 Good morning. I'm Brian Ferguson, Deputy Director of Crisis Communication at the Governor's Office of Emergency Services. Today we're here to provide you an update on the ongoing heat event and its impacts on our power grid and vulnerable populations across the state. You'll hear today from experts in the fields of energy, public health, and emergency management on the steps being taken to protect public health and safety, keep our energy grid on, and help keep California safe during this challenging time. We'll do brief remarks from each of the individuals, and we'll take your questions at the end. For those of you watching online, if you have questions or follow-up, you're welcome to email them to media at calloes.ca.gov. We have representatives available and on hand to take questions in Spanish for any of our Spanish language outlets. We can do one-on-ones afterwards. We also have American Sign Language interpreter interpreting for our access and functional needs and deaf communities. So with that, to give us an overview of the heat event that we're seeing, I'd like to introduce Sarah Rogowski from the National Weather Service. Thank you, Brian, and thank you for allowing me to speak with you this morning. We're going to continue to see a long-duration heat wave across the state through this week, and that's going to bring widespread heat impacts, or what you'll commonly hear is high to very high heat risk. What is heat risk? It is a way for us to explain how hot it is relative to what time of year and relative to the population. We are looking at, looking through the current date and the duration, and as well as high temperatures and low temperatures, and where we would get that temperature relief. And as that relief is less and less with the warm temperatures overnight, you're not getting the relief, so increasing the impacts and accumulating the impacts. What kind of temperatures are we looking at for the next rest of the week? Temperatures between 100 and 115 generally across inland areas, 80s to 90s closer to the coast. We're going to be seeing those values through Thursday and into Friday, especially across the central parts of the valley. We're also seeing warm overnight low temperatures, also approaching records just like those high temperatures are each day. Low temperatures trending in the 70s and 80s, and even near 90s for some of the central foothills, and we've seen some close to 90 degree temperatures along the southern foothills and southern California as well. Climbed to logically speaking, this isn't out of the question to have the warmer temperatures in September, even though we are seeing record highs. We tend to see another little bump in temperatures for September and even in October for parts of California, but these are higher than we normally see. With the heat and continued dry conditions, we are seeing an increase in fire weather concerns. Hot and dry, we're automatically looking for fire. No widespread winds are expected over the next five days. However, the normally gusty winds we see in the mountains and foothills are going to increase the fire risk even more. There is potential for isolated showers and thunderstorms across southern California and into the Sierras. Keeping an eye on those, no widespread rain is expected with those, but some lightning strikes in a few isolated areas of heavy rain are possible. I would hand things over next to Elliot Mazer from LISO. Thank you very much. Hello, everyone. I'd like to start by thanking California electricity consumers who really stepped up to flex their demand over the last few evenings. Your efforts have been making a real difference. For example, over the past two evenings, electricity loads have come in about 1,000 megawatts below our expectations or approximately 2% below forecast. Our system operators attribute most of that difference to reductions in electricity use in response to our call for load reductions. Your efforts to flex electricity demand away from those critical hours of 4 to 9 p.m. have been working well and we really appreciate it. But we have now entered the most intense phase of this heatwave. Forecasted demand for Monday and Tuesday is at all-time record levels and the potential for rotating outages has increased significantly. We're looking at energy deficits of 2 to 4,000 megawatts, which is as much as 10% of normal electricity demand. We need to use every tool available to get even greater energy savings today and tomorrow as this extreme heatwave extends into this week. In fact, we need 2 to 3 times as much conservation as we've been experiencing to keep the power on with these historically high temperatures in demand. We know it's been a long haul and it's about to get even more difficult. But the efforts of electricity consumers and our partners at the utilities and state agencies are making a real difference. Thank you for your focus today and tomorrow to help us maintain the reliability of the grid during these very challenging conditions. I'm now going to pass it over to Alice Reynolds with the California Public Utilities Commission. Thank you. Thank you, Elliott. Good morning, everyone. I'm Alice Reynolds of the California Public Utilities Commission. As you've heard, we're entering the heart of this heat event and it is expected to last longer and reach higher temperatures than previously anticipated. Since the first flex alert was issued last Wednesday, Californians have flexed their power, conserved energy, and helped keep our electric grid stable. Although this event is extreme, we