Perception or reality? Palo Alto tries to calm anxieties over power outages - Palo Alto Online

Perception or reality? Palo Alto tries to calm anxieties over power outages - Palo Alto Online

As Palo Alto pushes ahead with an ambitious plan to upgrade its electric grid and convert homes and businesses from natural gas to clean electricity, city officials are bracing for a tough challenge: public anxiety over power outages.

According to a new report from the Utilities Department, a recent survey of about 400 customers showed that 80% or more of customers gave the city high ratings for providing consistent and reliable electric service. They did not, however, give Palo Alto high marks on how outages were communicated, according to the department.

“And very few customers would confidently state whether Palo Alto was ready to manage a major emergency, unlike at other utilities, where customers generally had confidence their utility was prepared,” the report states.

The sentiment is likely borne of recent experiences. Assistant Utilities Director Jonathan Abendschein noted the city’s record when it comes to grid reliability is superior to that of PG&E in its Peninsula division. A presentation that he shared with the council on Feb. 12 showed Palo Alto in the first quartile when it comes to reliability, with less than 75 minutes of service interruptions per customer annually in nearly every year since 2011. PG&E had been mostly in the second quartile, with between 75 and 150 outage minutes, until 2018, after which time the number spiked dramatically (exceeding 400 minutes in 2020) before dropping back to about 150 minutes in 2022.

Palo Alto’s recent record, however, is less than stellar. Last year’s wet winter raised Palo Alto’s outage minutes to nearly 150 minutes per customer as trees took out power lines during storms, disrupting service. And just last week, another storm took out power for about 3,000 customers in various neighborhoods, according to the Utilities Department.

“Those declines in reliability may have impacted perceptions,” Abendschein said.

Weather, however, isn’t the only obstacle to reliability. Aging infrastructure and staffing shortages both contribute to a loss of reliability, Abendschein said. Structural vulnerabilities also play a role in shaping perception. In February 2010, the entire city lost power for about 12 hours after a downed airplane took out the three lines that share one pathway and that connect Palo Alto to PG&E. While city officials have been talking intermittently about adding another pathway, those plans have not yet come to fruition.

To address these issues, the City Council is preparing to adopt later this year a new strategic plan for reliability and resiliency. The plan, which council members discussed on Feb. 12, calls for modernizing the electric grid, promoting new strategies for efficient electrification and evaluating emerging technologies such as solar storage and microgrids, among other strategies.

By far the biggest component of the plan is the city’s $300-million effort to upgrade the grid, a project that the city is launching this year and that it hopes to complete by 2030. The effort aims to both improve reliability and add capacity to the city’s grid, which currently cannot accommodate the council’s electrification goals.

The effort will include upgrading the 4 kV lines that were installed in 1967 with 12 kV lines, upgrading more than half of the 3,000 transformers in the city’s distribution system, replacing hundreds of poles so that they can support the heavier equipment and installing pad-mounted transformers in neighborhoods that have underground electricity.

“For this investment, the city will be able to enhance its reliability, modernize the grid to accommodate solar storage and other new technology, add enough capacity to enable the city to be electrified and potentially accommodate new resiliency solutions as well,” Abendschein said. “It’s an investment that will really put Palo Alto well ahead of other communities on the path to lowering emissions and future-proofing the electric system.”

For the council, the grid upgrade is a necessary prerequisite to its ultimate goal of carbon neutrality. While officials publicly promote electrification, the grid currently cannot handle widespread adoption of electric appliances such as space heaters and advanced electric vehicle chargers. The city’s most ambitious sustainability program at the moment is providing subsidies and on-bill financing for customers who want to replace their gas water heaters with heat pump water heaters.

“Right now, the only thing we can really add on from a customer standpoint is heat pump water heaters,” Utilities Director Dean Batchelor told the Utilities Advisory Commission earlier this month during its own discussion of grid modernization. “That’s about the only load we can pick and it’s a pretty small load that the system will be able to handle.”

While the council has yet to adopt the new strategic plan, members acknowledged that it will play a critical role in convincing the public that going fully electric isn’t just environmentally sound but also safe and reliable.

“There’s definitely a disconnect between perceptions of reliability and the reliability that we’re seeing, especially when compared to PG&E,” Mayor Greer Stone said during the Feb. 12 discussion. “I’m concerned that the only thing that’s really going to impact the perception is going to be a combination of time and our ability to make it through subsequent winters with little to no outages,”

Council member Vicki Veenker, who sits on the council’s Sustainability/Climate Action Plan Committee, concurred and called the new strategic plan “extremely important.”

“Our grid could be the biggest hurdle or the biggest enabler of our achieving our climate goals,” Veenker said. “And this plan is how we make it be the enabler not the hurdle.”

In addition to limiting power outages, the plan will also consider ways that the city can leverage solar batteries and vehicle-to-grid technologies that allow electric cars to effectively function like batteries. The current grid would struggle to integrate these technologies, according to Utilities Department staff. The system was designed for one-way power flow from generators to homes and businesses, according to a report from the department.

“Adding high penetrations of technologies like solar and batteries that can feed the grid instead of just consume from it can cause voltage drops or even conditions when power is flowing the opposite direction,” the report states. “Voltage drops can cause flickering lights and issues with electrical equipment, while reverse flows can be a serious issue because existing grid protection devices like fuses or voltage control systems are only designed to work when power is flowing one way, so two-way flow can create dangerous conditions.”

With the grid update, the city hopes to convert this liability into an asset. According to the report, the utility could provide price signals or education to get people to use energy at times when the grid is less crowded or less dirty.

“And if people consistently operate these technologies in a grid-friendly way — for example, charging vehicles or batteries mid-day or at night rather than in the evening when the grid is most heavily used — it could also mitigate the capacity impacts of electrification on the electric distribution system,” the report states.

Council member Pat Burt, who chairs the council’s Sustainability and Climate Action Plan Committee, called the new strategic plan a “big deal” and emphasized the importance of accommodating emerging technologies and “smart systems” that could make electric supply both more plentiful and more reliable.

“It’s a real transformation that’s occurring in this electrification field, where we’re not just saying to electrify in the future all we need to do is double the way we do things,” Burt said. “It’s an entirely new, innovative approach and the technology advances are happening in real time, one after another.”