepayers.

So you know that, I'm aware. But just to make sure everyone is aware that there was a cost sharing element to that settlement. That fire also predated the framework that we have now. And so those were resolutions of property liability claims that predated the AB 1054 framework that we have today.

All that to not say that we're out of the woods in any sense of the word, because you're absolutely right in the difficulty that escalating rates is posing to Californians. One third of Californians are on the CARE program, which is an assistance program to pay your utility bills.

And that to me is kind of the only data point I need to know to realize how difficult the situation is. I will say, again, we published our report yesterday that is a response to Governor Newsom's executive order. In that, just a couple of things. On page 14, we do have the broad pie chart of what the major drivers are of rates.

And the two primary ones are wildfire costs, as we're talking about today, and the structure of the legacy net energy metering tariffs that are causing non-participants to pay for the incentives being provided to participants in that tariff. And so the other thing that comes through, and I worked a lot on this report, the other thing that comes through is that there isn't any one silver bullet. We have a lot of suggestions and ideas, and I know that we're very interested to work with the Legislature and the administration on ideas.

But the sense you get is that there are many programs that have performed really good work for Californians. We are all actually receiving clean, safe, reliable electricity every day because of the ratepayer funded clean energy programs. We're reducing the use of gas plants that are in low income neighborhoods. So those communities are benefiting.

So these programs really have led to tangible benefits for Californians and then at the same time, the multiplicity of programs and thinking about cost effectiveness and trying to apply cost effectiveness to each one. It's a complicated effort, and we go through that in the report.

But it's complicated because every program is structured differently, has different policy goals, and does cost ratepayers, but perhaps the benefits are something that California wants to achieve. So we are absolutely working on it, and we have a number of different ways that we are already working on saving ratepayers money.

I think you're absolutely right, though, that the circumstances and conditions of today are causing these wildfire risk mitigation costs to to rise in a way that is very, very difficult for all of us to deal with. So we're here and ready to partner and hope that we can work with the Legislature. As I mentioned earlier, alternative sources of financing is a major way that we think that some of this can be alleviated. That will require all of us to work on together. I appreciate all the points you made.

And I'll just make a couple of additional comments. And I believe Committee Members are aware of this, but California is one of only two states with inverse condemnation. If utility equipment is involved in a wildfire, even if a drunk driver runs into utility pole and causes a fire, the utility is on the hook.

And so that is why we created the 1054 construct in 2019. And with that framework, you know, at a high level articulates is that if the utility is not found to be liable for the wildfire, not negligent. Right. If a drunk driver smashes the pole, that's when the, you know, fund kicks in.

And effectively ratepayers are footing that bill. If they are found to be negligent, then shareholders foot that portion of the bill. So if there's negligence, the, you know, ratepayers are not on the hook for that. And then your comments, Ms. Peterson, were I think a good transition to our next hearing, which is stay tuned.

It's in two weeks, and it's going to be the first in a series of hearings focused on affordability. And the first topic that we are digging into is wildfire investments and expenditures and many of the points that you just raised. So thank you for that. Okay. Assembly Member Calderon.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for convening this informational hearing. I think it's really important. I wish all my other colleagues were still here because I wanted to, one, just share some comments. But also and then I have a question at the end, and thank you all for being here.

So I'm pretty sure that I'm probably the only one on this dais that has actually worked PSPS events. I spent 25 years working for an IOU prior to coming here. And so how I got into the emergency operations center, it wasn't by choice. It became part of my job.

I had to go through 40 hours of FEMA training, then I had to pass a very difficult test. Then I had to go through many more hours on PSPS training. And so, you know, I worked Thomas, worked Woolsey, Tubbs, and many other fires. My last fire was In November of 2020, shortly before I got sworn in.