Power restored to Silver Lake as state braces for more stress on grid

Power was fully restored to more than 20,000 Silver Lake customers Wednesday as California’s electrical grid operators called for a second day of voluntary conservation.

A Los Angeles Department of Water and Power official said the company is still investigating the cause of Tuesday night’s outage, which kept more than 12,000 customers without power until 10:45 p.m. and more than 8,000 others until after 4 a.m. Wednesday.

But Californians are still at risk of putting too much stress on the state’s power grid. For the first time since 2013, according to KTLA, the California Independent System Operator issued a Flex Alert – an electricity conservation call – on Tuesday, asking residents to voluntarily scale back power usage as demands on the grid surge.

Another Flex Alert will be in effect from 2 to 9 p.m. Wednesday, the agency said.

The demands on the grid could potentially ease by Friday, when weather forecasters say the hot, muggy weather more fitting to the South or East Coast is rotated inland.

“It’ll still feel kind of icky” on Wednesday, said National Weather Service meteorologist Richard Thompson. But the ocean breeze should return Thursday and by Friday, relief should be in sight, he said.

Temperatures and humidity will eventually drop closer to the seasonal averages, but a slight chance of rain and thunderstorms will continue to linger Wednesday and Thursday, he said.

Lightning off the coast triggered a countywide beach closure Tuesday afternoon.

Matt Hamilton and Ryan Parker contributed to this report.

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