I've lived in California for my whole life. A blackout in the 80's was an anomaly. They were so rare that I remember them as being fun, a little adventure, because they were very rare.

In current year California I experience them on a regular enough basis that they are an genuine annoyance, especially because they are most common in the high heat of Summer. It's bad enough that I have invested in backup batteries for my home so I don't lose my refridgerated food and other essentials.

One can blame PG&E, Wall Street, whomever, and they certainly bear fault, but what's changed is the Federal and California energy policy. They shut down the nuclear pathway and pushed "renewables". It became a religious issue in which simply questioning the notion that we can derive all our energy needs from "clean energy" makes you a bad person.

So now California has extremely expensive energy and poor reliability. It's a mess. But you don't live in California so it's OK right, no, not really, California is where they prototype these policies and you can see them being pushed to other countries and the rest of the US.

It really comes down to the old saw that doing dumb things is ultimately bad for you, no matter how good the intentions. Now we're in the retcon phase of this process where the apologists and beneficiaries of these policies try to gaslight us into believing that it was always this bad, and that things are actually getting better instead of worse.