Q&A: California's new electricity-blackout challenge

BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) — 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 specter of so-called “rolling outages" have loomed as a possibility every day since, and were narrowly averted Monday evening after “stunning" conservation efforts, according to ISO president Steve Berberich.

Conservation helped avoid threatened outages again Tuesday and may be needed again Wednesday to keep the power running. Temperatures are finally supposed to ease Thursday, but more outages could still loom if things heat up as much as some forecasts suggest.

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.

The outages prompted Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, to order an investigation into how the state's energy supply failed to keep up with demand. President Donald Trump also weighed in with a Tuesday tweet blaming the state's Democrats for the mess.

Here's a look at California's latest challenge.

Q: California had rolling blackouts two...