Comment by dghlsakjg

I don't live in SoCal. I live in rural Canada where I get several power outages per year due to inclement weather downing lines.

It sounds like there wasn't really a problem with gas availability, in your case. You were able to get enough gas to comfortably power a generator with no preparation during one of the biggest emergencies the city has ever seen. During the LA fires, the power cuts were to small enough areas that you could have just driven to a different area of the city. That sounds inconvenient, but hardly worth the effort of building independent power generation sources for the 10k+ gas stations in your state.

A far better solution is to do what we do in my part of Canada: a competently run power company that doesn't arbitrarily shut off power due to failing infrastructure setting billions of dollars worth of city on fire. We don't have PSPS's despite living in a very fire prone place with extreme weather because our infrastructure is maintained much better.

Instead of forcing everyone to subsidize individual power plants for gas stations to do long tail risk mitigation, California should maybe invest in a grid that doesn't regularly cause billion dollar fires.