San Diego County neighborhoods still have a chance of experiencing rolling blackouts this week as an historic heat wave presses on. When outages occur will depend on how well customers conserve energy.
Where they could occur will depend on San Diego Gas & Electric's list of neighborhoods. Click here to see where on the list your neighborhood is.
Helen Gao, a spokeswoman for SDG&E, said the grid is divided up into blocks, which are essentially groups of neighborhoods. And when there is a severe power crisis -- which can be brought on by a heat wave -- those blocks get turned off. When they get turned off depends on their placement on the list.
"We have a list of blocks that we will rotate through if we are asked to do rotating outages," Gao said. "Now if we have exhausted the entire list we go back to the top."
When KPBS asked for clarification on how the list is put together, Gao pointed to SDG&E's Emergency Load Curtailment Plan, which she said the utility must submit every year to prepare for energy demand emergencies.
How these outages are prioritized are listed on Appendix E of the document. It says certain "essential" services like hospitals, prisons and police services are exempted.
Many Californians already experienced blackouts on Saturday and Sunday, but Gao said customers stepped up and started saving power, avoiding another outage on Monday. So it’s unclear, even though the situation is still critical, whether more outages are coming.
"We’re not out of the woods," Gao said. "The situation is still really critical. We need everybody to do their part to conserve energy."
The California Independent System Operator (CAISO), which oversees the state's energy distribution, had already issued a Stage 2 warning on Tuesday. Stage 3 is when blackouts occur. As of 5:00 p.m. Tuesday, San Diego hadn't experienced any rotating blackouts.
Gao said the best way to tell where you fall on the list is to find your circuit number, which is on your SDG&E bill.
"For me, it's on page three of my bill, and it's right under my meter number and the billing period," Gao said.
She added that with the SDG&E phone application customers can obtain an electronic copy of their latest bill.
On a media call Tuesday, officials with CAISO said the outages can be blamed on lack of sufficient wind and other renewable energy storage.
They also said some of the state's power plants failed to provide enough energy because they had gone offline. Though some critics of the operator said there was actually enough energy available and the blackouts could have been avoided altogether.
