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The aftermath of the San Bruno explosion, photographed 10 days after a pipeline ruptured and ignited.
It looks like Pacific Gas & Electric’s shareholders are going to have to spend $2.25 billion on safety improvements because of a 2010 natural-gas pipeline explosion in the San Francisco exurb of San Bruno.
That was the record-breaking penalty proposed this week by staff of the California Public Utilities Commission. The agency’s five commissioners will have the final say on the proposal, and PG&E will have an opportunity to try to barter down that price tag. The company says it has already spent more than $1 billion on improvements since the fatal accident.
The penalty is being characterized by the agency and media reports as a “fine,” but while fines are typically paid into general government coffers, this $2.25 billion would be invested fully in improving the safety of PG&E’s infrastructure. And the money would need to come out of shareholder profits; it couldn’t be gouged from customers by hiking their bills.
The explosion on Sept. 9, 2010, killed eight people in San Bruno’s Crestmoor neighborhood, destroyed 38 homes, and ignited a fireball that burned for nearly an hour. The investigations that followed laid bare decades of contemptible disregard for safety by PG&E, which enjoys a near monopoly on electricity and residential natural-gas sales in much of Northern California. The gas pipeline had been fabricated in 1956 using substandard materials, and it had not been properly inspected or maintained in the decades since. It tore open along a poorly welded seam and exploded beneath homes in the early evening after pressure levels spiked following a control room power outage.
From a CPUC press release [PDF]:
The Safety and Enforcement Division says that the death toll, physical injuries, and extensive damage to homes by the pipeline blast is unsurpassed in its severity and PG&E’s [record of] failures is long and reprehensible.
“There is no amount of money that will bring back the eight people who tragically lost their lives in the pipeline blast or heal the lasting wounds to the people of San Bruno. All we can do is make sure such a tragedy does not happen again. I listened to legislators and the public and determined that every single dollar available from PG&E should go straight to efforts that will ensure safety,” said [CPUC Safety and Enforcement Division Director Jack] Hagan. “The recommendation is what the Safety and Enforcement Division believes is the maximum financial penalty that can be imposed on PG&E shareholders without compromising safety. This is a penalty far greater than the CPUC, or any other state regulatory body, has ever assessed.”
San Bruno had called on the CPUC to impose a steep fine and channel much of it to mandated safety improvements. From ABC7:
“They blew up our city. Eight people were killed, a whole neighborhood destroyed,” San Bruno Mayor Jim Ruane said. The city’s lawyer says the dollar amount was arrived at by calculating safety violations dating back to when the faulty pipe was installed in 1956. Every day the utility was in violation counts.
“The potential penalties in this case, if you took all of the violations over the half century, we’re talking about, it’s roughly on the order of several hundred billion dollars,” lawyer Steven Meyers said. “We’re only asking for $2.25 billion.”
“The company has already paid a very heavy price and I think numbers like you mentioned are just unrealistic,” [PG&E CEO Tony Earley] said Monday. In a rare chat with local media, the PG&E Chairman and CEO said shareholders have already paid more than $1.5 billion in gas safety improvements and if the penalties are as high as San Bruno wants, it will be bad for business and bad for ongoing safety investments.
“I don’t have that money sitting in the bank. I’ve got to go out and raise that money from shareholders who’re willing to invest in the company and future,” he said. “I don’t write them a letter and say, ‘Please shareholders, send me $1,000 each.’”
Oh, heavens no, Tony. Why should shareholders be on the hook for a company’s deadly profiteering?
John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who
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The Nelson Dewey coal plant along the Mississippi River will be shut down.
Wisconsinites will be breathing a lot easier after another coal-fired power plant is shuttered and two more are overhauled to reduce air pollution.
The coming improvements are courtesy of the EPA’s latest legal victory over polluting coal-plant operators. The EPA and the Sierra Club reached a settlement with Wisconsin Power and Light Company and other utilities following allegations of Clean Air Act violations.
From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
Under the settlement, filed in federal court in Madison on Earth Day, the utilities will be assessed a civil penalty of $2.45 million for alleged violations of air pollution laws over the years. …
But the big-ticket item in the settlement is the nearly $1.2 billion the utilities are spending to keep the largest of the coal plants operating by adding more modern pollution controls. …
By agreeing to stop burning coal at the Nelson Dewey plant in Cassville and two of the three boilers in Sheboygan, that means 590 megawatts of coal will be retired, or the equivalent of one large modern coal plant.
Statewide, including other coal plant settlements, the Sierra Club estimates that over 1,500 megawatts of coal power have been retired, or about 17% of the state’s fleet of coal plants.
“Over the last several years, Wisconsin has effectively begun to transition away from our oldest, dirtiest sources of coal-powered electricity and made way for 21st-century clean energy technology,” said Jennifer Feyerherm, a Sierra Club organizer, in a statement. “Today’s settlement marks yet another victory for clean air and healthier Wisconsinites.”
The EPA says the new settlement agreement will save lives, prevent lung and heart disease, and reduce haze and acid rain.
As David Roberts has explained, it’s not only pollution laws that are causing problems for coal in the U.S. Coal just isn’t as economical as it used to be. It’s cheaper to burn natural gas nowadays, and prices of solar and wind power have also been plummeting.
