The Brief

When it’s really hot, we use way more electricity — cranking up fans, air conditioning, maybe taking more than a few cold showers.

And increasingly severe heat waves, fire and weather are already stressing our electric power grid to the max.

On top of that, California has set ambitious goals to electrify our homes, businesses and cars.

The science is clear that burning fossil fuels such as gas and coal, largely to generate electricity, is the single-largest cause of our rapidly heating planet.

The idea is if we electrify everything and generate all of our electricity from solar, wind and other renewable power sources, we’ll dramatically reduce planet-heating pollution.

But — how will the grid keep up with worsening heat and even more electrification? This guide digs into that question. But first, let’s understand some basics.

What is the power grid?

The power grid is made up of power plants that generate electricity. They are connected via high-voltage transmission lines that go through transformers and substations to lower that voltage. That way, the electricity can safely pass through local power lines that plug into our homes and businesses. Watch the video below for a quick explainer.

The California Independent Systems Operator, or CAISO, is the nonprofit state agency responsible for maintaining a balanced grid. They send flex alerts — those emergency texts asking us to conserve energy that we’re now all too familiar with.

Where does our electricity come from? 

In short, like where your water comes from, it depends on where you live. But in general in California, electricity is primarily generated by gas-fired power plants, solar and wind power, and hydropower from water in reservoirs. Coal power is on its way out, but recent droughts have led to an increase in gas-fired and coal-fired electricity — the most polluting form of electricity generation. (There’s only one coal plant left in California and it’s in San Bernardino County.)

California also imports more electricity than any other state, often receiving as much as a third of its energy from other Western states. That connectivity between state power grids is one reason why we didn’t have power outages during the 2022 record 10-day heat wave in early September. A state bill is being considered that would expand that regional power sharing system.

A map of L.A.'s power grid.

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Courtesy of L.A. Department of Water and Power

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California already has a cleaner grid than most states. In 2022, renewable resources, mostly hydropower and solar, accounted for about half of the electricity California generated. Gas fueled most of the rest, according to the International Energy Agency.

But each city and county in the state has its own cocktail of energy sources, so check with your local power provider to understand where your energy comes from. For example, in 2021, Los Angeles got 35% of its power from renewable energy and 19% from coal. Pasadena, however, generated about 33% of its power from renewables and more than 47% from coal. That's why local efforts to shift to clean energy can make a big impact on the grid as a whole.

Electricity demand today and projections for the future

In early September 2022, California hit an all-time high for power demand during an long-lasting, record heat wave — you may remember getting that emergency text begging us all to turn down our A/C and conserve energy in whatever way safe and possible.

A flex alert text.

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Erin Stone

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LAist

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The ongoing, skyrocketing heat had Southern Californians using unprecedented amounts of energy. The grid was at risk of not having enough energy to support all that demand. Ultimately energy demand hit 52,061 megawatts, 69 megawatts above the 2006 record, set during a 10-day July heat wave.

But thanks to the public actually responding to that alert and a dramatic increase in solar battery storage, planned rolling power outages were avoided — unlike in 2020.

Now, not only are worsening heat seasons and wildfire risk increasing the demand for energy, but energy needs are increasing as the state moves to electrify and shift to renewable energy as quickly as possible.

With increasing heat waves and all that electrification, California expects it’ll need to nearly triple the amount of electricity it generates. To do that, the state will need to quadruple its solar and wind power, which means — in just the next 13 years — efforts to build large-scale wind and solar power and battery storage will need to speed up by a whopping 700%.

Projected energy needs in California from 2022 to 2045.

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California Air Resources Board

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LAist

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The state has added a significant amount of battery storage in just the last three years — from 250 megawatts in 2020 to 5,600 megawatts as of July this year, which can provide enough electricity to power 4.2 million homes for up to four hours before the batteries need to be recharged.

