So... Yes, boys and girls, it's time to play ROLLING BLACKOUTS! Who will be lighting candles and singing "Kumbiyah" tonight instead of watching "Weakest Link"? Who will be eating cold, congealed leftover Chinese takeout instead of piping hot, microwaved leftover Chinese takeout? Who will not be able to log onto the Tribes 2 server but will instead be weeping hot tears of denial onto their keyboards as they behold their dark, dead monitor screen? Nobody knows - because advance notice is NOT in the rules when you play this game! You pays your (exorbitant wad of) money, you takes your chances!
So I guess you've inferred that we had another Stage 3 alert here in SoCal today, which means random patches of the city's grid shutting down for an hour or so at a time (random to the general public anyway - it's considered to be a "security risk" to give us much in the way of advance warning, so for most people, the first sign of a blackout is - well, when everything shuts off). It's half amusing, half appalling that this is Southern California - arguably one of the most technologically, culturally, and financially advanced chunks of real estate on the globe - yet our power supply is about as reliable as that of, say, a village in Myanmar with a generator run by locals who chew betel leaves like Trident and occasionally forget to remember that they must periodically refill the diesel tank lest the "lightning god" get upset and stop providing the spark they need to watch "Magnum P.I." reruns on the town's one battered old black and white TV set.
Deregulation is a great idea, in theory... unless it is unleashed in an industry providing a basic building block of civilization as we know it and controlled by an oligopoly eager to recoup some cash lost through bad investments and subject to pretty much no restraints nor normal market controls (electricity being a relatively inelastic good; in other words, our demand for it isn't really going to go down all that much even in the face of increased prices - it's not exactly a luxury item for most of us. Sure, we'll bitch and moan about our bills, but the fridge still needs to be cold, and no matter how easy Vincent Price made it look, candelabras are a pain in the ass to haul around the house at night). So here we are, going broke paying the electric bill yet never knowing when the off switch may be triggered for our patch of the grid, casting us into darkness and, even worse, suffering us to reset all our digital clocks.
Viva la California! Covet our climate and our semi-soft-cheese lifestyle if you will, but rest assured - it comes at a premium.