1 At least we've improved to the point that it didn't cascade and take out the whole west coast.

Reminds me of the rules of high-availability computing - never trust one of anything, because anything can fail; never trust two of anything, because if one fails, the other is going to get hit with twice the normal load and promptly fail as well.

(Fortunately computers, unlike high-tension power feeds, rarely explode when things go wrong.)

2

A lot of the reason California is vulnerable is that state policy of various kinds (ballot measures, laws passed by the legislature) have made it damned near impossible to build new generation plants of any kind. So California has to import a pretty big percentage of its electricity from elsewhere.

Up here in the PNW it isn't quite the same. We are a net exporter of electric power, overall. Sometimes (during the dark of winter) we import but most of the time we export. (That varies from year to year, mainly as a function of the precipitation total in the Columbia river basin, and in particular the snowpack in the Cascade Mountains.)

So if there were a huge cascading failure, it would cut the link between California and us, leaving us with excess generation capacity.

3 But hey, as more Californians move up here, and as the Washington and Oregon legislatures do their best to make them feel at home by passing California-like laws, I'm sure that eventually the eco-freaks will make them blow up the dams in the Columbia river so the Salmon can spawn and we'll have to import electricity from who knows where too.

4 States like New Mexico should clearly start upping their fees for electricity sold to California. . .

5

Hmmmm. Wasn't that what Enron did? ;-)

(...albeit, via market manipulation and fraud) There's a lesson there about leaving your economy vulnerable to energy embargos and price manipulation.

6 New Mexico is an electricity consumer (from western Texas). This is why we had rolling blackouts last winter. NM exports oil, but not electricity.

7 My mistake.  Substitute for "New Mexico" "whoever is actually selling electricity to California."

8

You might be thinking of Arizona, which does sell power to some parts of California.

Earlier this year, there was much amusement when certain municipalities in CA started considering refusing to do business with firms in Arizona over their state immigration law.  They were overlooking the fact that they were buying much needed electricity from the same state and any embargo of contractual relations with Arizona would certainly turn off the power to those municipalities.