That increase in battery storage, plus the boost to hydropower with our wet winter, has state officials cautiously optimistic that we can avoid rolling power outages this summer — barring any extreme heat and wildfire disasters converging at the same time, which is always possible and will become increasingly possible if the world doesn’t dramatically slash carbon emissions in the next seven years.

But because we still don’t have enough battery storage to use all our solar power when the sun goes down, the state has decided to keep some gas-fired power plants running, which increases local pollution and adds to our greenhouse gas emissions, which are causing the issue in the first place. The balance between keeping the lights on and reducing emissions is a difficult line to walk.

A graphic of solar battery storage in California from 2019 to 2045.

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California Independent Systems Operator

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But it’s not just about replacing the old grid with huge fields of renewables, or gas cars and furnaces with electric ones. There are more creative — and more environmentally friendly ways to “decarbonize” our world, from investing in local energy sources to improving public transportation. These efforts can also relieve stress on the broader grid. For example, local or “distributed” energy sources (as they’re officially called) such as rooftop solar, community solar, clean microgrids, and even using electric vehicles to support the grid are all potential ways to help keep communities’ water and power flowing during disasters — and even reduce utility bills.

In the long-term, more local and national clean energy generation could help ease wildly fluctuating energy prices tied to global gas markets, as well as allow the U.S. to become energy independent, the benefits of which the war in Ukraine has most recently made clear.

Then there’s also the cheapest and least sexy option: energy conservation. Similar to water conservation, efforts to conserve more energy through more efficient appliances and better insulation can have a huge impact.

What does all this mean for utility bills? 

Unless you have rooftop solar panels, you’ve probably only seen your gas and electric bills go up. That’s largely because what goes into our bill isn’t just about the amount of energy we use.

A lot of what’s in our electric bills is actually for fixed costs, like hardening the grid against wildfires or subsidizing energy efficiency programs, said Severin Borenstein, an energy policy professor at UC Berkeley. No matter our income, those fixed costs are the same for everyone.

“As a result, we're essentially imposing a tax on the price of electricity,” said Borenstein. “When we do that, what our research has found, is it hits poor people much more than it hits wealthy. Compared to sales tax, compared even to a gas tax, and compared to income tax, it's just massively more regressive.”

For more of us to benefit from cheaper renewable energy, Borenstein said rate structures need an overhaul and the state needs to cover bigger slices of the fixed costs attached to our bills. To address this, California is considering an income-based rate system, which would be the nation’s first.

Borenstein said a well-structured, income-based rate would ease costs for low-income customers while giving households that want to invest in electrification more bang for their buck. But opponents worry it could hurt middle-income households and that the issue should be resolved with tax code changes instead. (You can learn more about what the proposal means here.)

But overall, this early in the transition, our bills are on an upward trend.

“I hate to say it, but I think the reality in the next decade or two is just higher utility prices due to these combinations of factors,” said UCLA urban planning professor Greg Pierce. “Once we've fully transitioned, I do think there's potential for quite a bit of savings compared to what people are used to paying and what we would be paying if we just stayed on natural gas.”

That’s because utility-scale solar and wind power is already cheaper than gas prices and increased efforts around local, distributed sources of power and battery storage could help renters and homeowners save significantly — though these projects can be more expensive to build up front. Also, newer electric appliances such as heat pumps use far less energy than older models of air conditioning or gas furnaces, for example.

When it comes to our ever-rising bills, Pierce said in addition to rate restructuring, it’s essential cities take action to better support communities through the transition by:

• Providing robust utility discount programs (LADWP has water and power rebates for low-income and senior customers, but Pierce said these programs could expand).
• Ending water and power shutoffs for nonpayment (which LADWP just agreed to do, though details still need to be worked out).
• Targeting clean energy programs towards populations that are most impacted by fossil fuels. Many of these efforts, such as community solar, have lagged in California. 

