Rolling California "Power Outages" -- August 15, 2020

Are "power outages" the same as "blackouts." Perhaps the latter has become politically unacceptable. I don't know.

Record-breaking heat means more rolling power outages.  

• PG&E says it expects to initiate rolling power outages for the second straight night, as the California Independent System Operator again issued an emergency order for utilities to cut down on power to prevent a heat wave from overwhelming the system. 
• PG&E expects tonight's outages will affect 220K customers in portions of the Central Coast and Central Valley, including Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Joaquin counties. 
• PG&E, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric last night turned off power to more than 410K homes and businesses for about an hour at a time. The moves come as temperatures around the state hit triple digits in many areas, and air conditioning use soared.
• California's power grid is under its greatest stress during the late afternoon and early evening as power usage peaks and solar energy production begins to decline, cutting the capacity during available during a supply crunch.
  

And it's only beginning. 

From Bloomberg (does this first sentence make sense to anyone? Written by a robot? In fact, much of the story is gibberish):

As numerous as 2 thousand Californians were actually dived right into night throughout 4 hrs advanced Friday in the very first rolling power outages to attack the condition considering that the 2001 electricity dilemma. (sic)

And that was actually merely Day One. 

An unrelenting warm front is actually assumed to bury California via the center of upcoming full week, delivering temperature levels skyrocketing past times 110 levels Fahrenheit in some components. (sic)

Folks blasting their cooling system and also followers to keep one’s cool are actually overworking the location’s energy body and also increasing the presence of a regular of Friday’s mostly surprise and also unexpected failures. 

It began at around 6: 30 p.m. true time (sic) on Friday, when California’s framework driver calculated via a sophisticated estimate that the condition’s energy reservoirs had actually dropped listed below an important limit and also phoned a Stage 3 framework emergency situation, which activates what it calls “bunch disruption.” The final opportunity such a statement was actually brought in throughout the 2000 and also 2001 electrical power dilemma, numerous hundreds of services and also residences took turns being actually dropped right into night, energy costs climbed to the condition and also a document’s biggest power was actually pushed into personal bankruptcy. (What the heck?)

Link her for ISO California.

I assume the "negative MW for solar" means solar farms are actually using some electricity to maintain some basic operations such as monitoring, security, etc. And, of course, the reason why solar is not providing any electricity, it's now 8:00 p.m.