[Urbane Guerrilla]

Last night was quite warm in SoCal -- room temp at dawn. Still air, humidity here at the coast, distinctly hot and dry inland apart from scattered thunderstorms -- those are unseasonable, and there's not enough of them to rain on the brush fires. Today's and tomorrow's forecast is more heat, and plenty of it.

We'd best not overcommit to our vaunted clean-energy generation, though: the entire state is on notice of Flex-Alert from midafternoon to 9pm Pacific, as we have less environment-independent generation than we used to. Solar generation begins to drop about 3:30 and steadily worsens as the sun sets. Wind basically shuts off for the sunset hours. Early afternoon is of course the highest temperature and the greatest load on the multi-state grid -- mix that with slumping generation and you've the recipe for mismanagement and rolling blackouts from here to New Mexico.