have done quite a bit of planning for extreme events in California. We have increased supply for emergencies. We've raised our electricity reliability buffer and all of the electrical utilities have been locking up imported energy as well as expediting new electrical generation projects here in California. And one additional tool that we have during emergency events is the emergency load reduction programs. Although these programs, commercial, industrial, and residential customers through the programs, these customers can receive compensation for voluntarily reducing electricity at the time of a flex alert. As the temperatures continue to rise and stay hot longer, utilities have stepped up their efforts to enroll customers in emergency load reduction programs and they're working together with local community choice aggregators to increase enrollment. The CPUC is also in close communication with the electrical utilities and generators as they work on repairs related to the prolonged heat and ensure customer safety. All of the utilities have increased staffing over the holiday weekend to have the staff needed to work on emergencies at all hours so that any necessary work to maintain the flow of electricity is done quickly. Californians are like no others. We are innovative and we persevere and as we roll into the hottest days of the heat wave, we ask that you continue to respond with typical California grid and after 4 p.m., remember to turn off unnecessary lights, take a break, stop using your washer and dryer, dishwasher, oven, stove, all electrical appliances, and turn the air conditioner to 78 degrees or above. You can also learn how to receive bill credits for these actions and more by visiting powersaverrewards.org. Thank you. I will now turn to Commissioner Siva Gundah of the California Energy Commission. Thank you, Alice. Good morning. My name is Siva Gundah. I'm the commissioner at the California Energy Commission. I just want to compliment a couple of things that my colleagues here, Elliot Mainzer from KISO and President Reynolds from CPUC have mentioned. So we are in an extraordinary event. So we are looking at about 51,000 megawatts of potential load tomorrow. And as President Mainzer mentioned, it would be the highest in September that we've ever seen. And so we're looking at all options possible to ensure that we act on both the demand side as well as the supply side. One thing to compliment what President Reynolds mentioned is there is a statewide program for emergency load reduction that was authorized by the legislature earlier this summer. We're working with a lot of water utilities and publicly owned utilities to help bring people into those programs to save energy. So we're here to answer questions. We're carefully tracking this. And as many of us internally say, one big California family, one big team, we need to move together the next three days. I look forward to supporting California. Thanks. Good morning. My name is Dr. Tomas Aragon. I'm the state public health officer and the director of the California Department of Public Health. Thank you for being here this morning to remind all Californians that it's not over. We have a few more days. It's going to be tough. The key message that we've been getting out to everybody is to be cool, be hydrated, be connected, and be informed. As we know, because of the heat, and I know that the focus has been on energy, so think of your body really as having a thermostat, right? And if you're alone and you don't have air conditioning and you have the heat is increasing, you're going to need to figure out ways to cool your body down. This is different from somebody who goes out in exercises. That can be usually people who are perfectly healthy, who go out in exercise where they're producing heat and within 60 minutes can get themselves into trouble. It's called exertional heat stroke. It starts off with heat exhaustion, but then it can go to heat stroke. So we want to let people know that they can get in trouble. So one of the things that people need to do, especially because schools are going to be coming back tomorrow, other businesses will be coming back, is to make sure that you review your organizationals heat emergency plan and processes around this. The other tool that you can use to help guide you and your family and your community was mentioned by the National Weather Service, which is what's called the heat risk. The heat risk when you go to their site, you can click on any part of California and you can see what color you're in. What you will see if you go there and you click, it actually gives you a seven-day forecast. So you can click on the coming days and what you will see is, especially along the Central Valley, you will see it red, turning to more and more dark purple, which is very high risk. And then by Saturday you'll see that all of California cools down. Looking at that map is really useful because you can go ahead and look to see what the situation is in your area and use it with the other information that you have in your community. A key thing about that map and grid is that it gives you practical tips that you can take, especially within the red level three or the magenta level four, which is the very high risk categories where everybody's impacted. There are tips on thinking about canceling events. So if you're in an area where it's purple, I'm sorry, where it's magenta, very high risk, think about moving the event to where it's safer. Think about rescheduling the event. Think about canceling the event. And