, even after upgrades were made in the wake of the electricity system’s collapse in winter storms in 2021 that left 200 people dead.in advance of expected hurricane-force winds, a major focus of lawsuits filed against it by Maui County and other litigants.
Hawaiian Electric is hardly an outlier in the power industry. Companies routinely put off acting on warnings of wildfire risk made by their own safety teams and government agencies. Like other companies, Hawaiian Electric did not follow through on recommendations to better fireproof systems. Nor did it follow the lead of California utilities implicated in tragic wildfires that haveAdvertisement
When a power company is under siege, its entire region suffers. They are not like other corporations that can easily be replaced by competitors if they misbehave and get hit with financially crippling legal judgments. The cost of mistakes by power companies typically flows back to their customers and taxpayers.
“We have been planning our electricity systems to deal with problems we have dealt with in the past, not for the future,” said Melissa Lott, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “Requiring climate risk be considered in electricity system planning is something we can do. We have those technologies. They are accessible. We just have to require that they are used.”Some of those technologies are more costly than others.
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