https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/wildfire/marshall-fire/marshal-fire-lawsuits/73-d134f663-565e-4390-abe3-3b5b62ecdaa9

snip...

The fire destroyed more than 1,000 homes and killed two people. The wildfire erupted late the morning of Dec. 30, 2021, and was fueled by hurricane-force winds as it raced across the county.

The investigation concluded that an intentionally set trash fire on property owned by a religious group known as Twelve Tribes was the initial point of origin for the Marshall Fire.

Roughly 40 minutes after that fire ignited, a second blaze began nearby, sparked by hot particles discharged from an Xcel Energy power line at the Marshall Mesa Trailhead, the investigation found.

Killing thousands of cattle. He's still assessing the loss.

and monitoring of the power generation sources.

... then a few large electric companies?

A tiny electric company might have better safety standards than a huge regional electric company, but it could also be much worse. I think much worse is the more likely scenario.

Small town U.S.A. tends to be a pretty wretched place. I can easily imagine how locally owned power generation and distribution systems could be equally wretched.

Poorly designed and maintained electrical equipment will start fires no matter who owns it. Random Bob's locally owned and operated solar farm isn't fundamentally any less dangerous than a huge electric company.

through huge, high-voltage lines. There would be far fewer transmission stations. An outage in a huge regional energy supply grid can affect tens of millions of customers, while outages in small distributed generation grids would be far smaller, and possibly more easily repaired.

You do raise valid points, though.

Xcel Energy brake out the check book.

Weather forecasts are pretty accurate a day or so in advance.

Better a planned electrical outage than an unplanned inferno.

The fact that the power was out in Lahaina and Hawaiian Electric turned it back on has not been a prominent part of the company’s own narrative of the disaster, but could play a significant role in the company’s future, especially as it faces a barrage of lawsuits for its role in sparking the blaze.

https://www.civilbeat.org/2023/11/the-power-was-out-before-the-fires-started-then-hawaiian-electric-flipped-the-switch/#:~:text=The%20fact%20that%20the%20power,role%20in%20sparking%20the%20blaze.

...gotta have electricity...and it can kill you if you're not careful.

I guess you could say that about quite a number of things.

https://russblib.blogspot.com

Having grown up in a house that had wires running along the backs of houses, which did seem to minimize downed lines (although the houses were densely built too), my current townhouse has the wires run underground, although at some point they come up to poles somewhere to get to a substation. That still limits the potential for trees/branches/snow/ice loads taking out a wire. Meanwhile my sisters are in older suburban houses with wires strung all over and constantly getting downed.

But I think anywhere that is wildfire prone, they need to move those wires underground and figure out what to do with the transformers.

when stray voltage was such a problem for farmers. They decided a work around was to add a third line to capture stray voltage and that was cheaper than burying everything.

Buried lines are so much safer and require less maintenance, but I was told by the powers that be at my coop that they don't last as long in the ground.

It's going to be really slow and they're not getting everywhere they should.

I have a PG&E easement behind my house. 2 Years ago a dead tree fell against the lines to my house. Ended up taking the power out from 7 house, damaged my neighbor's awning and fence. This was after my neighbor had been calling them about it for a long time and me calling them about it for months straight.... We were lucky it happened in November, so we didn't have a fire. They still haven't cleared the deadwood back there. If they're not going to maintain the area in the easement, they should underground the lines.... but they won't.

We did get a rate increase though...

one of my sisters had her electric line ripped from the back of her house due to a neighbor's tree branch that cracked and fell on it (I think the tree was an Ash that was pretty much dead due to the Emerald Ash Borer). When the wire ripped off, it took out part of her siding with it. It was a mess to get it all repaired between the electric company and an electrical contractor who could repair some of the siding damage after rewiring. Way back when those houses were built in the '50s, the developers had the electric poles lined up along a creek at the base of their backyards on a township easement and trees had been planted along the creek to "hide" the poles. The wires were then swung some 125 ft across the yards to the homes.

Her neighbors across the street have their poles backing against the bottom of similarly tree-lined hill and their power goes out continually whenever there is some windy storm.