The company also operates two aging reactors at Diablo Canyon, which are surrounded by earthquake faults. Plagued by core embrittlement, nuclear waste mismanagement, collapsing infrastructure and much more, the utility has cut a deal with state regulators, local communities, labor unions and some environmental groups to shut the reactors in 2024 and 2025. But critics fear that a seismic shock -- the reactors are less than 50 miles from the San Andreas Fault -- could send a radioactive cloud into downtown Los Angeles within five hours. Under federal law, PG&E would be financially responsible for just a fraction of the ensuing holocaust.
This year's fires will produce a tsunami of litigation. If it's proved that PG&E's downed poles were not to code, and that they sparked foliage that should have been removed, the ensuing lawsuits are likely to involve staggering numbers, demands for jail time and maybe the ultimate bankruptcy of the utility, which would be welcomed by many.
Many people are dead, thousands are homeless, the ecological damage is epic, and the rebuilding costs will stretch into the tens of billions. On the heels of three major hurricanes, this "new normal" defies the imagination.
The dominant question remains: Was this fire caused by an incompetent, negligent megacorporation badly running a centralized electric grid? And if so, what will replace PG&E and its obsolete grid as rebuilding begins?
The challenge runs parallel to that of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. There, Hurricane Maria took out the central electric grids entirely. In response, a movement has grown up to replace them with a decentralized network of locally controlled solar panels, wind power and biofuels. Power would be generated and distributed at the community level. To the extent that a heavily revised and downgraded central grid might be useful for large wind and solar farms, its role in a global-warmed world would be as a backup for a decentralized, community-based generation.
Thus begins the campaign to rebuild the islands and Northern California along Solartopian lines, with decentralized solar, wind, biofuels and geothermal energy transcending the old central grid and dumping the old central utilities into the compost heap of history.
As Northern Californians stagger under the shock of deaths, toxic air and ecological and property damage, the debate may seem premature.
The challenge remains: How do we avoid the next global-warmed ecological holocaust? Sommer hopes for "a collaborative design process where cities and their neighborhoods come together to map the architecture of their own power systems."
But one thing is certain: Their solutions will not include transmission poles that fall over in moderate winds, possibly sparking bone-dry brush left uncut.
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