Tuesday evening, the utility said it had reduced the overall scope of the potential outage to roughly 150,000 customers in 16 counties.

A company spokeswoman said that five Bay Area counties had been removed from the potential shutoff list — Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Mateo and Santa Clara. Outside the immediate region, four other counties — Santa Cruz, Amador, Trinity and Colusa — were also removed from the outage list.

“If conditions change, forecasts change, we will pivot and change with the weather," said Mark Quinlan, PG&E's incident commander, Tuesday evening at a press conference.

PG&E plans to cut power to some areas as early as 7 a.m. on Wednesday. The utility will begin restoring power following a weather "all clear," which is expected Thursday at 8 a.m. for all counties.

By next year, PG&E hopes to dramatically reduce the frequency, scale and scope of the power shutoffs.

“It’s our commitment, and we’re making that commitment very publicly, that next year we will not be in this situation. That we’ll be able to protect the public in ways that aren't as terrribly disruptive as they are today," said PG&E’s Utility President Andy Vesey.

Here's the company's most recent list of counties facing blackouts and how many customers may be affected:





Original post, last updated 8:45 p.m. Monday

With a new onslaught of high winds forecast to sweep bone-dry Northern California starting Tuesday night, PG&E has notified customers in 25 counties it's likely to impose another round of "public safety" blackouts this week.

In an updated list of potential shutoffs released Monday evening, the utility said the preemptive power outages beginning early Wednesday could affect a total of 303,000 customers, or at least 750,000 people, in an area stretching from the Santa Cruz Mountains through the East Bay and North Bay to the northern Sierra Nevada.

The Bay Area counties the utility has put on notice include Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma. The shutoffs are designed to minimize the chance power lines will touch off wildfires during periods of heightened fire danger.

The potentially affected counties outside the Bay Area include: Butte, Colusa, El Dorado, Glenn, Lake, Mendocino, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, Santa Cruz, Shasta, Sierra, Sutter, Tehama, Trinity, Yolo and Yuba.

The precise timing of the shutoffs across the Bay Area remained unclear Monday evening.

The Marin County Sheriff's Office issued a Nixle alert saying a blackout could occur about 4 p.m. Wednesday, with the utility beginning to restore power after an "all clear" Thursday morning.

The Moraga Police Department put out a message saying that PG&E would begin to cut power at 9 a.m. Wednesday to a total of 18,584 customers in Lafayette, Moraga and Orinda.

The city of Berkeley tweeted that it was expecting a blackout early Wednesday in the southeastern corner of the city, in a hilly area near the Claremont Hotel. Later, the city said that all the affected addresses are actually in Oakland and that it was seeking confirmation of that from PG&E.