Planck Vision Systems manufactures thermal imaging solutions for portable inspection and 24/7 monitoring of commercial applications including: Early Fire Detection, Manufacturing, Substations & Tunnels, Electrical Panel/Cabinets, Storage Facilities, Data Centers and Elevated Body Temperature Screening. Our company is headquartered in Santa Barbara CA, the capital of infrared sensing technologies in the United States. Founded in 2020, our design team has worked together for more than 15 years on thermal/visible camera systems and on products that are currently distributed worldwide.We specialized in working with our customers to meet the unique thermal imaging needs of their clients. Our proven systems have been installed globally in commercial applications for energy production and distribution, food production, transportation, industrial automation, and elevated body temperature (EBT) detection.
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This PG&E Saratoga substation was put out of service on Christmas Eve by a fire. Photo by Drew Penner.
Around 21,000 customers were without power in North Santa Clara County after a Pacific Gas and Electric substation in Saratoga caught fire and belched black smoke into the air on Christmas Eve.
PG&E learned about the emergency at its facility at 12975 Glen Brae Dr. at 8:25am, which it said was responsible for cutting power to 16,500 of those customers. The rest were likely storm-related, the company noted.
“We responded to reports of a fire,” said PG&E spokesperson Stephanie Magallon, adding the blaze went out by itself while crews were on site—adding the company was successful in getting electricity working again many affected residents quickly. “We’ve been able to restore the majority of those customers.”
She said, by around 11:30am, just 2,000 of these customers remained without power.
PG&E later said it was able to get power restored for the rest by noon.
The cause of the fire was an equipment failure, but other than that, it remains under investigation, Magallon said, adding that it’s too soon to say whether the San Francisco outage of last weekend (which was also related to PG&E substation infrastructure) or this smaller one were caused by the stormy weather.
Bill Sullivan is one of the Saratoga residents who lost power.
“Maybe the transformer got overloaded,” he speculated. “It’s traditional.”
At the time he was sitting at home looking at the PG&E outage map on his phone, curious about another electricity failure in the area.
“Then, I heard the boom and the power went out,” he said. “When you live near a substation like this, you get used to it.”
He opted to travel by bike to a neighboring city to run an errand.
“I rode to Cupertino to buy groceries,” he said, noting this took him about 20 minutes.
His power had already been restored by 11:30am, he said.
By 12:40pm, there were still around 2,700 PG&E customers without power, the company reported.
That included 750 in Sunnyvale, 280 in Saratoga, 1,200 in Los Gatos and 155 in Cupertino.
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Planck Vision Systems manufactures thermal imaging solutions for portable inspection and 24/7 monitoring of commercial applications including