It’s that time of year again. Hot weather has been around for a few weeks already, and we all know what that means in (most of) California: brownouts, blackouts, and rolling electricity shortages, oh my!
The electricity in these parts just started getting flaky this week, but boy it’s off to a roaring start: I’ve witnessed three brownouts and two outright power failures already. How about you?
I’ve had 0. (North LA county).
None in the Bay Area. Why should we have any - Enron is kaput.
Ours flickered at home around 2pm today. Just enough to shut down the computer and screw up the clocks. Tivo and the microwave rebooted and all was well.
None in Santa Barbara. I don’t believe we ever had a rolling blackout here. I was up in Lompoc a couple of years ago during one. I was eating lunch in a Mexican place. Luckily they cook with glass so I had a very nice day time candlelit lunch.
We had a storm-caused outage back in March.
None (So. OC). Don’t really remember having a whole lot last summer. To be honest, I can’t remember the last one.
We had 'em back when I lived in Sacramento, but where I live now, not a one. During bad winter weather we might have some outages here and there, but summer is fine.
Of course, we never have warm weather and most people don’t have air conditioners. In Monterey? Ha! I want cold air, I open a window. I run my heat in August.
The power has flickered on and off a few times in the last few months. Other than that? Nothing unexpected.
A local power plant blew up and left the majority of the city without power.
My power was off this morning. I woke up just a little late, but since I couldn’t dry my hair, it was a wash. And since it was flickering last night, I don’t really think it was a car vs. pole thing as it usually is in my neighborhood. I don’t expect rolling blackouts until the weather gets much warmer though.
San Fernando Valley, none here.
Two hours after I wrote this we had a power outage. Serves me right. It was due to an equipment failure though and only lasted about ten minutes.
You posted this 6 hours after my power in Berkeley (and 29,000 other PG&E customers apparently) got restored after being out for 18 hours. Nothing to do with any AC loads, they still don’t know what caused it. We usually only have problems during winter storms, this one is a mystery.
None in San Diego I’ve been aware of.
I know there’ve been a few in San Francisco, and like half the East Bay went dark last night, but I don’t think there were any shenanigans.
We don’t get a lot of that up here. None so far this year. I live north of Sacramento; it’s plenty hot. Only not right now.
None around Sacramento, in fact I don’t remember any last year either.
As others have implied, those were artificially created problems.
I’m out in the country near Napa; no power problems since it warmed up. 2 outages a few hours long over the winter, and several outages a few minutes long.
None at home (San Gabriel Valley) or at work (downtown LA) so far. Although this thread reminds me of all the fun we had when the power went out in downtown last year due to (as I recall) human error trying to reroute transmission lines.
Even when the power came back on, nobody got any work done the rest of the day. It was just so odd.