These are more short-term answers, but longer-term making solar-plus-battery storage more accessible to low- and middle-income households could lead to big savings. And, it’s kind of obvious, but eventually all our gas bills will be absorbed into our electricity bills. That could mean a larger-than-expected water and power bill for renters and homeowners.

“For high-income households, it's probably actually a convenience,” said Pierce. “But for low-income households, any big, rare bill is worse than small, frequent bills.”

Still, most of us will be dealing with higher costs for the foreseeable future.

“I think everyone has to be prepared for or is going to face sort of higher bills,” Pierce said. “The transition costs a lot.”

But focusing purely on bills can make us forget all the long-term benefits of this transition, such as good job opportunities and an overall healthier living environment, said Tiffany Wong, a policy expert at grassroots group Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education, or SCOPE-LA, which advocates for environmental and economic justice in south L.A.

“It's not just about how we reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but it's really this holistic view of public health, our environment, our housing,” Wong said. “But where we are really now is, how do we get affordable rates?”

Joey Quiñones grew up in East Los Angeles, , where cumbia, punk and oldies soul could all be heard within two blocks. That mix shaped the sound he's built with his band, Thee Sinseers, and on his own. This year, he's out with two very different albums — the band's Love Stories and his solo album, Inna Soul Steady Situation. And most recently, he brought it all back with hometown shows at The Wiltern this past Saturday and Pacific Electric on Sunday.

Quiñones says the sounds of East L.A. are baked into his music.

"You wake up in the morning, and your mom would be cleaning to cumbia, and you'd hear it blasting from the other yards," Quiñones says. "You'd hear the local neighborhood band practicing their punk rock songs. Then you get to the street, and you hear all the oldies with the lowriders on Whittier Boulevard. It's everywhere. We can't sit down and not write a song that doesn't incorporate stuff like that, whether it be the singing or the horn section or the guitar playing. It's always gonna be subliminally in there." 

Quiñones says  Thee Sinseers came together almost by accident, when he accepted a dare to sing. But he knew the band had potential when they started getting paid.

"When we made $100. There was a time when that's really what it was," Quiñones says. "The community of musicians that we have has always supported each other in anything. So to be able to kind of do something where we were able to support our families and support each other was the key thing to really take it seriously. When you don't owe money, then you're doing something.”

The band's new album includes a song called "Let's Fall in Love Again," in which Quiñones admits past mistakes. He says that kind of honesty is the key to his songwriting.

“Life has been the teacher in all this,” Quiñones says. “Sitting down and honestly writing honesty, that's the key to, I don't wanna say soul music, but just good music and just music in general. When you make anything, you put honesty in it, because people know when you're kinda full of it. That's the biggest thing: being able to sit down and reflect and admit faults and admit to the life-changing and getting used to it and adjusting to it.”

Ahead of this past weekend's homecoming, Quiñones admitted that it was a little nerve-racking after touring the world.

"I was really excited about it months ago," he said. "But now it's getting closer and I just want things to be perfect. We're all so excited to play for our families and our friends, so coming home and being able to do that properly is the focus right now for all of us."

Stephen Richer no longer runs elections in the fourth-largest county in the country.

But for the rest of his life, he'll remember the feeling when polls closed on an election night.

More than a million ballots staring at him and his staff. Every moment that passes without them fully counted means another conspiracy theory sprouting online.

"Those days, those were hell for me," said Richer, a Republican who served as the clerk and recorder for Arizona's Maricopa County. "You'd have a limited number of workers, and you'd have a limited amount of space, and you'd be doing everything that you possibly could. … And yet you have everyone blowing up your phone, everyone saying that you're incompetent or corrupt or worse."

This midterm year, election officials in competitive congressional districts will face that same pressure.

But they will also face a hard reality: that those races might not be called until days after Election Day.

Here's an FAQ on why that is, and what it could mean this year.

Why do we know the results immediately in some places, and in others it takes days or weeks?

It comes down to the margin of victory.

Which sounds strange, since who wins an election and by how much shouldn't impact how long it takes election officials to count ballots.

