Snakebit business

The timing couldn’t be worse for Ron Greenberg.

The frustrated owner of Ron’s Reptiles, the home-based business off Cohasset Road north of Chico, received notice last week that PG&E intends to shut off his power on Saturday (Nov. 30)—one of the busiest days of the year for small businesses—to replace an electric power pole in the area of his property at 44 Rock Creek Road.

The planned hours of interruption: 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Greenberg’s hours of operation: 10 a.m.-4 p.m.

Without power, Greenberg won’t be able to light his shop for customers. His portable generators and propane heater are just enough to keep his animals warm and run his well.

“I’m well aware of the safety concerns and issues,” he told the CN&R “It’s not so much what they’re doing as how they’re doing it.”

Greenberg says his frustration stems in part from his interaction with the utility about the upcoming maintenance work. Calls placed to a number on his shut-off notice went unanswered for days. A heated visit to PG&E’s downtown Chico office ended with him being guided out by security. The message he received from customer service: to contact the California Public Utilities Commission. In other words, “tough luck.”

It’s all become too much for Greenberg. He says he had already suffered significant business losses during PG&E’s previous public safety power shut-offs (PSPS) following the Camp Fire. His homeowner’s insurance also has doubled in the last year because of his assessed wildfire risk. And he’s grieving the recent loss of his wife and business partner of 41 years, Donna. Greenberg plans to shutter his shop in January, after more than 15 years in business—a move that he says has been sped up in the wake of PG&E’s intentional blackouts.

“This PG&E thing has just overwhelmed me,” he said. “We went through four … public safety curtailments, which, in my opinion, is a bunch of smoke, and I don’t mean from a fire.”

Everything in Greenberg’s shop is for sale, including more than 300 snakes, lizards, turtles and various products. His daughter Jamie says the family is leaving the state for Arizona.

“It’s done,” she said. “It’s like, you can’t live like this. It’s not fair to the animals. It’s not fair to a 72-year-old man who just lost his wife and is by himself. And there is nothing we can do about it. It’s just frustrating.”

Paul Moreno, a Chico-based PG&E spokesman, said the power pole is scheduled for replacement because of its condition, and the utility wants to avoid any unexpected problems.

“If the pole were to break, we’d have to do emergency repairs, which would take longer to complete than a planned job where we have [a] crew on-site with materials when the planned outage begins,” Moreno said. “We provided notice to our customers so they could make arrangements, such as using a generator.”

About 600 customers—mostly residential—will be affected in parts of Chico, Cohasset and Richardson Springs, he said. PG&E has been contacted by only one customer to change the scheduled outage time—Greenberg.

“We are sorry for any inconvenience caused by the planned outage, but with a planned outage customers can make arrangements ahead of time and we can prevent an unplanned power outage.”

Greenberg’s decision to close up shop illustrates the economic toll of PG&E’s intentional blackouts, which have been occurring more frequently following the Camp Fire. Rough figures have pegged losses in the billions of dollars, though experts caution those are just estimates and say more work is being done to understand the economic consequences of power outages.

Last month, Catherine Wolfram, a professor of business administration at UC Berkeley, analyzed the cost of the intentional PG&E blackout from Oct. 9-12 in a post on the school’s Energy Institute blog, finding estimated losses at about $1 billion. Wolfram conceded some calculations used were preliminary and crude.

“In short, we really don’t know what the right number is for the value of lost load,” she wrote. “And, to make good decisions about the steps we should take to avoid outages, we need better estimates.”

PG&E offered one-time on-bill credits of $100 for residential customers and $250 for business customers for the aforementioned large-scale PSPS for which the utility acknowledged rolled out with significant communications snafus.

In Greenberg’s case, intentional blackouts have meant spending over $10,000 on generators and their maintenance. He says he is prepared to keep his animals alive, but that’s it. His business loses money every time a power shut-off occurs. Last month, an intentional blackout tragically intersected with his wife’s death, resulting in thousands of dollars in losses.

Greenberg said his wife died in her sleep in the early morning hours of Oct. 5, before PG&E cut power later that night. In his distress, he failed to make arrangements to turn on a generator that powered circulation and exhaust fans in his rodent house, which is a small shack on his property. When he awoke the next day and saw the door to the shack was closed, his heart sank. More than 1,500 rats died because of the conditions inside. It was a significant loss that amounted to at least $13,100, he said.

“I’m old,” he said. “I am sad. I am frustrated. I am pissed off. If there’s any way to experience all the emotions at the same time, I think I’m going through that. You just don’t lose somebody after 41 years ….”

His eyes welled.