At midnight on Wednesday, California’s largest utility begun cutting off power to customers across the northern part of the state…

“It’s long past time for us to get serious about reducing the impact of our infrastructure on climate change, and also getting ready for the impacts of climate change on our infrastructure,” Costa Samaras, the director of Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Engineering and Resilience for Climate Adaptation, told Earther. “In the power sector, that means big energy efficiency and deep building retrofit efforts, local distributed solar and storage, and transmission lines that aren’t as big of a fire risk and can handle extreme heat days. There are always questions of ‘how will we pay for it,’ but there is also a very large costs associated with doing nothing, which it looks like the Bay Area is paying now.”
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