Through this reading by Watts on Six Degrees, one of the main points I could take is that one of the fundamental rules about electric power is that it is extremely hard to store. You can power our phone or a laptop with a battery for a few hours. However, no one has yet developed the technology to build batteries that can power cities. As a result, power has to be generated when it is needed, and shipped instantly where it is needed. The flip side of this rule is that once generated, it has to be somewhere, and that is precisely where the power that had been flowing to Northern California had to go – somewhere.