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Blackouts Threaten Entire U.S. West This Summer as Heat Awaits

Outages are possible from Washington to New Mexico, with drought and searing temperatures forcing states to compete for electricity

Last August, an unrelenting heatwave pushed California’s energy grid to the brink of collapse and fueled wildfires from Los Angeles to Napa.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
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First they struck California, then Texas. Now blackouts are threatening the entire U.S. West as nearly a dozen states head into summer with too little electricity.

From New Mexico to Washington, power grids are being strained by forces years in the making — some of them fueled by climate change, others by the fight against it. If a heat wave strikes the whole region at once, the rolling outages that darkened Southern California and Silicon Valley last August will have been previews, not flukes.