Q&A: California’s new electricity-blackout challenge
Associated PressBERKELEY, Calif. — As if the pandemic and economic recession weren’t bad enough, millions of Californians now face recurring threats of abrupt blackouts during a heat wave in the nation’s most populous state. California’s Independent System Operator, a nonprofit agency that manages the state’s power supply, ordered utilities to impose temporary blackouts for the first time in 19 years last Friday and did so again Saturday, pulling the plug on hundreds of thousands of customers for one to two hours. The blackouts seemed to catch government officials off guard, despite an ISO warning in January that the state could run low on power over the summer if several western states were to experience extreme heat at the same time — which indeed happened several days ago. “This has been a rude awakening for California,” said Najmedin Meshkati, a University of Southern California civil and environmental engineering professor who has studied the state’s power supply. It’s highly unlikely that the ISO would order rolling outages at the same time as a fire-prevention blackout, as demand will automatically have already been reduced, Borenstein said.
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