Oregon’s largest electric utility is prepared to cut power in some areas to prevent wires from sparking fires in dry and windy conditions this summer, Bloomberg reported. Portland General Electric Co. is focused on safeguarding its grid to reduce wildfire risks and would only interrupt service to customers as a last resort, CEO Maria Pope said. “We focus much more on a daily basis on how we prevent having to do power-safety shut-offs,” Pope said. “Should there ever be circumstances like we were faced with last year, or could be faced with this season given the drought conditions throughout the entire West, obviously shutting the power off is one of the tools we have.” Cutting power to prevent fires is a relatively new and controversial practice that has spurred investigations in California, where utilities defend outages as necessary amid increasingly extreme weather. The state’s utilities say shut-offs must be used until they can sufficiently harden electric grids by covering service lines, strengthening poles or even burying wires. PG&E Corp. in Northern California has been using power cuts to prevent wildfires for several years after its equipment was blamed for starting devastating blazes that drove the utility into bankruptcy. Pope said Portland General has done only one preventative outage before, cutting off 5,000 customers in September as wildfires burned near Mt. Hood. The Oregon Public Utility Commission adopted temporary rules in May to improve communication between utilities and customers around shut-offs.