so please take advantage of that tool that we have to help guide and to use it with your other information. And that's the key things that I want to cover today and I'll be available for questions. I'm now going to turn it over to Anna Lee Berlu, who's Assistant Deputy Director with CAL FIRE, who will give us an update. Great, thank you so much, Thomas. Anna Lee Berlu, Assistant Deputy Director with CAL FIRE. So as of today, we have 4,400 firefighters are battling 14 large fires across the state of California. Yesterday alone, 45 new wildland fires started. Of note, the mill fire in Siskiu County, it's currently 4,263 acres, 40% contained. While damage inspections are still ongoing, inspections have already identified 88 structures destroyed, 11 structures damaged, and I'm saddened to report two civilian fatalities. The Siskiu County Sheriff's Department will be the lead regarding information on the fatalities. Additional fire spread is not anticipated. Siskiu County Sheriff's Department has opened up some of the evacuation order and warning areas outside of the FIRE perimeter. For those returning home, we encourage you to go to readyforwildfire.org to learn more about what it is that you should expect in a checklist for preparing to go back to evacuated areas. For the mountain fire, also in Siskiu County, the fire is currently 10,338 acres, 10% contained. The fire did continue to be active overnight. It's burning in very steep terrain and the fuels are stressed with the high temperatures and dryness, which is causing difficulties for firefighters at scene. So as we remain in this continuing hot and dry period throughout the week, we ask everyone to be diligent in preparing and preventing fire starts. 95% of wildland fires are caused by humans. All of us have the ability to prevent those fire starts. Cal Fire continues to have and maintain a high level of preparedness throughout the week and this holiday weekend to address the predicted weather and incident activity. In the past 24 hours alone, Cal Fire firefighters responded to over 1600 new emergencies. In closing, I just want to say thank you to our state, local, tribal and federal fire agency partners, as well as the public for your partnership and cooperation in preparing for preventing and mitigating wildfires in California. This is definitely a team effort and it requires all of us to work together to reduce the impacts of wildfire in California. Thank you. So in closing, before we go to questions, just want to again emphasize the important role the public plays and all the elements that this group has talked about with the extreme temperatures that we're seeing and the threats to our electricity. All of you as Californians have a role to play, monitoring that thermostat, particularly after 4 p.m., being thoughtful about public health, if there's activities that are risky, looking out for friends, neighbors, family members who may be at greater risk and supporting them to come out safely through this period of time. Likewise, the State Operations Center here behind us is actively working with our local county partners across the state just to make sure that there's no unmet needs, that we're prepositioning generators, should there be any power edges, providing ice, supporting cooling centers, etc. So with that, thank you for your time. We're happy to take any questions and feel free to ask them now. So question. I'm Ladea with KCRA. So you mentioned some people have been conserving energy so far, but I think you said you need two to three times as much conservation to keep up with demand, if that was for today. So can you speak to how likely rolling blackouts might be, and if that happens, when do you make that call, and what's the process for that? Sure. Yes, the number I cited earlier that we've seen about approximately a thousand megawatts of flexible demand so far, we're going to need exactly two to three times as much of that. What that does is that gives us a buffer against taking other actions, and as we get further across the course of today, we'll be checking to see the level of imports from other states. We'll be seeing if the other generators inside California can provide us some additional information, and if the conditions continue to deteriorate, we will trigger a stage two emergency, in which case all of the efforts and all of the demand response and backup generation capability that we've been pulling together in recent weeks and months will be made available to us, and of course the hope is that that will be sufficient to keep us out of what is known as a stage three condition. If for reasons, if we experience additional contingencies, we lose additional generators, or fires have additional impacts on the system, it's conceivable that we could go into a stage three. We'd have about 3,000 megawatts of additional capability there to protect us, but blackouts rotating outages are a possibility today, and so the efforts of consumers to really lean in and take those actions after 4pm today are absolutely essential, and so we've really appreciated the effort so far, but as we've been saying, we are now moving into the most extreme part of this heat wave and really stepping up those actions here today and tomorrow in particular are going to be essential to helping us maintain reliability. One of the things that is, you know, we're a little bit fortunate right now, it is extraordinarily hot in California, record setting heat wave in California, and the desert southwest is also very very hot. There are some other portions