Why Southern California homes lose power on purpose.
The outages that hit Malibu, the Conejo hills, Topanga and the Palisades every autumn are not failures. They are a policy, and understanding it is the first step to deciding whether your house needs a standby generator.
Ask anyone who lives above Kanan Road or along the Malibu coast what happens when the Santa Ana winds come, and they will tell you: the power goes out, sometimes for days, and it goes out before anything has broken. That is not a utility struggling to keep up. It is a utility turning the power off on purpose, under a program called Public Safety Power Shutoff, and it shapes how County Line Electric wires houses across three counties.
What is a Public Safety Power Shutoff?
A Public Safety Power Shutoff, usually shortened to PSPS, is a deliberate de-energization of power lines by a utility during conditions that could start a wildfire: high winds, low humidity and dry vegetation. Southern California Edison describes it as a last resort used when the risk of its equipment igniting a fire is high, and the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates the investor-owned utilities, sets the rules the utilities follow when they call one. The lines stay off until the weather passes and crews have patrolled them for damage, which is why a shutoff that started in a windstorm can outlast the wind by a day or more.
The policy came out of the fires of 2017 and 2018, several of which were traced to utility equipment. The utilities now treat turning the power off as safer than leaving it on when their lines run through dry hills in a wind event, and the state has agreed. For the homeowner that means the outages are structural: they will happen every fire season, in roughly the same places, for as long as the lines run where they run.
Who gets shut off?
Not the whole region. A shutoff is called circuit by circuit, and the circuits that get de-energized are the ones that run through the areas the state maps as high fire hazard. The Office of the State Fire Marshal publishes the Fire Hazard Severity Zone maps that identify those areas, and in County Line's service area they cover most of Malibu, Topanga and the Santa Monica Mountains, the hills on the south and west edges of Thousand Oaks and Westlake Village, Calabasas and Hidden Hills, the Montecito foothills, the canyons of Bel Air and Brentwood, the Palisades and the Altadena foothills. If you live in one of those places, your circuit is a candidate for shutoff. If you live on the flat in the middle of the Conejo Valley, it mostly is not, though ordinary outages still happen.
Inside the City of Los Angeles the utility is the Department of Water and Power rather than Edison, and LADWP has its own wildfire mitigation plan and its own shutoff practice. The Palisades, Bel Air and Brentwood are LADWP territory. The practical effect for a homeowner is the same.
How long does a shutoff last?
Edison's own guidance is that customers should prepare for an outage that may last several days, because a shutoff has three parts: the wind event itself, the inspection of every de-energized line by crews on foot or in the air, and the re-energization, which happens in stages. A shutoff called on a Monday evening for a Tuesday wind event can leave a canyon without power until Thursday. Add the ordinary outages from equipment faults, storms and summer load, and a house in a shutoff zone will spend several days a year without utility power.
What stops working?
Everything electric, which in the hills means more than lights and refrigerators. Many properties above the valley floor are on wells or booster pumps, so the water stops. Septic systems with pumps stop. Electric gates stop, which matters when the reason for the shutoff is a fire you may need to leave ahead of. Garage doors, the network, cameras, medical equipment, air conditioning in a heat wave and the freezer full of food all go at once. Cell service can degrade as tower backup batteries run down.
What a standby generator does about it
A standby generator is a permanently installed engine on a pad beside the house, fueled by the natural gas line or a propane tank, connected to the electrical panel through an automatic transfer switch. When utility power drops, the transfer switch disconnects the house from the grid and starts the generator, usually within ten to thirty seconds, and the house runs on it until utility power returns and the switch hands back. The generator exercises itself weekly so it is ready. Properly sized, it carries the well pump, the gate, the refrigeration, the network and whatever else the load calculation included.
The sizing matters more than the brand. A load calculation adds up what has to keep running, and the pumps on a canyon property are often the largest item. The fuel matters too: natural gas where there is a main, propane where there is not, with a tank big enough for several days. And the location has to satisfy the manufacturer's clearances, the local building department and, in Malibu, the Coastal Zone review. County Line Electric installs Generac standby generators across the shutoff country of three counties and returns a written estimate within 24 hours of the site visit; the standby generator page walks through the process.
What else helps
A battery system with a critical loads panel can carry a smaller set of circuits for hours rather than days, and pairs well with solar, though it does not replace a generator for a multi-day shutoff on a property with pumps. Signing up for the utility's shutoff alerts gives you a day or two of warning. Knowing which circuit your house is on, which the utility's shutoff maps show by address, tells you whether to plan for this at all.
The outages in the hills are not bad luck. They are a known pattern with a published map, and a house can be wired for them.
If you are rebuilding after a fire, the generator belongs in the new service from the start; it is far cheaper there than retrofitted. If you are in an existing house in a shutoff zone, the decision is a load calculation and a site visit away.
Further reading
- Southern California Edison. Public Safety Power Shutoffs. www.sce.com/outage-center/outage-information/psps
- California Public Utilities Commission. Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS). www.cpuc.ca.gov/psps/
- California Office of the State Fire Marshal. Fire Hazard Severity Zones. osfm.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/community-wildfire-preparedness-and-mitigation/fire-hazard-severity-zones
- Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Wildfire mitigation and Public Safety Power Shutoffs. www.ladwp.com/
- California Contractors State License Board. Check a License. www.cslb.ca.gov/OnlineServices/CheckLicenseII/CheckLicense.aspx