It feels like just yesterday that California was roiled by rolling blackouts during an epic summer heat wave.

But that was nearly a year ago, and now summer is dawning once again. Across the West, power grid managers and utilities are preparing for heat waves and for the dry, windy conditions that have toppled electrical infrastructure and ignited wildfires.

Temperatures are already surging, which is happening more frequently as the planet warms.

It’s not too bad in Los Angeles, but a heat wave brough triple-digit temperatures to California’s Central Valley. Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington were also scorching.

The California Independent System Operator, which runs the power grid for most of the state, says we’ve got enough electricity supply on hand at the moment. But blackouts loom as a threat this summer.

How big a threat, exactly? The Times recently had a chance to ask state officials that question during a panel discussion hosted by the Sacramento Press Club. Our co-moderator was Ashley Zavala, California Capitol correspondent for KRON 4 News.

It was a fascinating conversation featuring Elliot Mainzer, president of the California Independent System Operator; state Sen. Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg), whose district has suffered some of California’s worst fires sparked by electrical wires; Susan Kennedy, a former advisor to Govs. Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger who served on the California Public Utilities Commission and founded energy software company AMS; and Bob Foster, former president of Southern California Edison.

Here are some highlights from the discussion, edited and condensed for clarity.

L.A. Times: Elliot, right up until your agency pulled the trigger in August, it didn’t seem like rolling blackouts were going to happen. Looking ahead to the next few months, do you think people should be preparing for this again?

ELLIOT MAINZER: Guarded optimism is a reasonable way to state it. If we get relatively modest temperatures across the West, or if it’s hot in California but not hot in adjacent states — given the resource additions that we’ve had since last year, given the fact that the infrastructure going into the summer is in pretty good shape — we should be fine.

If we get into another big West-wide heating event like we saw last year, our numbers tell us the grid will be stressed again. But we will be reaching out actively to consumers and industry to conserve energy. The Flex Alert program and calls for conservation that were absolutely instrumental last summer, particularly after the 14th and 15th of August, are going to be essential.

BOB FOSTER: Yeah, we could have blackouts again. A more important issue is what we do over the next six years to fill the gap from things like the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant and the coastal gas plants going off the system. I happen to believe in the carbon and renewable goals we have, and the quickest way to kill them is to have reliability problems. We need to avoid that.

The recent action by the Public Utilities Commission was a real step in the right direction. I finally see some urgency. I see a more than adequate amount of new energy being proposed — over 11 gigawatts. I wish it would have happened a year ago.

LAT: Sen. McGuire, a lot of these power grid decisions get made by regulatory agencies, including the decision to keep running gas-fired “peaker” plants that are only needed when energy demand is high. What is the Legislature’s role in making sure we keep reducing emissions and also keep the lights on?

MIKE McGUIRE: No. 1, this Legislature, the governor and the Public Utilities Commission have to hold the utilities accountable when it comes to their vegetation management and hardening their infrastructure.

I live in PG&E territory, and I’ll be candid: America’s largest utility is one of the most dysfunctional utilities, unfortunately, in the nation. And it’s incredibly frustrating because what we’re going to see, based on their lack of vegetation management in the most high fire-risk zones, is the same communities in Northern California hit year after year after year for the next 10 years.

No. 2, we can’t end our reliance on the peaker plants immediately. We get rid of peakers and the lights go off, and that’s simply unacceptable. We have to continue adding alternative sources of energy, and expediting that.

ASHLEY ZAVALA: With Gov. Gavin Newsom facing a recall election, some observers are making comparisons to the early-2000s energy crisis, when power outages helped fuel the recall of then-Gov. Davis. Are those comparisons fair?

SUSAN KENNEDY: I don’t think so. I think people understand this is a very different situation. Twenty years ago, the blackouts were the product of government failure, government incompetence. Everyone knew they should not have been occurring. And no one was prepared. We weren’t sensitized to turning things off and living without electricity for periods of time.

We’re now in year two or three of blackouts that are the result of environmental events, fire and weather. I live in Sonoma, and I bought a very expensive generator, so I’m now not as fearful when the power is going out for seven or eight hours, or days when the wind kicks up and the heat is there. I think people are a little more resilient and resigned to it because of the fires.

FOSTER: I was the point person for Edison in 2000-01, and this is entirely different. This is not Newsom’s problem. He didn’t create it. He needs to solve it, but I would urge everybody to be a little understanding. The governor’s not the guy out there with the hard hat building the plant or putting up solar systems or putting in batteries.

LAT: The word “crisis” gets thrown around a lot when we talk about power shortages. But when you look at the numbers, on Aug. 14 we had about half a million utility customers lose power for 2½ hours at most. The next day we had about 300,000 lose power, and nobody for longer than 90 minutes. How big a crisis is this?

KENNEDY: It’s not a crisis. We’re now the equivalent of many Third World countries where we’re used to having the power go out for hours at a time. That was unheard of 20 years ago. The first time I heard the words, “Utilities are expecting brownouts,” it was the end of 1999, and we all looked at each other and said, “Brownouts?” We didn’t even understand the concept of brownouts in the state of California, the fifth-largest economy on the planet.

For the last 20 years, regulators have been balancing cost, emissions and reliability. We make a decision that we’re going to reduce costs, and reliability suffers, or emissions suffer. We make a concerted effort to reduce emissions, and costs go up. And we only chase those problems when they break the system. We have to recognize that it’s a constant balancing act.

McGUIRE: We have two challenges. One is having the necessary supply on the hottest days in July, August, September. But we also need to focus, especially in PG&E territory, on the blackouts we’re seeing because of fire danger. Some of the poorest communities are suffering because of the negligence of this utility.

In 2019, there were some areas in the North Coast that lost power 14 out of 30 days. Schools shut down. The economy came to a stop. The most medically vulnerable didn’t have access to their medical equipment. This is not only unheard of, it’s unacceptable. We’re the fifth-flipping-largest economy in the world, yet we can’t keep the damn lights on.

ZAVALA: We all learned last summer how heavily California relies on out-of-state power. What will it take to move away from that and become more self-sufficient?

MAINZER: California is likely to have a significant dependence on imports from out of state for quite a period of time. And that’s a phenomenon that’s existed for many, many years, and it’s not entirely a bad thing if the different sub-regions of the West take care of business and make sure they have resource adequacy.

But California needs to be acutely sensitive to the fact that if we continue to see these types of heating events that we saw last summer — and it gets hot in Sacramento and Phoenix and Spokane and Portland and Salt Lake City at the same time — then there’s not as much power. So we have to have contingency plans and other capabilities during those periods.

And I want to mention demand flexibility. This summer you’ll see a lot of messaging about the things consumers can do from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. Turning their thermostats up just a little bit, assuming their health can handle it. Reducing the use of those heavy appliances, turning off unnecessary lights. That kind of aggregated capability can be a real difference-maker.

FOSTER: We should not look to be energy self-sufficient. Look at the recent debacle in Texas, and the huge power outages there. Texas has almost no interconnections with other states — they wanted to be free from federal jurisdiction, and it’s created a real problem. They had no help when they needed it. You want some out-of-state power. You want some flexibility.

This article was originally published in Boiling Point, a weekly email newsletter about climate change and the environment. Sign up at latimes.com/boilingpoint.