In SA, as I have mentioned, we have times of rolling blackouts. Stages 1 – 4 being the worst.
The last few years we have learnt, at least some of us, how quickly one can learn to scale down your power requirements and go from paying the utilities for all your power to saving a ton of money being solar grid-tied to the utilities to going off-grid with the same solar system.
Now let me be clear, it is NOT easy to do, but dang, once you have learnt to live with 50l of water per person per day and no power, all in a 1st world city, trust me, your views change … like in a LOT!
We don’t have snow in SA, so no real heating costs but we do have heat. Just last week I saw temps in a town in SA hitting 52°C (125.6°F). The latest model air conditioners can work quite nicely with solar systems in these cases.
Point of the reply: Get a move on and become more self-reliant, less impact on the environment. PG&E is not there to “save the day”.
Problem is, MOST people are just not interested in scaling down. THAT is the core problem.