Page 115 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

Together we do what we couldn’t do alone
equipment picks up the load,” says
Ray. “In Grass Valley, we had four
2 MWs and one 1 MW tied to-
gether at their substation, acting
like one big generator. Those five
generators were paralleled togeth-
er, communicating with each other
through their control panels. Our
techs were onsite monitoring the
load so if it dropped down too low
in the middle of the night, they
could adjust the load to keep it from
crashing. And if it started peaking during the day, they were there to drop the load back off. They also managed the fuel because each of these generators uses 70–80 gallons of fuel an hour and needs refueling every twelve hours. So our technicians were there 24/7.”
OPTICS VERSUS SAFETY
From the public’s standpoint, the utility still had a lot of refining to do. One USA Today article described the approach as “more sledgehammer than scalpel.”3 And while that may be true in those early PSPS events, the complexities of the challenge were staggering. What the public needed to consider was the gravity of the choice—public inconvenience for a few days or more death and devastation like in the Paradise fire. It all comes down to optics versus public safety.
Peterson had 38 MW of prime power in Oroville, CA for the North Complex fire in September 2020
Peterson power modules on rent for utility power
The utility’s calculus for launching a PSPS event involves the red flag conditions of low humidity, high temperatures, and high winds. Whenever any of these factors ap- pears in the forecast, the utility will cut off power to vulnerable sec- tions of the grid. And that, in turn, affects everything downstream of the shutoff point. Often the cause is not visible to those in the affect- ed area. “In some cases, you’ll have
a PSPS event and everyone in that neighborhood is upset because the wind is not blowing and the conditions don’t look hazardous,” explains Schalk. “What they don’t understand is that the transmission lines from the substation to their neighborhood may be on the other side of the hill where it’s extremely windy, so they don’t see the lines slapping around and the potential danger.”That’s exactly what happened for the first two PSPS events. There was no fire anywhere near the outage areas. Instead, high winds and high temperatures were the red flags that prompted those shutoffs.
3 Della Cava, Weise, Paluch, “California power outage”, USA TODAY online, October 9, 2019
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