California avoided major blackouts. So why is Newsom facing attacks over heat wave response?

Faced with a historic heat wave that has lasted nine days and placed unprecedented stress on California’s electricity grid, the nation’s most populous state managed to avoid rolling blackouts.

That would seem to look like success. But Republican lawmakers and organizations still found reasons to attack Gov. Gavin Newsom and the liberal state of California.

They took issue with Newsom asking Californians to limit the hours they charge electric vehicles. They criticized the state’s grid operator, the California Independent System Operator, for issuing Flex Alerts that urged voluntary conservation during peak hours. They even trolled Newsom for wearing a long-sleeve jacket during a taped briefing.

On Wednesday, a campaign twitter account for Florida Gov. Ron Desantis posted a video of him taking aim at California’s power struggles.

“I hear a lot of people chirping about Florida from California. They’re so worried about Florida. They can’t even keep the power on in California, are you kidding me?” Desantis stated in the video.

Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, a QAnon conspiracy theorist and steadfast believer that Donald Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election, called DeSantis “America’s Governor” on Twitter and wrote that he should “fix this disaster.”

“Apparently, it’s too hot in California for [Newsom] to keep his energy grid properly functioning,” she wrote.

California has long been a target for conservatives. Their disdain for its progressive politics drives efforts to depict it as a drug and crime-ridden welfare state that citizens can’t escape from fast enough. Newsom has become increasingly outspoken against his fellow governors in red states, like DeSantis, and the chatter around his presidential aspirations has only made the target bigger.

But as of Friday morning, most lights in California were still on and the worst case scenario — millions of vulnerable residents at serious risk if power was cut off amid scorching temperatures — never came to pass.

Anthony York, the governor’s senior communications advisor, brushed the criticisms off as “right-wing nonsense.”

“It’s not like he turned tail and ran off to Cancun, like we saw in Texas when the grid failed and hundreds of people died,” York said in an interview, referring to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s decision to flee Texas for Mexico during its devastating 2021 winter storms.

“It’s distracting from the real problem: climate change and our dependence on fossil fuels,” York added.

About a half-dozen cities in the Bay Area and Northern California lost power Tuesday night due to what was described as miscommunication when the state’s grid operator instructed utility companies to prepare for possible rotating outages. Officials were able to prevent such a step.

A decision by Newsom to ping the cellphones of millions of residents and visitors across the Golden State has been credited with helping to avoid such a widespread disruption.

At about 5:45 Tuesday evening, as electricity use hit an all-time high and California’s grid operator warned that demand was on the verge of exceeding supply, the California Office of Emergency Services sent out an alert urging Californians to conserve energy by turning off or reducing nonessential power “if health allows.”

It was a measure taken only twice before: in 2020 for Covid-19 stay-at-home orders and in 2017 for extreme fire risk in Southern California.

Within 45 minutes, electricity demand dropped by roughly 2,600 megawatts — enough to power nearly 2 million homes.

York said the response by Californians who shut down appliances and raised their thermostats was “beyond our wildest expectations.”

Ahmed Banafa, an engineering professor at San Jose State, said he considers the state’s response to the heat wave, including its communication strategies, “a success story.”

“It doesn’t belong to one person or one entity but to all the Californians who stepped up and decided to send some power back to the grid,” he said, cautioning that there was still more work to be done to make California’s power grid more resilient to extreme weather events.

Meanwhile, members of the Republican party continue to liken the alert to COVID-19 lockdowns and government overreach.

Energy conservation efforts were “government force-fed,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy wrote on Twitter. Arizona Congressman Andy Biggs called the conservation effort a “climate change lockdown.”

“This is all about control (again),” Biggs wrote on Twitter.

Republican Assemblyman and Congressional candidate Kevin Kiley called the OES alert “a frantic emergency text telling everyone to stop using power.” His chief of staff and assembly candidate Josh Hoover said the alert was “the direct result of poor leadership.”

Jessica Millan Patterson, chairwoman for the California Republican Party, said that California looked like like a “third world country.”

Mike Madrid, a GOP consultant and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, said there will always be a “wide swath” of the Republican party that’s eager to push back against government-issue mandates or even suggestions of them, like the recommendations made in the Flex Alerts.

“[Energy] conservation is about having a common goal and acting together — they’ll react to that and call it tyranny, they’ll call it coercion … it’s a total bastardization of the concept of freedom,” he said. “And it’s a total rejection of social progress.”

This story was originally published September 9, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "California avoided major blackouts. So why is Newsom facing attacks over heat wave response?."