Utility reliance on diesel generation to power communities during wildfire-related power shut-offs has been an area of concern for regulators for a while now. PG&E deployed six such shut-offs last year and in January, Senior Vice President and Chief Risk Officer Sumeet Singh told regulators at a workshop on Monday.
Those outages affected 800,000 less customers as compared to similar events in 2019; while this was largely because of better and more granular weather forecasting capabilities, temporary generation, including microgrids, helped as well.
