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California’s Preemptive Blackout Portends a Dark Future
Climate change plays a role, but the power outages are chiefly the result of mismanagement — the kind we can no longer afford
The millions of people currently affected by power outages in Central and Northern California are struggling with inconvenience and worse, but at least they can take comfort in the fact that they’re not alone. In 2017, the last year with concrete data, 36.7 million Americans were affected by power outages that lasted on average for a little less than eight hours.
These blackouts were caused by hurricanes and snowstorms, floods and severe winds. Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands suffered the longest-ever blackout in U.S. history following Hurricane Maria in 2017. By one estimate, blackouts cost Americans $150 billion a year and can directly lead to injuries and even deaths. And they’re getting worse. Thanks largely to a string of natural disasters, the average duration of power outages nearly doubled between 2016 and 2017.
What’s happening may signal a new normal in an increasingly hot and crowded world.
Given that background, the fact that hundreds of thousands of customers in California are likely to be without power over the next few days is bad but far from unprecedented. Unlike nearly all the power outages in recent years, however, this isn’t the result of fire or a hurricane. It’s not because the equipment failed or the utility was hacked. Rather, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) — the largest utility in the largest state in the United States — decided to preemptively cut electrical service to millions of people out of a concern that unusually strong winds and dry conditions could cause live power lines to spark catastrophic wildfires. And that feels very different, in part because what’s happening may signal a new normal in an increasingly hot and crowded world.
In the narrowest sense, PG&E’s actions are justifiable. The utility has been found responsible for a number of wildfires over the past several years, including the devastating 2018 Paradise inferno that killed nearly 100 people. The billions of dollars in legal liabilities that resulted drove PG&E into…
