Rolling blackouts were a familiar experience for Californians just a few years ago, as Democrats’ reckless climate policies weakened the state’s electric grid. Now they are back, as the state has failed to keep its forest fires under control.
Rural Californians are now being forced to go without power for days at a time as utility companies engage in intentional power outages to avoid sparking fires during fire season. There have been more “public safety power shutoffs” so far in 2025 than in any year going back to 2020, and that is only through the end of July. Lake Hughes, an unincorporated community in Los Angeles County, went through four straight days with no power after one such shutoff in mid-August, along with multiple other outages later in the month.
Recommended Stories
That means that Californians in communities such as Lake Hughes have been forced to go without air conditioning during the California summer. Some residents have been forced to stay in hotels as their homes become too hot to live in, while others rely on ice vouchers at local community centers. It also means that all the food in refrigerators and freezers goes bad, and microwaves become unusable. It also means that whatever poor souls decided to buy an electric vehicle now, as California plans to force everyone to do by 2035, are out of luck if they haven’t fully charged their vehicles just in time for these power outages.
These intentional power outages are the result of California coming off two wet years, when rainfall has helped increase vegetation. But it is also a result of California’s unserious attitude toward forest management. Around 75% of wildfire damage comes from a lack of forest management and the general governmental incompetence that comes standard with California’s Democratic monopoly on power — see: the 2025 Los Angeles fires.
EATON FIRE COULD BANKRUPT CALIFORNIA’S $21 BILLION WILDFIRE FUND
You could suppose that this is at least progress for a California that, just a few years ago, was putting residents across the state under rolling blackouts in the summer because the grid was too weak to provide them with electricity. California tried to rush toward a “carbon-free” and nuclear-free energy grid and left the grid so weak that Democrats had to bring back natural gas and other forms of “dirty” energy to end all the bad headlines about rolling blackouts. At least now, communities such as Lake Hughes can rest easy knowing that they are being deprived of power on purpose because California can’t control its wildfire problems, instead of it being an unintentional consequence of terrible energy policy.
One way or another, it is clear that California just can’t keep the lights on for residents throughout the year. It is just too difficult for a state with a bigger economy than Japan to both ensure that residents have access to electricity and that the state’s forests aren’t living tinderboxes that can light up at a moment’s notice. Blackouts are the calling card of the Golden State, and California Democrats just can’t seem to prevent the state from backsliding into the Dark Ages.