Though there’s still no damned excuse for PG&E taking more than ten months to send someone out to investigate the noise source at the PG&E Poplar substation near my QTH, I did get a call last week after my second letter to PG&E’s CEO and my case being escalated to a supervisor in the customer call center, who then raised the issue with a handful of other supervisors. It shouldn’t be this hard to get someone to react at a public utility, but at least they finally did.
It turned out there had been some activity at the substation in an effort to resolve the problem between March 31 when the source of the trouble was confirmed, and when I finally got a call from someone who knew what was going on. Evidently PG&E has a fairly terrible communications problem when it comes to information moving between the people who actually work on the issue and the customer-facing call center and ticket tracking system.
The trouble has been isolated to the vicinity of a 230kV bus at the substation, though in the intervening weeks they’ve also power washed and cleaned up some 115kV systems. Evidently the trouble is that they cannot simply power-wash around the 230kV bus; to do so would risk a catastrophic arc flashover because of the sheer potential difference involved. (230kV is a LOT of electrical potential.) From the explanation I was given, it sounds like PG&E does not have a redundant system for this 230kV bus either. They can’t work on it without shutting it down, and they also can’t just shut it down to work on it– to do so would shut down power at the substation for everyone it serves.
Given the lack of redundancy, I asked how they do routine maintenance on this system just in general, and the answer could be summarized as “rarely, and at considerable expense.” The systems themselves are designed to have a very long MTBF, but on the occasions that they do need to shut them down, they have to plan it out months in advance, bring in a mobile unit of some kind (presumably either power generation or a busbar on a flatbed maybe?) to keep things working while the 230kV system is shut down for maintenance. This apparently happens only once every 4-5 years and can be a multi-million-dollar operation.
That said, all hope is not lost: they’re trying to book their infrared team to come out and image the system while it is under load to see if they can spot any “hot spots” which might be addressable without something as inelegant as a power-wash, and they’re also looking to work with their high-tech services team to see if there are other ways they might suppress the RFI and keep it from being a nuisance in our neighborhood.
But lets be very clear about one thing: what PG&E is doing at the substation, though it may be very inconvenient to fix, is still a violation of FCC rules. And it doesn’t matter if it inconveniences a handful of Ham Radio operators, shortwave listeners, AM broadcast enthusiasts, or a thousand people’s cell phones; the rules are the rules and they don’t distinguish by how many people are affected or how troublesome it may be to correct the root cause. (That said, I do believe I’ve observed a correlation between noise emanating from the substation and reduced signal quality of KRCB-DT on ATSC channel 5, but I need more data to confirm it.)
The PG&E supervisor promised to keep me better informed going forward as they continue to work on the problem, which is a very different attitude than what I got from the rest of the company between May 16, 2024 and May 16, 2025 (it was in fact one full year to the day between my opening of a case about the substation and receiving a call from a supervisor on Friday).
That’s what I know for now. More to come, I hope.