https://www.wired.com/story/why-the-pgande-blackouts-spared-californias-big-tech-hqs/ > Huge swaths of California were without power on Wednesday after the (recently bankrupt) utility PG&E—whose downed power lines caused last year’s Camp Fire—preemptively pulled the plug on hundreds of thousands of customers. The unprecedented move, designed to reduce the risk of wildfires, plunged more than 500,000 homes in 20 counties (and counting) across Northern and Central California into darkness shortly after midnight, and plans are in place to cut power to over 250,000 more. In total, the estimated number of people that could be left without electricity is upward of 2 million (a “customer,” in PG&E-speak, can be an apartment complex or other kind of multiunit building). Though the scope of the blackout is expansive, blanketing the Bay Area, chunks of the region remain conspicuously absent from outage maps: The seats of power for nearly every major tech giant. > It’s far from a coincidence, says Michael Wara, head of the climate and energy policy program at Stanford University’s Woods Institute. If anything, it’s by design. He is one of the state wildfire commissioners, which are tasked with examining issues related to fires tied to utility infrastructure, like the one caused by PG&E in 2018.