Before the Bay Area could get excited about the possibility of snow on peaks with a storm expected to land this week, strong winds Tuesday pushed public agencies and the region’s major power provider to prepare for major challenges.

National Weather Service meteorologist Brayden Murdock said the first indicators of the system arrived Tuesday with a not-so-subtle increase in the winds. Gusts had been forecast to increase from 20 to 40 mph Tuesday.

As temperatures dip and moisture approaches late Thursday, it’s possible that snow could fall as low as 1,500 feet as the system passes through, according to the weather service. Murdock said the heaviest rain and precipitation activity is expected to be Thursday evening into Friday, with many areas seeing between three-quarters and 1.4 inches of rain.

He also said the chances of snow below 1,000 feet were low because the coldest conditions will occur when there is not much moisture going through the area.

“We’re gonna have winds, rain, snow,” he said. “There’s just gonna be a whole lot of hazardous stuff going on.”

That “hazardous stuff” is what Pacific Gas and Electric Co. was most concerned about as the storm approaches, a company representative told reporters at a news conference Tuesday.

“It is going to be a very windy day (today) and of course that means we can have tree limbs and other debris falling into our (power)lines,” said Teresa Alvarado, vice president of PG&E’s South Bay and Central Coast region. “The wind is always of concern to us.”

Alvarado said she expected power outages throughout the Bay Area to be “in the thousands,” and by 2 p.m. Tuesday, they already were.

About 23,000 PG&E customers in the region already had lost power, according to the utility. More than half of those customers were in the Peninsula, where 12,357 lost electricity.

About 4,900 customers in the South Bay and 4,330 in the North Bay lost power, as well. The East Bay mostly had been spared early Tuesday afternoon with only 142 customers without power, according to the utility.

Public agencies reported outages of varying sizes in Fremont, Palo Alto and Mountain View.

The new challenge for PG&E comes about seven weeks after more than 100,000 power outages were reported throughout the region during the historic storms in early January. She said the company was looking to improve on its service deployment measures during the next storm by stationing more service workers closer to the higher-risk areas such as the Santa Cruz Mountains and San Lorenzo Valley.

“This is your average, run-of-the-mill winter storm that we are preparing for,” she said. “The winds will be significant and they will cause impacts on our system, but we are prepared for this system.”

PG&E customers should be prepared for outages by fully charging their cell phones, flashlights and electric vehicles in case they’re without power for an extended period of time, Alvarado said.