But the reality is what most Americans think of as "election results" — the winners announced on election nights across TV networks and social media — are not the result of all ballots being counted, but rather, races being called by news organizations that determine the winners based on a state or district's demographics and initial returns. (NPR relies on The Associated Press for its race calls.)

Those determinations come a lot faster when races aren't close.

"Margins matter," said Richer, who noted that in recent elections, there has been a lot less scrutiny on Utah than there has been on his home state of Arizona, or certain contests in California, despite the states counting votes at similar speeds.

"In Utah you can call all the races very quickly because the Republicans there have high margins," Richer said.

That gives the illusion of elections there being complete, but no state is done counting ballots on election night, even if it seems that way because notable races are called early.

So you're saying the timing of results isn't at all tied to vote-counting speed?

Not exactly.

The closer the race, the more election analysts need to see before they can make a call. So the faster states count ballots, the faster those determinations can be made.

This is why the longest wait times every election usually come from places that have competitive races and which also count slowly.

Like, California?

Exactly. California has become the poster child for long results times because of both those factors: a bevy of competitive congressional districts, which help determine the balance of power in the U.S. House, and a vote count that's been among the slowest in the nation.

Add in that President Trump, the most prominent purveyor of election misinformation in the country, has long targeted the liberal California, and experts see a perfect storm for false voting narratives.

"It's progressive, it likes mail ballots, it gets [postmarked] mail ballots after Election Day," Richer said. "It just all adds up to a fairly incendiary situation."

Charles Stewart, an elections expert at MIT, put it more simply.

"California just has a big target on its back," said Stewart.

California's slow vote counting caused a lot of conspiracy theorizing during the state's June primary. Is this fall going to be a rerun?

Kim Alexander is cautiously optimistic that won't be the case.

She runs the California Voter Foundation, which has been advocating for ways to speed up California's vote tally without giving up the state's generous voting access policies, like mailing every active registered voter a ballot.

"We have all these amazing rights and opportunities that we give to our voters, and the price we're paying is a longer vote count," Alexander told NPR. "But that doesn't mean that it has to be this long."

An election worker processes ballots for the California state primary at the Los Angeles County Ballot Processing Center on June 5.

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Justin Sullivan

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Getty Images

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The single biggest cause for California's slow count comes from a phenomenon Alexander calls "the pig in the python" problem: a logjam of millions of vote-by-mail ballots getting returned on Election Day that need to be processed.

Those ballots take longer to count than in-person votes, as officials need to deal with envelopes and verify signatures to make sure mail ballots are cast by the people they're supposed to be cast by.

Some counties see up to 50% of their vote-by-mail ballots turned in on Election Day, Alexander said, which means processing work doesn't even begin until later in the week.

"I can't tell you how many people who are informed and engaged and … when I tell them that the cause for the long vote count is voters holding on to their ballots to Election Day and turning them in, they look at me and they're like, 'That's what I do,'" Alexander said. "And I'm like, 'I know! You're part of the problem!'"

The state allocated $40 million to speeding up its counting this year, and part of that money is going to voter education.

Alexander is optimistic that once voters learn they can play a role in speeding up the process by voting earlier, or by utilizing other voting methods that allow for quicker counting, they will respond.

"California has been beaten up by this president for over a decade over our election process, and it's gotten pretty worrisome," Alexander said. "I think that California voters, if they feel they can do something to respond to that, many will take action."

To that point, research conducted earlier this year found that when voters in California's San Joaquin County received postcards urging them to vote earlier, they were more likely to meet the recommended deadline that allowed for election-night counting.

Alexander noted one more change that could mean less spotlight on California this year: fewer competitive House districts.

Ahead of the 2022 elections, the state had nine districts that the Cook Political Report considered competitive. But this year, in part because voters approved a mid-cycle gerrymander to respond to gerrymanders in Republican-controlled states, the state has just three.

