Heat Wave Tests California's Emergency Communications Strategy
This story was originally published September 8, 2022 by CalMatters.
Communication is everything.
That seemed to be the key takeaway Wednesday as California officials assessed their response to the long-running extreme heat wave that pushed the state's power grid to the edge of rolling blackouts Tuesday night. (The situation improved Wednesday as temperatures dipped slightly, though conditions were still dire enough for the California Independent System Operator to declare a Stage 2 energy emergency that ended at 9 p.m. Today, residents will spend their ninth straight day under a Flex Alert asking them to conserve energy between 3 and 10 p.m.)
On the one hand, the decision from Gov. Gavin Newsom's administration to send emergency text messages to 27 million Californians around 5:50 p.m. Tuesday urging them to conserve energy had an immediate impact: Demand fell by about 2,000 megawatts within 20 to 30 minutes, bringing the state back from the brink of outages, Elliot Mainzer, president and CEO of the California Independent System Operator, said Wednesday.
- Mainzer described the texts as "a tool of absolute last resort," a message Newsom echoed at a Wednesday press conference when he said his team "spent the last four or five days debating the merits and demerits" of sending the alerts.
On the other hand, the state’s grid operator and some local utilities had a miscommunication about the need for outages, resulting in thousands of Northern Californians needlessly losing power, Mainzer acknowledged.
- Mainzer: "That is certainly concerning to me. There was a lot happening on the grid for everybody (Tuesday) night. And so we’ll double down on the communication to make sure that doesn’t happen again."
The prolonged heat wave has also increased scrutiny on the Newsom administration’s communication — or lack thereof.
The governor on Wednesday gave an apparently unplanned press conference in Los Angeles to discuss energy and the heat wave after speaking at a high-profile technology conference in Beverly Hills. But Newsom's press office didn’t notify state Capitol reporters or some local television stations until after the governor's remarks had already started, limiting their ability to attend or cover the event.
This prompted an outpouring of frustration from journalists who noted that the governor's office hadn't made Newsom available for questions or shared information about his availability as California's grid faced its most serious threat of the summer — even as the office asked reporters to leverage their "media reach" to encourage people to conserve energy and help avoid blackouts.
Asked why the governor's office hadn’t notified statehouse journalists about the press conference, Newsom spokesperson Erin Mellon said in a text message with reporters that "he had time" after the tech event "and wanted to address press. … We called the press we could reach in time to get to where he was." Newsom's office didn't respond to a further request for comment.
- Jessica Millan Patterson, chairperson of the California Republican Party, said in a statement: "Gavin Newsom’s strategy during this energy crisis seems to be: If you can’t stand the heat, enjoy the A/C, throw on a sweatshirt and hide from reporters. Quick tip for reporters trying to get a hold of Newsom: Replace the word California with Florida, Texas or any other red state, and he’ll happily answer your questions."
- Newsom said during the press conference: "If you're certain networks, you're not interested in facts, because they get in the way of your argument. … They want to double down on the Texas approach, which is more coal, more natural gas. You saw how well that worked last February — all that coal, all that natural gas, and you had three full days of blackouts there. I'm not trying to cast aspersions here, I just want some objective facts.' (However, California has also relied heavily on natural gas during the past week.)
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