Heather Kelley counted 15 days the power was out last August, up at her place that’s perched atop the Santa Cruz Mountains along Skyline Boulevard.
“It makes our life just a living hell up here,” she said. “It’s absolutely terrifying.”
Kelley says it’s not just the inconvenience of being in the dark.
The Los Gatos resident, who is located in Santa Clara County, is used to handling a few outages here and there—and the occasional falling tree limb causing wires to snap.
But since Pacific Gas & Electric Co. began requiring eyes on the entire affected line before powering back up, and due to the utility’s recently implemented strategy of cutting electricity to areas it predicts could be in danger of wildfires sparking, Kelley and her husband decided it was time to purchase a backup-battery system.
For rural residents like Kelley and her husband, when an outage occurs, their ability to know what’s going on during an outage becomes greatly reduced.
That’s because when a blackout happens, they lose internet. The wired service provided by Frontier Communications is so slow in their area that they switched to getting data through Ridge Wireless, she said.
While the tower is on a back-up generator, there’s a lag before the company is able to fire it up, she added.
“There’s none on the landlines either,” she said, when asked if there are other backup systems in-place in her area.
And the cellphone infrastructure they dial into does have a day or so of battery backup, but with recent outages lasting multiple days, Kelley says that’s cutting it too close for comfort.
She’s signed up for the Reverse 911 program that lets people know when to evacuate if wildfires threaten their safety.
But she worries those alerts might not be able to come through if the power goes down; she believes it would be even harder for an older resident who struggles with technology.
Luckily, Kelley and her husband are able to afford a two-battery set-up for their solar array.
They settled on a Tesla Powerwall, 2022’s most requested home energy storage device according to Energy Sage.
But that’s when their difficulties started, as they went to the County’s Department of Planning and Development on June 1 to get the rubber stamp to install them.
“We’re hanging two batteries on the wall with an inverter,” she said. “It’s not complicated.”
They’d been hoping to have the lithium-ion cells up-and-running in time for August. But around Aug. 5, the installation company—which submitted the permit application—still hadn’t heard back.
“They knew it was in structural review but it had been there for a long time,” she said. “The vendor asked me to check on the permit.”
This was strange for Kelley, since a woman across the street—just over the Santa Cruz County line—didn’t face the same issue when applying for a similar permit.
“My neighbor got hers in less than two weeks,” she said. “There’s something wrong with our Building Department, like they need to hire more staff or something.”
And when her parents added a porch, and had to go through the Town of Los Gatos’ process, they got the thumbs up for entire architectural plans within two weeks.
That’s why she can’t understand what’s happening at the County.
“There’s something not right,” she said. “I’m not mad. I’m not playing a blame game. I’m just wondering why simple things are taking such a long time.”
Kelley decided to contact Supervisor Joe Simitian’s office about her Powerwall permit.
The staffer she dealt with was quite responsive, she explained.
“She emailed me back, and miraculously my permit came out of structural review that afternoon,” Kelley said, adding her vendor still had to wait for access. “It took about a week longer to update the system.”
When they could see the status, it indicated they needed to resubmit the permit.
According to Kelley, this was due to a couple minor elements.
“It’s just wording issues,” she said. “It’s like, oh yeah, hurry up and wait. It’s a nightmare.”
They were asked to remove some notes from the plan set and add details on the page about how the battery will be mounted, Kelley said.
“And that’s it,” she said. “I’ve been told that it’s a snowflake process from every single person in Santa Clara County.”
The County did not reply to a request for comment about the case as of press time.