That makes it less likely the entire country will be waiting on California to know who controls the House.

OK, anywhere else we should be watching when it comes to results speed?

Using the formula discussed earlier (competitive races + slow vote counting), it's impossible not to look at Alaska.

According to data from the MIT Election Lab, Alaska was the last state in 2024 to reach 95% of its ballots counted.

Election Day was Nov. 5 that year, but the state's lone House race — which Republican Nicholas Begich won by fewer than 10,000 votes — wasn't called by the AP until Nov. 20.

This year, polling shows a tight Alaska Senate race. That means, if results fall a certain way in other states, the entire country could be waiting weeks to know which party will control the U.S. Senate next year.
Copyright 2026 NPR

This story first appeared on Long Beach Post.

Neighbors in North Long Beach rushed out of their homes on Saturday and blocked federal immigration agents from detaining a man they had just violently knocked to the ground, according to first-hand accounts from four residents who spoke to the Long Beach Post.

The man is a U.S. citizen named Ricardo Gonzalez who lives near where he was detained, according to neighbors and an online fundraiser started by his family. He was riding an e-bike near Elm Avenue and 56th Street on Saturday afternoon when an agent jumped out of an unmarked car and tackled him, according to a neighbor who asked to be identified only by his first name, Joe. (Other accounts online said agents rammed Gonzalez with their car. The Post could not locate any video of this or anyone who said they witnessed it first-hand.)

The agent then accused Gonzalez of throwing something at their car, Joe said.

Agents tased Gonzalez twice while he was on the ground, and one agent knelt on his back while Gonzalez yelled in pain and said his arm was broken, according to two neighbors who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.

As residents came outside to see what was going on, they started yelling and honking, alerting more neighbors.

The area was already on edge, Joe said, because eight or so unmarked law enforcement vehicles had been parked in the neighborhood since early that morning. He said his wife at one point had even called 911 to report the vehicles and ask if they could move because they were blocking multiple one-way streets.

Volunteers with anti-ICE rapid response groups had also brought loudspeakers to warn about the vehicles and urge everyone to stay inside. Instead, when neighbors heard the growing confrontation with agents, many intervened.

“If they try to take one of us, they’re going to have to take all of Long Beach,” said Patricia Velazquez, who has lived in the area for more than three decades.

Cellphone video shows roughly 50 people yelling expletives at masked agents who were carrying handguns and wearing vests that said “ICE.” Neighbors demanded to see a warrant, dragged trash cans behind the agents’ vehicles or stood in front of them, blocking them from driving off.

One agent made racist comments to the mostly Latino crowd, saying they didn’t “look legal,”  according to Joe. They also used pepper spray on the crowd, neighbors said.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions about the confrontation.

At one point during the roughly hour-long standoff, agents grabbed two women — both U.S. citizens — and put them in the backs of different vehicles, according to two neighbors. They were soon freed, according to Joe. He described the crowd distracting agents while people sneaked behind their vehicles to open their doors.

Long Beach police soon showed up. In a statement, they said federal agents had called for help providing medical aid to someone and dealing with a crowd that had vandalized vehicles.

One officer attempted to step in immediately but was held back by his partner, one neighbor said. Video shows federal agents then allowed Gonzalez to leave with the Long Beach officers after agents searched his wallet and looked at his identification.

An LBPD officer uncuffed Gonzalez and took him to a nearby fire station. Paramedics then took him to a hospital. 

Gonzalez is a Long Beach resident who, until recently, worked for the city, Long Beach City Councilmember Tunua Thrash-Ntuk said in a statement. He was riding through his own neighborhood, she said, “when he was racially profiled and violently assaulted by ICE agents—leaving him with broken bones and crushing medical bills.”

In their online fundraiser, Gonzalez’s family says he is a hardworking man who supports his family. He is still recovering, they said, and asked for help spreading the word about what agents did to him.

