Every year, as the temperature in the Coachella Valley soars, it’s always surprising to see Southern California Edison, the company you give all of your summer income to in order to not sweat through your furniture and/or die from heat exhaustion, conducts scheduled power outages during the hottest part of the day. KMIR decided to ask the electric company some questions about it and their answers are, well, you tell me.
The most common question is, why? Why does Edison conduct power outages in the middle of summer?
“We would much rather do that than have a piece of equipment fail and then put our customers in the dark for a much longer period of time,” said Tomaso Gianelli, senior manager for Southern California Edison’s outage communications team.
Edison is literally the only one who feels this way. Seriously, given a choice, all of us would choose a nice February night with the power out over a boiling July afternoon. We’ll just go out for dinner or go to bed early and all without worrying our pets are going to die or that all of the food in our fridge is going to spoil.
Seriously though, this answer is so bad and seems to come from a group of people who really don’t understand what it’s like to live in the Coachella Valley in the summer.
Oh, and then there’s this:
Question number three: How hot does it have to be for before Edison says, ‘Okay, maybe we shouldn’t turn off customers’ air conditioning?’
“it’s going to be around 113-degree heat index or temperature. Whatever is reached quicker and then we would cancel all non-critical outages,” Gianelli said.
Ahh yes, because 113 degrees is just too hot, but 112 degrees is totally delightful. What a random, still hot af number to decide upon. Although, maybe a possible solution is just to pay Patrick Evans $20 to say it’s going to be 113 degrees tomorrow on the TV every night and we can be done with this shit until November.
Finally:
Who is next on the outage list?
For security reasons, Edison could not tell us. But they did say that so far this year there have been 300 scheduled power outages. They estimate there could be as many as four hundred more.
700 power outages? In one year??
For how much we all pay them for electricity, Southern California Edison really sounds like a company that needs to get its shit together.
