Authorities say a power outage in Southern California has left at least 123,000 customers in the dark in San Diego and Orange counties.

San Diego Gas & Electric spokeswoman Jennifer Ramp says the blackout began at just after 11:40 p.m. on Thursday and continued into the early morning hours of Friday.
Ramp told KNBC-TV (http://bit.ly/13ECZkb) that the company's entire south Orange County customer base was without power. That includes the cities of Mission Viejo, San Clemente and San Juan Capistrano, as well as Camp Pendleton in neighboring San Diego County.

The company is investigating the cause of the outage.

(That means they don't have any idea what caused an eighth of a million people to be without power! And they call this reliability!)
How about this statement:
"Cause: We have determined that a combination of factors has caused a problem in the electric system."
Uh, sounds like a mechanic telling you why your whatever failed in your car and why they don't know what the hell caused the failure. Just a guess, folks. Bullsh*t it appears for the press.
But they know how to bill millions of people more money anytime they please? And wrap it all up in monthly bill changes and split months and other gobbledy-gook to confuse the customers so they really can't read their bills. Like a carnival barker selling lightning instead of snake oil!

Incidentally, why does your power bill baseline power allowance change every month so you use more than the baseline no matter how much you use? We don't have air conditioning, have gas hot water and range, only use fans to circulate the air, got rid of all the old tube type TVs and use timers on lights. Switched to LED's and fluorescent lights everywhere and are very judicious about turning lights off. Yet every month, I notice the baseline electric usage is lower than what we use so we fall into the tier 2 category for some of our electric bill, allowing the gougers to charge a higher rate.

Once again, are the "Smart Meters" just a new way to screw the customers in Southern California to pad the electric company pockets?