It’s about to get hot out in California. A prolonged heat wave is expected to set in across the state starting Thursday and lasting through the Labor Day weekend, with a chance at record-setting high temperatures that touch the 115-degree mark, according to the National Weather Service. Dealing with that heat is bad enough. Doing it without the comfort of air conditioning or electricity is an absolute nightmare — and one that has potentially deadly consequences. But it looks like that’s exactly how some Californians will experience the coming heat.
This week, the California Independent System Operator (ISO) issued a warning that the excessive heat “will stress energy grid" and Californians may need to participate in “voluntary conservation” to keep things operating. What that means in practice is opt-in “blackout” periods during which residents and businesses will be asked to cut back on electricity usage. The state is basically saying, “Please turn things off now and conserve energy so that when heat gets bad, you won’t be forced to turn things off because there is no power.”
