Losing Power During Harvest

Don’t know if this has been brought up yet. I can’t imagine every winery in the region has backup generators. Could it possibly happen that fruit won’t be able to be processed…and even worse cooling jackets on fermentation tanks won’t be working leading to overheated wines?

But PG&E needs to be able to punish customers.

Are they playing that game in your area, as well?

We get it here, too.

All of the above can and will occur without backups. There was a chronicle article recently and I was shocked at how many wineries were complaining that they aren’t prepared and do not have backups. I am probably biased because I have a neighbor whose primary business seems to be repairing generators for the dairies in Sonoma-Marin area, but if I were designing a winery myself I would make sure to have backup power of some sort as a necessary component. The winery I am with is prepared.

No game here.

80 mph winds in Atlas Peak, Napa combined with charged power lines resulted in catastrophic loss in Napa/Sonoma.

60 mph winds in Jarbo Gap, Butte County combined with charged power lines resulted in catastrophic loss in Butte County.

When PG & E was held liable (fair or not), the only reasonable thing to do to prevent such event from happening again is to eliminate charged power lines. The whole situation is a complete mess with thousands of people with no power. Hopefully the winds die down fast and there is minimal amount of time without power.

All three associated wineries have generators. We designed a full time, permanent generator for the new facility. This is the new reality. I even have a small generator at home that should power my chest freezer & wine fridge. Buying ice today to get the insulated cooler cold enough to keep milk & food temperature appropriate. Probably a good time to be in generator sales

Nothing like a collapsing infrastructure.

It has nothing to do with a collapsing infrastructure. It’s about climate. High winds uproot trees which blow into transmission lines and burn. 80 mph winds or greater play havoc.

3-5 days to fully restore service according to PG&E.

Then there is the issue of people hooking generators up to their homes without isolating the home from the power grid. They are essentially re-energizing the power lines. Workers are endangered by lines that are not dead.

If you are attaching a generator to your home you need to shut off your main breaker.

And like that PG & E website has been down for a few hours. Still down… Ugh! hitsfan

We can have a discussion about how much is climate related, and how much is the creep of human civilization out into rural areas more prone to fire. But the immediate cause is poor maintenance of power lines and the vegetation around them. If you run power lines through forested areas where trees can fall on them, it doesn’t matter what the climate does, eventually one of those trees will fall - or a power pole will fall - and start a fire. The long term solution isn’t turning off power on high fire risk days, it’s managing the power lines and their routes to minimize or eliminate the risk.

I have to believe there are other methods to safeguard against fire danger as well, such as monitoring the power lines to detect a failure, and turning off power to that part of the grid instantaneously.

It’s not reasonable to expect this is going to be the status quo going forward.

You get the sense that this is a short-term knee-jerk reaction, and we can certainly hope that more comprehensive and consumer friendly methods will be implemented at some point. I do know there was a huge contingent of out-of-state maintenance crews brought in to work on clearing vegetation for high risk power line locations, but the sheer amount of miles that will need to be tended to is difficult to imagine.

Then there is the issue of people hooking generators up to their homes without isolating the home from the power grid. They are essentially re-energizing the power lines. Workers are endangered by lines that are not dead.

If you are attaching a generator to your home you need to shut off your main breaker.

I hope everyone remembers to do this! It can be a real disaster for a lot of people if not. And possibly even defeat the purpose of shutting off the power in the first place.

It would seriously suck to have no power. But a fire would be worse.

Good luck to everyone up there and I hope everyone pulls through with no real hardship.

The drought years have killed millions of trees. Driving on highway 50 to Tahoe you see so many areas of brown trees (they were evergreens) it’s unbelievable. Giant swatches of dead trees. PG&E had a plan on cutting down many trees this year- didn’t even come close to the plan. They have used 4,000 employees to cut trees on over 1,000 projects this year. It takes special people (wild crazy) to cut trees over 200 feet tall. Many contractors falsified records. Oh yeah, PGE is not good at record keeping and verifying things- remember the San Bruno natural gas explosion? They have over 100,000 miles of lines. Trees should be 30 feet away from lines. Good luck with all of that!

Rerouting the power lines is part of the solution. Putting thousands of miles of high power lines underground would be a monumental task.

What surprised me is that they plan on keeping San Francisco and Marin Counties electricity going when all of the counties around them are shutdown. How are they routed through other counties and not endangering them is a mystery for me (Sonoma, mendicino, Napa).

I don’t remember the exact figures but a friend of mine that worked for PG&E told me their internal calcs had undergrounding every line in CA at 100 years & a trillion dollars.

I am ready. Have a propane stove, propane grill, wood burning fireplace, hose hooked up to the water holding tank that is fed from the well. I’ll be ok.

I put my wine in barrel yesterday, so no problem with fruit processing or temp fluctuation during fermentation. My guess is most wineries have been anticipating this.

But wait…is not this a problem for Victor to solve…and pronto?

20 billion for high risk, however this article shows just how expensive it is per mile.

I went through the map…this is an utter bullshit screw-you power turn off.

To top it off, they turned off their website, too!

I used to have a degree of sympathy for them, now they are simply punishing customers. maybe they want everybody so pissed off that the state won’t be able to find unbiased jurors.

In Chico, they actually have guards posted to protect their offices.

Guess we should all be planning how to get by without PG&E.

Yeah me too. Gassed up the generator (and bought MORE gas), propane cook stove, charcoal grille, stockpiled about 30 gallons of water for chickens, cats, dog, and some sensitive newly planted winter garden. I’m on a pressure tank so we won’t run any unnecessary water and hope pressure holds for 12+ hours. Generator will run fridge and freezer, coffee maker in the morning.
Scheduled to pick Pinot tomorrow in AV but receiving winery doesn’t have back up power, so we’ll see about that.

Have backup generator at wine storage and the winery. But the winery is in Calistoga… well, if a fire starts and I can’t GET TO the winery, then it does little good. More worried about smoke taint than any other outcome. Still 1/3 of Napa Cab is hanging out there. Power will be shut off here in Santa Rosa starting some time tonight. Phone towers might not work too! At least last time we could communicate by cell. This time, no guarantees.

I don’t think fire is imminent. PGE got nailed on the one 2 years ago and are being cautious.

As someone on the East Coast, it’s interesting to read these posts— all from Californians.

The issue back here is not fire but repeated and persistent outages. Trees and wind are the issue. Vegetation is lush and trees grow rapidly. I bought a weekend place upstate a year ago and, for several months starting at this time of year, every week I went up, there had been an outage, often for several hours. A few months ago, power was out for six hours after a rain storm with wind. If you live in the outer NY suburbs — let alone the Hudson Valley— a generator is essential. (LED flashlights are a godsend.)

This is Central Hudson Power. So PG&E is not uniquely bad.

And then there’s ConEd…