Liam Denning, Columnist

California and Texas Fail the Power Test Together

Both states struggle to reconfigure a 20th-century grid for 21st-century challenges.

June 18, 2021 at 1:37 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

The heat is on.
Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America

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Are Texas and California really so different? They certainly look different from the rest of the country in one respect.

For all their contrasts, Texas and California are currently united in asking their respective populations to unplug appliances and forgo the air conditioning. Both have experienced blackouts of some form in the past year, and both have issued warnings about potential power shortages this week amid unusually hot weather. Given that it’s only June, both may yet suffer more as summer rolls on.