Quick Take:
Residents living in Mid-County just south of Aptos have been dealing with unreliable electricity for many years, but it’s been especially bad since the summer. At a community meeting on Thursday, Pacific Gas and Electric said that infrastructure updates that should make power much more reliable are expected to be done by Monday.
Seacliff resident Peggy Kaysen’s power has gone out 20 times since last August, with nearly half of the outages happening since June. Dan DeKimpe said he’s seen ongoing power outages over the entire 34 years he’s lived in La Selva Beach, and that the situation appears significantly worse in his coastal community than it is for people he knows living in rural areas of the country.
“My mother lives in a small town in upstate New York, and she can’t remember the last time they lost power,” he said. “There are some years that maybe I have five [outages], and others where I probably had 15.”
Kaysen and DeKimpe were among the frustrated Mid-County residents who packed into a conference room at Seascape Resort on Thursday evening, eager to speak with Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) representatives after having experienced relentless power outages.
While residents say that electricity reliability has long been a problem, it has been especially bad since the summer. At the meeting, PG&E Central Coast Regional Senior Manager Jeremy Howard explained what’s been plaguing the community — the equipment that helps maintain stable voltage in electrical networks at the Rob Roy substation near Aptos High School, which serves the Aptos area, failed and needed to be replaced.
Howard said that the company had to contact the manufacturer for the new parts, which were back ordered and took a long time to ship. In order to continue serving the area with electricity, PG&E routed power from the Green Valley substation near College Lake in Watsonville, which is farther away, causing spottier reliability.
“There are a lot of miles between there and where you are, and it’s traveling through a high fire-risk area,” he told the crowd of more than 60. “So we essentially took a problem and made it a little bit worse by making it more line miles to serve you.”
The power lines from the substations are routed through the high fire risk zone north of Highway 1, where the land is mostly covered in forest. When something like a branch or an animal hits a powerline in this area during the fire season, the company has set up its system to shut off power to decrease the risk of sparks igniting a fire. A crew needs to come to the site and check if it is safe to restore power, making outages last longer.
“It was sort of a double whammy this summer,” Howard said of the frequent outages in the Aptos area. “There was not only the fire zone piece, but also the substation problem.”
The good news, Howard said, is that the company expects the Rob Roy substation to be back online by Monday, and that crews will also rearrange the circuit, running it outside of the high fire risk zone north of Highway 1. The hope is that this will cause fewer outages — and shorter ones than customers have historically endured — since it will not require a crew to inspect the area.
Howard told Lookout that now that the circuit will be run outside of the high fire-risk zone, the system can detect a disturbance like a branch falling, shut off power for a matter of seconds until the cause of the alert is gone, and then automatically turn power back on.
While the residents applauded the announcement, some still worried about how the power system would fare in the winter and when the potential storms are brewing. Howard said that storms are “a little bit of a wild card,” given how much their intensity can vary from year to year. He told Lookout that while the system is designed to be resilient, luck plays a big role in how the power infrastructure fares during storms, since downed trees are the most common cause of storm-related outages. However, reliability during storms could see improvements in the future, even if not immediate.
“Nothing is going to change that other than putting the lines underground, which we’re working on statewide,” he said. “It’ll come to Santa Cruz County, and we’ve already done a little bit in the CZU burn scar.”