What is a PG&E Public Safety Power Shutoff, and how do I keep my power on?

A Public Safety Power Shutoff, or PSPS, is a planned outage that PG&E and the other California utilities call when fire-risk weather is severe. When fuels are dry, humidity is low, and winds are high, an energized power line that gets hit by a branch or blows down can throw a spark into dry vegetation and start a wildfire. A PSPS removes that ignition source by de-energizing the lines until the weather passes.

It is a preventive outage, not a fault. Nothing is broken, the power is off on purpose. PSPS events are concentrated in fire season, which in the Bay Area generally runs from late summer into fall, but they can be called any time conditions line up.

PSPS is part of PG&E's Community Wildfire Safety Program, created after utility equipment was tied to several major California wildfires. A related program, Enhanced Powerline Safety Settings, also trips power off faster when a line is disturbed, which causes shorter unplanned outages during fire season on top of the planned PSPS events.

The logic is blunt but sound: a line that is not energized cannot start a fire. During a red flag wind event, the chance that a tree limb, blown debris, or a downed conductor ignites dry brush is high enough that PG&E would rather turn the power off than take the risk.

That is small comfort when your home goes dark for two days, but it explains why these outages are wider and longer than a normal repair. After the wind dies down, crews have to patrol every mile of affected line, often by vehicle and by air, and fix any damage before power can be safely restored. That inspection step is why a PSPS can outlast the weather that triggered it.

PG&E aims to notify customers about one to two days before a PSPS, with updates as the forecast firms up. Those alerts only reach you if your contact information is current, so the single most useful thing you can do is sign up for PSPS address alerts and confirm your phone, text, and email on your account.

You can also look up your address on PG&E's outage and PSPS tools to see whether you are in the scope of an active or forecast event, and watch the outage map during the event itself. Households that depend on power for medical equipment should enroll in the Medical Baseline program, which adds extra notification and support.

Knowing a shutoff is coming matters more than it sounds, because it gives a battery system time to top off before the grid goes down, which is covered below.

Most PSPS events are restored within about 24 to 48 hours after the dangerous weather passes and inspections clear, but a large or repeated wind event can keep power off for several days. You do not control the timing or the duration. What you control is whether your home can ride through it.

This is the heart of the problem. A short outage is an inconvenience you can wait out. A multi-day outage during a heat wave or a smoke event, with no refrigeration, no medical equipment, no well pump, and no internet, is a different kind of problem, and it is the scenario worth planning a backup system around.

Even without a battery, a few steps make a PSPS easier to get through. The goal is to cover the essentials for the longest outage your area realistically sees.

Not on their own, and this surprises most people who already have solar. Grid-tied solar is required to shut off when the grid goes down, a safety rule that protects the utility crews working on the lines. So a roof full of panels will not run your house during a daytime shutoff by itself.

For the panels to keep powering the home when the grid is gone, the system needs a battery and an inverter that can run independently of the grid. With those in place the home can island, meaning it disconnects and runs as its own small grid. Our guide on whole-home backup during outages walks through exactly how that works.

Both can keep your lights on, but they fail in different ways during a multi-day event. A generator depends on fuel, and a wide PSPS can take down the gas stations near you, so a long outage turns into a fuel-hunting problem. Generators also need manual starting, regular maintenance, produce noise and exhaust, and create a carbon monoxide risk if run too close to the house.

A home battery runs automatically the instant the grid drops, makes no noise or fumes, and recharges from your solar every sunny day of the outage, so it does not depend on a fuel supply that may be unavailable. The tradeoff is that a battery holds a fixed amount of stored energy, which is why sizing and daily solar recharge matter so much.

Runtime depends on three things: how much energy the battery stores, how much power your home draws, and how much the sun recharges it each day. As a rough guide, around 30 to 60 kWh of storage gets most homes one to three days of whole-home backup, and a sunny outage can stretch that much further because the array refills the battery daily. A standard Potrero design uses about 28.6 kWh and scales up when multi-day resilience is the priority. Our article on how long home batteries last covers the storage side in more depth.

Because PG&E usually warns of a PSPS a day or two ahead, a battery system can pre-charge from the grid before the shutoff so you enter the outage at or near a full charge. Walking into a planned outage full, then recharging from solar each day, is what turns a battery from a few hours of backup into multi-day resilience.

Potrero treats whole-home backup as the default design goal, sized from your PG&E interval usage and what must stay on rather than a generic battery count. A smart panel adds control, so during a long shutoff the system can prioritize and shed loads to stretch critical circuits like the refrigerator, medical equipment, heat, well pump, and internet.

The right backup target depends on where you live. Homes in parts of the Bay Area that see frequent, multi-day shutoffs may want more storage, while homes with rare, short outages may not. You can get an instant estimate from just your address, or schedule a design consultation to see what it would take to keep your specific home running through the next PSPS.