Thousands lose power in north San Luis Obispo County

August 18, 2020

On a day of record heat on the Central Coast, thousands of North County residents lost power as outages occurred in multiple cities and communities. [Tribune]

Approximately 4,200 customers or more lost power in Atascadero on Tuesday. The outage began in the afternoon north of Highway 41 West.

The Atascadero outage was not one of California’s ongoing rolling outages occurring due to an overwhelmed state power grid, according to PG&E spokesman Mark Mesean.

Then at approximately 5:44 p.m., more than 3,500 customers lost power in an outage that stretched from Santa Margarita to Pozo.

Additionally, a smaller power outage also occurred Tuesday in Paso Robles. By Tuesday night, power had been restored to most, if not all, of the affected homes in SLO County.


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I can’t wait until we have only electric power for our homes! Thanks SLO Progressives!


I do have solar, and guess what, I have power and dont have to pay a for profit entity like Diablo for my energy. I also dont loose power when private companies fail their customers.


Solar is not the end all, unless large scale battery storage is created…which there is no money for. It seems that the more we move toward so-called green energy, the more we regress. Nuclear energy is not as dangerous as some claim it to be. Natural gas is no worse on the environmental than the manufacturing of solar panels, batteries, etc…and that doesn’t even address disposal of panels & batteries. I too have solar, it is not great – the panels degrade significantly on an annual basis. Without nuclear or petroleum energy, we will continue to experience more & more outages!


If you want to see who is to blame for your power outages … Go spend a couple of hours at a PGE payment center.

When you see PGE customers whip out $5000.00 to $20,000.00 in stacks of CASH to pay their electric bill ,,, you have located your electricity hogs …


They said legalize marijuana it’ll be Great !!!! Um except when citizens need power to cool or heat their homes and businesses ….One 2 car garage size marijuana grow on a regular residential street uses more power than all the rest of the homes on the street .

When they legalized weed they should have built more power generation plants .

Multiply one 2 car garage size marijuana grow by at least 1 million grows in the state ….just the indoor marijuana grows use 40 million homes worth of electricity


Right when we’re supposed to stay inside, with the windows closed so we don’t die of smoke inhalation. What next!?


This is a good time to discuss the viability of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant and never mind the grid sucking Teslas online. You can’t have one without the other but then again air-conditioners could be outlawed to allow for excessive demand on the grid electric vehicles require. Sure some may say there aren’t that many electric cars but that is about as weak as never the horseless carriage debate. For the same reasons we have AA there should be chapters of DSA too.


Our family found our recent outage unsettling, not because the power was off but because it identified misbehavior by PG&E in it’s reporting and updating mechanism. They sent FOUR text alerts over 30 hours stating a crew was on site, and they were not.


We can see the entire short “feeder” line two miles onto the ridgetops from where it comes off the main line on the highway. Homes on the main line showed lights OK. Ok so there was a two day outage now known to have been a lightning strike based on transformer damage. Ok, no big deal and all routine, however the PG&E text alert system sent a total of FOUR inaccurate texts over 30 hours saying a crew was “on site” and assessing the damage, or “on site” and conducting repairs of some sort. It’s hard to miss the bright blue trucks and they were never there during the hours and moments specified by the PG&E text thing.


It’s all fixed now and we got by just fine, however either the crews or the company were generating inaccurate location information of a crew in four instances over thirty hours. This does not engender confidence in the new reorganized PG&E, and we were damned glad we had a quiet $800 Honda (which won’t run the air, just fans) to keep the fridge cold.