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People are voluntarily asked to reduce power consumption between 4 and 9pm on the hottest days of the year. We're out of power!

California has a lot of problems, but the state government at the moment is actually operating quite effectively at trying to solve them. Including the issues with the electrical grid (for example our one nuclear plant getting emergency funding to stay online to help meet our environment goals while the grid is transitioning).

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They could easily handle this with some smart metering, so people could just dry their clothes or charge their EVs in the morning or at night.

Smart metering is installed and rates vary with the time of day. Some people can afford to not care about that so asking people not to charge their cars might help.

Just absolutely restrict 240V during peak times then.

From the perspective of your electrical meter, there is no difference between running 2 120V appliances on separate busses vs running a single 240V appliance assuming they consume the same overall wattage. So this would be a very difficult thing to enforce.

That’s what a meter with more intelligence is used (and ya, it would need tighter coupling with the panel where 240V circuits are formed).

240V are what run electric stoves. I guess no cooking either. Why don't we just have a functioning grid like civilized society?

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