As the People's Republic of KKKalifornia continues its progressive deindustrialization, the local Public Utilities Commission has decided to allow electric utilities to implement mass blackouts during period of high fire risk in order to insulate themselves from liability should a fire break out (archived). As much of this People's Republic is a precariously irrigated desert, this means locales including San Francisco, San Jose, and the "ritzy" suburbs of Los Angeles are all candidates for preventative power outages, depending how the wind blows.

Certain special classes of utility determined by the composition of their ownership had been granted this authority as early as 2007. Calistoga in the Napa Valley enjoyed a prophylactic service outage last year that was surely sold as entirely for the people's own protection.