Long Beach Congressman Robert Garcia said he was “proud of the neighbors who documented and stood up for the family being terrorized by ICE.”

“ICE agents brutally attacked and broke the arm of a North Long Beach resident and U.S. citizen,” he said in a statement. “The videos are horrific and should concern not just our community but the country.”

Mayor Rex Richardson said he is outraged by agents’ actions and is demanding answers from the Department of Homeland Security.

One of the first major signs of this year's "Super El Niño" has reached the U.S. It's called a Kelvin wave – a deep ocean wave that's currently raising sea levels along the West Coast.

Scientists have long known about Kelvin waves, but this year, the phenomena grabbed the public's attention with video explanations receiving thousands of views across TikTok and X.

"It does surprise me – I mean, here it's been around all this time," says Mark Cane, who created one of the first models to forecast and predict El Niño. "I'm sure Lord Kelvin is happy in his grave."

(Lord Kelvin, the British physicist who also developed the Kelvin temperature scale, first described the wave back in the late 1800s.)

Kelvin waves can develop along the equator during El Niño years, when a vast region of water in the Pacific Ocean becomes much warmer than usual.

Some of this warm water, in the form of a Kelvin wave that stretches thousands of miles, moves slowly east beneath the ocean's surface until it reaches South America. Then it splits, traveling north along the West Coast and as far south as Chile.

"It's like an enormous bathtub sloshing around," Cane says, professor emeritus of earth and climate sciences at Columbia University. "But the slosh is very peculiar, because it only goes west to east along the equator in a Kelvin wave."

These are not the massive, highly visible waves that crash into shorelines during major storms and hurricanes.

"It's not a wall of water, it's not a tsunami, it's not a wave you can surf," says Dillon Amaya, an assistant professor of atmospheric sciences at North Carolina State University. "It's a planetary-scale wave."

A Kelvin wave's impact is gradual, raising sea levels as it moves up the coast, and bringing with it an elevated risk of floods and warmer water temperatures.

What's the impact? 

Kelvin waves can increase the risk of flooding and coastal erosion.

By themselves, Kelvin waves don't cause flooding, Amaya says. Instead, they load the dice, making flooding more likely by raising sea levels.

"It makes the background conditions more favorable towards coastal flooding, but what you need are triggering factors," Amaya said, such as a major storm or very high tides.

Josh Willis, a climate scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says Kelvin waves raise the chances of a "triple whammy" along the California coast: "El Nino, the high tide and the storm surge all coming at once."

That's exactly what some Southern California communities experienced in early October. Sea levels were already higher than normal because of the Kelvin wave – about six to eight inches, Amaya says. Then, when Tropical Storm Rachel hit, a storm surge flooded neighborhoods and left oceanfront homes partially submerged.

"That storm surge was almost certainly made more devastating because of the Kelvin wave," Amaya says.

Warmer water temperatures

Kelvin waves move slowly east beneath the ocean's surface until they reach South America. Then they split, traveling north along the West Coast and south as far as Chile. The dark red represents higher than normal sea levels.<br>

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Dillon J. Amaya

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North Carolina State University

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Kelvin waves also bring warmer water up the coast, which can be disruptive and put stress on marine life.

"We've seen tropical fishes in places that we don't normally see them," Amaya says. "Like a whale shark was spotted off the coast of San Diego."

The Kelvin wave can push down nutrient-dense cold waters that support productive marine ecosystems. Amaya says researchers have already seen evidence of sea birds dying in response to warmer water temperatures along the coast.

When is the next Kelvin wave? 

There are usually five to six Kelvin waves during a strong El Niño year, Amaya says.

Amaya predicts the next Kelvin wave will reach San Diego in late October or early November. Several more waves are expected through the fall and early winter, he says. Kelvin waves usually subside before the peak of El Niño.

The El Niño pattern typically peaks late in the year or early January. This year, NOAA researchers predict the El Niño will remain strong through early 2027.
Copyright 2026 NPR