First they struck California, then Texas. Now blackouts are threatening the entire US West as nearly a dozen states head into summer with too little electricity.
From New Mexico to Washington, power grids are being strained by forces years in the making — some of them fuelled by climate change, others by the fight against it. If a heat wave strikes the whole region at once, the rolling outages that darkened Southern California and Silicon Valley last August will have been previews, not flukes.