of the western United States, particularly in the Pacific Northwest and other areas that aren't quite as hot, so we have been getting a pretty good amount of imports from those areas in the last couple of nights, we're expecting that to persist. We have arrangements within California and across other states for emergency assistance from other utilities if we really start getting into stress-grade conditions. We've been on the phone constantly checking in with all of those utilities if conditions continue to deteriorate. They'll help us, we also may be in a position to help them under certain circumstances, so there's mutual assistance between the utilities, and then ultimately it's, you know, that all of the efforts on the fire side are incredibly helpful, you know, that preemptive work on the fire side to keep a close eye on the transmission lines, that's a major contingency that we're really making sure does not happen, so keeping the transmission grid healthy, and then all of the entities that have generators doing everything they can to keep them online at the maximum extent possible. Those are all the things that need to come together here to keep us out of significant reliability problems, and I just want to say again, I'm just profoundly grateful to all the work that's happening across the state with the utilities, with the state agencies, many people, many agencies taking steps to give us the best chance of working through this event successfully. Two to three times more conservation, does that mean that two to three times the number of people need to step up and do that, or what does that actually look like? I think it's going to be a combination of individuals and businesses, commercial operations, you know, we have a number of businesses and major utilities that are working with their big customers that have taken steps to be prepared to reduce their demand, but every single individual in our service territory in California can play their role, and it's really just taking those specific steps after 4 p.m. to raise those thermostats, shift all their major electricity consumption out of that 4 to 9 p.m. or beyond period, and make sure that at the end of the day they're doing everything they can to just keep their electricity consumption to a minimum. This is an extraordinary event, this is a record-setting heat wave in terms of temperatures and duration, and this is the time where here in California we really do need to step up and work together to bend that demand curve. You mentioned like record-setting, we're expecting possibly record-setting temperatures, is the demand unprecedented as well that you're seeing? Right now the forecast for Tuesday would be, if it materialized, would be above the highest demand ever seen in California, which was back in July of 2006. So our goal is to not see that number, right? We're going to try to do everything we can with all of our partners to bend that demand curve well below that and give us that margin of safety before we get into significant great disturbances, but it's going to take all of us to really lean in here today and tomorrow in particular. To stage 3, if that's necessary, is that something that you would find out later, like during those peak hours when people are supposed to be conserving energy? Yes, we'll be watching it very, very closely. Later today, at about 2.30 in the afternoon, we will finish running our energy market for tomorrow. We'll have a better handle on what tomorrow's conditions look like and we'll start really seeing how things are setting up for this evening, how much conservation is already kicking in. This last couple days I'll say it's been encouraging. Folks have actually been starting some of that flexible demand even prior to 4 p.m. It's been helpful. We've seen a demonstrable shifting of the curve, so we'll start watching that very carefully. We'll take advantage of all the other available energy resources, the imports, the emergency assistance that may be available to us, and then we'll make a determination. We are right now in what's known as an EEA-1. We're in the first stage. We'll know by this evening, by late afternoon, probably whether we need to go into the stage 2, which then triggers all of the tools that Commissioner Gundy described. President Reynolds and her team have been working so hard to give us here in recent months. I'm just going to ask, on that call you submitted via phone, understands Labor Day weekends are trying to be accommodating, but they're asking for kind of an explainer if we do reach the rolling blackout stage. What does that look like? How is it determined and what would the size and scope be? But just a basic background on that. At the California Independent System Operator, we watch the real-time supply-demand balance for the grid. If we get to that point, where all of these other tools that we have described are the energy, the demand response, the emergency response are operating reserves, if those are exhausted, at that point we would be conveying to the utilities that it would be time to drop load. And the utilities, the individual utilities inside of our balancing authority, our service area, would then allocate those rotating outages to their customers. They would make the determination of the best way to allocate them. And typically the goal is to try to keep them as short of duration and as minimum impact as possible for individual consumers. They would be rotated and moved across the system as a way to minimize them. And our expectation, if we got there, of course