California’s power grid operator made it through Sept. 7 without rotating outages, but thousands of PG&E customers in the Bay Area still lost power as fatigued transformers failed in the extreme heat.
Nearly 24,000 customers were affected at one point Wednesday evening by the outages, mostly from transformer failures.
As of 10:30pm that number had dropped to about 10,700 customers in the region, primarily in the South Bay cities of San Jose and Morgan Hill, according to PG&E spokesman J.D. Guidi.
The City of Morgan Hill sent out an email to residents the night of Sept. 7 notifying them that the city was “experiencing significant power outages for the third time in three days.”
Transformers, which distribute power to customers, need a period to cool down, usually overnight. During intense heat waves, however, transformers aren’t able to cool and the components can fail, according to PG&E.
At 9pm, the California Independent System Operator announced the state had dodged rolling outages once again. A Flex Alert was extended to Sept. 8, calling on consumers to conserve electricity from 3 to 10pm.
“Thank you, #CA. With your help, we made it through another day without rotating #poweroutages. Today’s #FlexAlert has concluded,” stated an announcement on Twitter by the power grid operator.
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