Many residents of Grand Terrace ask… why? when I look out my window I am sitting in the dark, and the entire San Bernardino Valley is lit up like Christmas.
Reliable sources have shared “all the power that comes from the windmills, the solar panels as far away as the Colorado River come into Grand Terrace at the station up on the bluff near Grand Terrace Road. From there the electricity is distributed out to Riverside, San Bernardino and even into Los Angeles. But we are near the central node. And that is the reason that they are protecting the central node. Unfortunately, we are sitting in the middle of it.
This information was confirmed when SCE Southern California Edison representative Mark Cloud gave a presentation and lengthy explanation with several apologies to the City of Grand Terrace at the council meeting held January 14th. “The problem with Grand Terrace is this. You happen to be in a serious cluster of utility infrastructure. You notice the transmission lines coming from behind us here. That is called West Endeavors transmission line, relatively new. It brings renewable energy from the desert to this region.
“That comes into the substations that are up here on the bluff above the 215 Freeway on Grand Terrace Road. That makes this area more sensitive to outages, and I wish it wasn't the case, but it is. If one of those substations goes down from fire or wind, or lightning What will have is a catastrophic fire. That goes beyond Grand Terrace and will reach all the cities around us that are fed by these substations. That is the complication that we are seeing here in Grand Terrace.”
Cloud explained “PSPS is a protocol “Public Safety Power Shutoffs” cpuc.ca.gov/psps/ is a tool to reduce fire risk.
“If we are going to completely reduce the fire risk in a really bad situation. We will preemptively de-energize a circuit. If we think your circuit and our equipment can start a fire, of course, the very last thing we want to do is to burn anything down in our system. So while this PSPS protocol is extreme and does shut you down for a while, and not all cities have been hit like Grand Terrace.” Cloud goes on to say “That doesn’t mean it excuses the length of time you've been out, the frequency with which you've been out. It doesn't! There is, though, an operational reason why this area has been hit harder than other areas.