we're going to do everything we possibly can not to, is that they would likely be of relatively shorter duration as we move through the evening and eventually demand starts to taper off after that 4-9 period. So that's the protocol. We're in very, very tight coordination with the major utilities in our service territory. They are all prepared. We've been rehearsing this for months. If we got here, we're always trying to be maximally prepared well in advance of an event like this. That is, of course, the last measure. But I want to redirect people's attention to that this is something that we can influence dramatically together by stepping up together here over the next 24, 48 hours and really leaning in to bend that demand curve and take those specific steps that can make a real difference. The mutual assistance we spoke about with the other utilities, the non-ISO utilities, how exactly does that work? Is there an obligation on their part to help if they have their cushion? There is. It's generally, for many, many years, all of us in the Western United States work together across. We're part of one big interconnected system, and we all experience distress at different levels. And so we have points of time where utilities in another area may be experiencing significant concerns. The state of Nevada is very hot right now, so we're in very close contact with them as well. So we're always looking out for each other, but we're making sure that if somebody has some extra capability to provide, they'll provide that on a short-term basis. Today here in California and the desert southwest, we're all sort of in it together, so we're closely communicating and making sure that we're all successful in keeping the lights on. But is there a legal obligation if somebody has extra power to spare? I would not say it's necessarily a legal obligation. If there was not a previous commitment to provide firm energy in that hour, no, but it's generally, this is the spirit and the way that we work with each other of providing mutual assistance, and by this evening we'll be making calls to folks within California and in other parts to see if they have anything else to offer us before conditions deteriorate. I'm going to throw one more in from the phones for Commissioner Gund up probably. So we have a colleague from LA Times asking, what is the single best thing an individual can do in their homes to conserve energy, whether it's the thermostat, the dishwasher, but just a little explainer for people at home of what is, you know, what are the most basic actions that can serve the most energy at home. Thank you. I'll start and I'll request President Reynolds to jump into here. So I think the, as President Reynolds mentioned, the biggest thing we can do is really pre-cooler houses and make sure the cooling load is reduced, meaning take your thermostats up to 78 degrees in the window of concern here between 4 and 9 p.m. The second thing is just, you know, turning off any lights that you can do. You know, we all can find the light in the house that we can turn off. That would be great. And lastly, any of those electrical loads that you might have in your home, if you can shift out of that window, unless it's absolutely critical, would be extremely helpful for the grid today. And I'll see if President Reynolds has anything else to add. Just to emphasize the importance of pre-cooling your house. So this is not about being hot all day. Consumers would have, but all Californians have the option of turning their thermostat to 70 degrees in the morning and still help the grid by turning it down sometime after 4 o'clock. And 78 is the recommended temperature for the evening, as long as that's consistent with health needs. So just wanted to emphasize that point. Yeah, thoughts for you for Cal Fire? You may have already answered this question, I'm not sure. My reporter wanted to know, given stream heat and risk to firefighter health, do you anticipate a scenario where you might pause firefighting to preserve firefighter health? Yeah, I appreciate that question. Thank you. So the safety of our firefighters and all responders is of course of utmost important to us as we are out there in these extreme conditions over the next heat. We are doing a lot of training and education and prevention with our firefighters. Simple things also that we are encouraging the public to do, like pre-hydrating, pre-cooling, ensuring that when we don't have to be in these hot conditions, we're not in these hot conditions, so that our firefighters are ready to respond. We are not at this point anticipating any disruption of our firefighting efforts, but we are continuing to ensure that our firefighter safety is of utmost power. Anything else in the room? All right, so in closing, just want to thank all of you for joining today and just remind Californians that this really is an unprecedented event. We as a state are taking every available action to keep the power on, to keep people safe. There's a room of people behind us who are coordinating the state response will continue to be here throughout the week, but we want the public to understand the risks that they face and what protective actions they can take. So we encourage you all to learn more about this on either the state public health website or flex alert website where you can sign up to get alerts, understand the energy savings you do at your homes, and then the resource referred to you in this event. So with that, well thank you and we'll hope you all stay cool and have a great day. Thank you.