Commentary: California is struggling with the twin threats of extreme heat and power outages

Last month, more than 24,000 Bay Area residents experienced a power outage when a local fire affected PG&E equipment.

As a medical student at Stanford, I was on campus during the blackout, which lasted for days as temperatures soared over 100 degrees. Shortly before the outage, the National Weather Service had released a heat advisory signaling “the onset of extremely dangerous heat conditions.”

These overlapping threats of extreme heat and power outages expose the ways