LOS ANGELES - As many as two million Californians were plunged into darkness over the course of about four hours late Friday in the first rolling outages to hit the state since the 2001 energy crisis.
The intense heat is hitting at an especially vulnerable time for the region with the pandemic forcing people to remain at home. California grid operators decided to call for the rotating outages around 6.30pm local time when they determined through a complex calculation that the state's power reserves had fallen below a critical threshold, said Ms Anne Gonzales, a spokeswoman for the California ISO.
"Unfortunately, because of the emergency nature of this, we weren't able to notify customers in advance," Mr Smith said in a telephone interview. The outages occurred for 60 to 90 minutes on a rotating basis through the utility's Northern and Central California service territory, he said. Sempra Energy's San Diego Gas & Electric utility said shutoffs were"widespread" across its territory in San Diego and southern Orange counties, affecting about 58,700 customers whose power were restored as of 8:0pm, an hour and 20 minutes after the outages started.
FIRE CUTOFFS The rolling outages in California also come less than a year after utilities in the region deliberately cut off power to millions of customers in an effort to prevent their power lines from igniting wildfires amid unusually strong winds - another consequence of increasingly extreme weather that has led to fires across the state in the past week.
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