Also South African here, I don't think it would be the same set of problems. Seems like less of an incompetence/malice thing and more like a long history of ba

Also South African here, I don't think it would be the same set of problems. Seems like less of an incompetence/malice thing and more like a long history of bad strategies with grid infrastructure and power generation. California has been constantly lowering its power stability throughout the day by shutting down reliable power plants for more intermittent solar and wind farms, without building the storage needed to avoid a blackout. On the infrastructure side, it seems like there hasn't been much recent investment, and as power sources get further and further from the consumer the likelihood of a problem on some section of the lines increases. Problems with power lines is an unfortunate reality of states where population centers are spread fairly far apart (we deal with this in Canada too). They're very expensive, especially long distance ones, so it can be hard to make incentives for infrastructure upgrades.