Millions of Californians lost power after a brutal heatwave. Yahoo Finance's On The Move panel share the details.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: Wasn't it Buster Poindexter who sang the song "Hot Hot Hot"? Well, they're not singing that in California. They're living, especially with some mysterious power blackouts, these rolling blackouts. Melody Hahm is going to join us, because there's this question as to whether those blackouts are actually necessary, right, Melody?

MELODY HAHM: Yeah, and let's be clear-- California is at the epicenter of a lot of these blackouts and this heat wave. But states like Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Texas, and even parts of Montana have been affected by a lot of these power outages over the weekend, starting on Friday evening, at least in the state of California. To be clear here, this is a move that was made by a lot of the power companies, including PG&E, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas and Electric. And they were given a directive by the non-profit California ISO that basically operates our grid here in California. And they were told to preemptively make this move as heat wave-- the heat wave did sweep our state.

I want to be clear that there were broken temperature records. So in some ways, the argument can be made that this sort of preemptive move was necessary. Take, for example, Death Valley. The temperature did hit 130 degrees for the first time ever.

Last time we had this degree of a heat wave was actually in 2006. So in many ways, it was unprecedented, meriting this sort of a proactive move. It's very different, let's say, from the power grid shutdown that we saw over the wildfires last year as well as the year before. And that was to prevent some sort of damage or potential brush fire because of some difficulties in the equipment that we saw. So this is a very distinct sort of move and collaboration done by a lot of the electrical companies here.

And Adam, I want to say, at least for me-- I'm based in Los Angeles-- that a lot of the fires did sweep part of the eastern-- part of southern Los Angeles, but also Northern California. So I personally have been directly impacted by any of these blackouts. I do have to say, over this period of work-from-home time, we know that people have been using so much electricity. And we know that Governor Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, over the weekend said hey guys, let's try to reduce our electric use as much as possible, perhaps from the hours of 3:00 to 8:00 PM.

Let's be real. We know that citizens across the state are heavily dependent, not only on electricity, but just staying at home. They need to figure out ways to kind of keep themselves occupied during this time. So it is such an unfortunate kind of convergence of events, right, because people are so much more heavily dependent on kind of staying indoors and cool during this time.