Thousands of PG&E customers without power across Bay Area due to weather
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Thousands of Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) customers are without power Tuesday night due to the weather, according to the company's website.
The largest of those outages is impacting nearly 6,000 customers in Dublin and San Ramon.
The City of Dublin posted to X that an outage impacting 5,000 customers in West Dublin could last until Wednesday morning.
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In Concord, outages are impacting everything from restaurants to hotels to normally crowded streets.
Some of the smaller ones are impacting more than a thousand customers in Danville and Pleasant Hill.
In the South Bay, there are several small outages being reported by PG&E.
In the North Bay, 4,369 customers in Novato are without power but estimated time or restoration is 11:15 p.m.
At this time, there is not estimated time of restoration for majority of those outages.
Despite some outages though, Severin Borenstein of UC Berkeley's Energy Institute at Haas, says things could be worse.
Borenstein points to the massive upgrades the state has done to its power grid in recent years to help reduce the chance of flex alerts - which ask Californians to reduce their energy use.
"The biggest change we've seen over the last few years is a massive installation of batteries. If you go back four years, California had essentially no batteries to store power," Borenstein said.
Borenstein says given the updates, he doesn't expect mass power outages like we've seen in this past this time around.
He says given the upcoming holiday and weekend, Wednesday will likely be the day the grid is stressed the most.
"We'll still have people going to work. And it's going to be the second day of the heat wave so buildings are going to be hotter and have not had the chance to cool down overnight."
