No Rolling Blackouts In California Thursday Evening, Grid Operator Says
SACRAMENTO (CBS13) – California's power grid operator said there would be no rolling blackouts Thursday evening after Pacific Gas and Electric announced earlier in the afternoon that multiple counties across the Sacramento region could see outages as high heat impacts the West.
"We have many tools to use before there would be the need for outages," a spokesperson for the grid operator told CBS13.
The California Independent System Operator (CAISO) said PG&E's announcement described "a process that has been in place that, should outages be called, the amount of energy reduced from the system would be shared by customers of all three investor owned utilities. Although PG&E described their process, in no way has the ISO activated that process."
Megan McFarland, a spokesperson for Pacific Gas and Electric, initially said the rolling outages could impact several counties, including Kern, Calaveras, Alameda, San Joaquin, Merced, Madera, Kings, El Dorado, Yolo, Yuba, San Luis Obispo, Marin, San Mateo, Sutter, Sonoma, San Francisco, Monterey, Solano, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, Tuolumne, Contra Cost and Fresno.
PG&E said approximately 121,000 customers statewide would have see their power shutoff between 7 and 9 p.m. for 1 to 2 hours.
CAISO said cooling temperatures across the state Thursday evening along with consumers' conservation efforts and "600 to 700 MW of demand response on hand that would instantly lower demand when called upon" helped avoid what would have been the first rolling blackouts of the year in California.
Pacific Gas and Electric's website allows residents to see if their homes are within the impacted areas if rolling blackouts were to occur. The utility listed several block numbers that would be affected by the outages. Users can click here to enter their addresses and see if their homes are within any future affected areas.
The announcement of the potential outages came as Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a state of emergency Thursday and the state's power grid operator called for residents to conserve energy for a second consecutive day Friday as a triple-digit heatwave cooks the West.