Too bad Wisconsin has been lagging behind in wind energy. Time to start ramping that up.
John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who
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It’s a good news day for peer-to-peer car-sharing, and those hideous and somewhat disturbing furry pink mustaches I keep seeing around San Francisco.
The detachable pink mustache alerts ride-seekers that this ride is a Lyft.
Today the California Public Utilities Commission said it has reached an agreement with Zimride, the parent company of fast-growing California ride-share purveyor Lyft, to suspend a cease-and-desist notice and $20,000 citation against the company. The PUC is still reviewing its regulations on car-sharing programs in the Golden State and hasn’t yet reached similar deals with Uber or Sidecar, which are technically still outlaws, though they don’t have the creepy mustaches to match.
This was good timing for Lyft, which announced this morning that it would be expanding to Los Angeles neighborhood by neighborhood in an attempt to cover all that concrete sprawl. And it’s not just Lyft that has its sights set on bigger and better car-sharing markets. From Techcrunch:
The move into L.A. marks the first expansion market for Lyft, which became available to riders in San Francisco last summer. To expand into Southern California, the company sent a team to recruit drivers and build the initial community infrastructure in the city. That means interviewing drivers, inspecting their cars, and generally attempting to instill the Lyft culture into the new market. …
Lyft isn’t the only ride-sharing service that is looking to broaden its footprint. San Francisco-based competitor SideCar recently launched its service in the Seattle area, and is looking to expand even more aggressively in the coming months.
The more car- and ride-sharing companies prosper, the more pressure they can put on regulators to let them go about their business, especially if they aren’t clearly and directly taking a bite out of established taxi cab business.
Assuming car-sharing can stay, you know, legal, there are encouraging signs that smaller, peer-to-peer companies can compete with the big boys. For all the hand-wringing car-sharers did over Avis’ purchase of Zipcar earlier this month, peer-to-peer car-share start-up Getaround has twice as many cars on the road in Portland as does Zipcar.
“Anybody who’s been sort of watching the company can see that we’ve been pretty focused on building supply,” said Steve Gutman, a spokesperson for Getaround.
When Avis bought Zipcar, it emphasized that the deal would bring more cars into its network. But with peer-to-peer sharing, supply can be ramped up all the more more easily.
Peer-to-peer sharing still has a ton of untapped potential, so long as regulators let the cars keep rolling. I’d prefer to take mine without that hideous mustache, though, thanks.
Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for
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Presented for your consideration, two views of how the United States should develop and evolve its energy policy.
In an interview with USA Today (yesterday), outgoing EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson railed against obstructive Republican members of the House, and trumpeted the agency’s work on fighting climate change during her tenure.
Climate change is “a simple scientific statement,” said Jackson, who was in San Francisco on Tuesday to tour the city’s new energy-saving Public Utilities Commission building. She said the EPA’s so-called “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases pose a public threat, upheld despite court challenges, has enabled the agency to use the Clean Air Act to start reducing their emissions and “help businesses to look forward to a different future.” …
There’s still a way to go, she acknowledged. She said the nation has to get to the point of accepting scientific evidence. She cited the EPA’s recent rules that set stricter standards for fine particle or soot pollution, which were based on EPA research — done at the request of the National Academy of Sciences — showing that soot is a cause of premature death. “And yet you have people argue about whether soot standards are beneficial,” she said.
Another challenge, she said, is Congress. Jackson repeatedly tussled with congressional Republicans and the fossil-fuel industry over anti-pollution regulations. “One of the questions everyone is asking themselves is whether the U.S. House of Representatives is actually going to reflect the will of the people on a lot of these issues, and the will of the people is awfully clear.” But people in Washington continue to argue about them “and that’s not good for our country,” she said.
Speaking of people in Washington, this morning the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Thomas J. Donohue, shared his bold vision for the future of America. To summarize that vision: Imagine if Ward Cleaver had been an oil industry executive. From his remarks:
We have more oil, gas, and coal than any other country and we are now the largest single natural gas producer in the world. We are now in a position to export liquefied natural gas and coal, and thus reducing our trade deficit and bringing billions of dollars into the United States. The abundance of affordable natural gas is attracting good manufacturing jobs back to America, particularly in the chemical and steel industries.
All of this adds up to a lot of jobs, growth, improved national security, and more revenues for government. …
To achieve these great benefits, we need to safely open up new land to exploration. We’ve foolishly locked away too much of our resources on land and off our coasts.
We need a predictable and fair regulatory environment. The federal government shouldn’t pick the winners and losers or subject energy projects to endless and duplicative reviews. Such roadblocks have stymied vital projects like the Keystone XL Pipeline, which must be built. We should stop EPA’s senseless and ideologically driven battle to ban the production and use of coal.
One of these people is staying in Washington to advocate his agenda. One of them, beaten down by the process, is leaving.
State of American Business, Remarks by Thomas J. Donohue President and CEO, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Chamber of Commerce
EPA head calls climate-change shift a proud milestone, USA Today
Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.
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Lisa Jackson blasts D.C. on her way out, while Chamber of Commerce shrugs and lobbies
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