Rolling blackouts hit as millions swelter
Downtown skyline is seen behind high tension towers from the East 4th street bridge along the LA river in Los Angeles, California on Sunday.
The agency running California’s power grid warned that millions of homes could be hit by rolling blackouts imposed on Monday to manage overwhelming energy demand caused by an extreme heatwave baking the state for a fourth straight day.
Officials for the California Independent System Operator estimated that peak electricity consumption on Monday would likely exceed available supply statewide by as much as 4,400 megawatts — roughly equivalent to the amount of power needed by 3.3 million homes.
A lapse of that magnitude would mark the most severe shortfall to strike California’s grid since 2001, the last time utilities in the state essentially rationed energy in the form of rolling blackouts, said Ralph Cavanagh, energy co-director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.
The controlled power disruptions, with alternating blocks of utility customers losing electricity for one or two hours at a time, are designed to prevent excess demand from triggering a more widespread collapse of the grid that could last days.
An earlier round of rotating outages this weekend affected around 408,000 customers of four utilities across California, more than half of them served by Pacific Gas and Electric Company.
