2024 Was a Record Year for Planned Blackouts in California — Here’s Why It’s Not Slowing Down

2024 Was a Record Year for Planned Blackouts in California — Here's Why It's Not Slowing Down

2024 set a new record for Public Safety Power Shutoff activity across California, with utilities calling more planned outages, affecting more customers, than in any prior year since the practice began. It's a trend that runs counter to what many homeowners might expect — that as utilities invest billions in grid hardening, planned blackouts should be getting less frequent, not more.

Why the numbers went up instead of down

Several factors pushed PSPS activity higher rather than lower. Wildfire risk itself has continued to intensify due to prolonged drought conditions and increasingly dense, dry vegetation in many parts of the state. Utilities have also become more conservative in calling shutoffs following past incidents where equipment sparked catastrophic fires, meaning the threshold for triggering a preemptive outage has, in practice, gotten lower rather than higher as liability concerns have grown. And grid hardening work, while ongoing, covers only a fraction of California's vast utility infrastructure each year, meaning most circuits remain just as vulnerable to shutoff triggers as before.

Why this isn't likely to reverse soon

Grid hardening — undergrounding lines, installing covered conductors, replacing wooden poles — is a decades-long undertaking given the scale of California's utility infrastructure, even at current investment levels. Until a much larger share of the highest-risk circuits have been hardened, utilities have strong financial and legal incentive to keep using PSPS events as their primary tool for managing wildfire risk during dangerous weather, since another catastrophic utility-caused fire could mean billions more in liability. See if your home qualifies for free battery backup and NET-Billing electric bill discounts

What a record year means for homeowners going forward

If 2024 was a record year and the underlying drivers haven't changed, homeowners should expect PSPS events to remain a regular feature of California's wildfire season for years to come, not a temporary inconvenience that's about to fade. Planning around backup power as a one-time emergency purchase misreads the trend; planning around it as a recurring, multi-year reality is the more accurate framing.

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What this means for backup power decisions

Given that trend, a home battery system, particularly one paired with solar, isn't just a nice-to-have for the occasional bad storm — it's increasingly a practical response to a wildfire mitigation strategy that California utilities are likely to keep leaning on heavily for years.

If you want your home prepared for California's ongoing PSPS trend, My Home & Solar Solutions can help you design a solar and battery system built for it. Visit myhomesolution.org to get started.