Electricity: outages.

Existing law vests the Public Utilities Commission with regulatory authority over public utilities, including electrical corporations. Existing law requires the commission to adopt inspection, maintenance, repair, and replacement standards for the distribution systems of electrical corporations in order to provide high-quality, safe, and reliable service. Existing law requires the commission to conduct a review to determine whether the standards have been met and to perform the review after every major outage. Existing law requires the commission to require each electrical corporation to report annually on its compliance with those standards. This bill would require, if one or more customers served by an electrical distribution circuit experiences 4 or more discrete electrical outages, as defined, during a single calendar year, the electrical corporation that owns and operates that circuit to perform a review of that circuit to determine the cause of the outages and implement system improvements to reduce the anticipated risk of future outages on that circuit below the threshold level of 4 outages per calendar year. The bill would require the electrical corporation to make the findings of the circuit review, the scope of work expected to be performed to reduce the anticipated risk of future outages on that circuit, and the expected reduction in the risk of future outages resulting from that work available to the impacted customers and the city, county, or city and county in which the circuit is located. Under existing law, a violation of the Public Utilities Act or any order, decision, rule, direction, demand, or requirement of the commission is a crime. Because the provisions of this bill would be a part of the act and because a violation of the bill or a commission action implementing its requirements would be a crime, the bill would impose a state-mandated local program. The California Constitution requires the state to reimburse local agencies and school districts for certain costs mandated by the state. Statutory provisions establish procedures for making that reimbursement. This bill would provide that no reimbursement is required by this act for a specified reason.