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An executive spokesperson for PG&E tried to reassure the Pleasanton City Council and residents this week that the company is doing everything it can to address the complaints coming from residents who have been experiencing unexpected and prolonged power outages.
Jake Zigelman, the vice president of the Bay Area region at PG&E, is one of the utility company’s senior leaders who focuses on regional operations. He was also the main person who spoke during Tuesday’s City Council meeting, as he went over the main causes of the power outages, what the company has done in the past few months to address those causes and what it plans to do in the future.
“The reliability you all have experienced is not what it needs to be,” he said. “It needs to be improved, it hasn’t met the standard we’re shooting for and I know it hasn’t met your expectations.”
In the past, residents — mostly those who live in the Ruby Hill or the southwest areas of Pleasanton — have spoken out about power outages negatively affecting their lives because they are left without electricity for hours on end.
Just the following morning after the meeting, there was another notable power outage on Foothill Road from Muirwood Drive to Castlewood Drive.
According to Zigelman, the average duration of power outages in Pleasanton over the past year was three hours — the maximum duration of a power outage was about 23 hours, he told the council.
But apart from the duration of each outage, residents were also concerned about the frequency of these outages, especially during the hot months. One resident previously told the Weekly power outages are typically expected to happen now during the hot months and that they can occur as much as three times in one week.
Pleasanton resident Laura Danielson, who lives in north Pleasanton, said during public comment at the council meeting that she was “at her wits end” after having to deal with six power outages since May and having to deal with all the lost food and medicine that came with those outages.
“It’s such a severe quality of life issue,” Vice Mayor Julie Testa said during the meeting.
And after some record-breaking heat this summer, Testa and others on the council said they heard from a number of residents across the city who wanted to see action being taken, which is what led to the public update on all the work PG&E has completed and what it has planned for the city in the coming years.
“Not only are they doing all the work they just described but they’re also advocating for us,” City Manager Gerry Beaudin said. “I have heard from you all as selected representatives, we’ve heard from members of the community, their frustrations, (and) we’ve been able to sit down and turn that into a productive result and a plan for Pleasanton.”
Zigelman started off his presentation looking at the past 12 months in Pleasanton and said that there have been 58 unplanned outages across the five main power circuits in Pleasanton. He said PG&E did also see significant outage activity during the late June and early August timeframe.
He said 60% of the outages this year were related to overhead equipment — 55% of those outages were vegetation related while the rest were related to third party damages, animals that got into equipment and equipment failures.
The other 40% of outages, Zigelman said, were related to underground equipment failing.
He also acknowledged the record heat the Tri-Valley experienced this summer which forced PG&E to enable certain wildfire preventative measures and said the reason for the outages actually had to do with Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings (EPSS).
Sarah Yoell, PG&E executive director of government affairs and community relations, told the council that EPSS are settings — which are in high fire-risk and surrounding areas — that the company implemented to reduce wildfires.
“They allow our lines to automatically turn off power within a tenth of a second,” she said. “If anything hits the line, we turn the power off. The problem with that is that we then have to patrol the lines to make sure that it’s safe before we turn it on.”
She said residents might be used to Public Safety Power Shutoff outages, where they get advance notices of the shutoff and have enough time to prepare, but with the new enhanced powerline safety outages, there’s no time to prepare because the outages are automatic.
“Something has possibly hit the line and we need to make sure that it’s safe,” she said. “That is one of the things that has been causing some of the outages that have been happening in Pleasanton.”
Zigelman said one of the main things that PG&E has been doing over the last few months is moving customers away from high fire risk area EPSS protected circuits to circuits with the reduced fire risk and lower EPSS exposure.
“The more that we can remove customers from that EPSS scope … the better,” he said. “The duration of those EPSS outages (are) largely driven by that patrol time.”
Zigelman said EPSS outages that occur in the evening force PG&E workers to wait until the next day to address them because they need to patrol that line to the end, which they can’t do until they have daylight.
“So now you have an overnight outage that gets patrolled in the morning and then pretty quickly restored but because it’s an EPSS outage … the protocol is that you need to patrol that all the way and you need daylight to do it,” he said.
Apart from that, Zigelman said the company has recently replaced thousands of feet of deteriorated cables along the west and southwest power circuits and has completed 70 proactive maintenance projects across the entire power grid in Pleasanton to repair and replace equipment.
He also said critical operating equipment and damaged equipment across the grid has also been replaced.
Other work Zigelman said has been completed includes vegetation-related work mostly in Ruby Hill — specifically cutting, trimming or identifying trees that need maintenance. He said hundreds of other trees in the city have also been identified for maintenance work.
But that is just the beginning of all the work PG&E has planned for the city.
“There is work underway, there has been work underway for the last several months that will continue for years and never stop,” Zigelman said. “The grid needs to be reinvested in every single year.”
He said next year the company is aiming to install an underground device to remove about 3,000 customers from EPSS exposure and that in 2026 they are aiming to install three EPSS protection devices in Ruby Hill to reduce exposure to those settings as well.
Some of the longer-term plans PG&E has for Pleasanton, Zigelman said, are replacing cables in the northern parts of the city so that power can be restored quicker during future outages.
Frankly, I’m tired of hearing excuses. PGE needs to start tracking & sharing reliability data. I would like to see downtime data for each of the circuits (failure timestamp, restoration timestamp); calculated uptime % (computer industry uses uptime for past period, usually a year / a year & expressed as a percentage, so 99.975 or something like that). Ideally, this information should be shared with each customer about their account experience. The PUC & PGE needs to be explaining how rate increases are going to improve customer experience in a quantifiable manner.