What if rolling blackouts return to California?
Wildfire line de-energization plus demand spikes push CAISO into rotating outages; the modeled channel runs to crops via heat/drought, but the real read is California power scarcity and PSPS economic drag. Rhymes with the August 2020 CAISO rotating blackouts and the 2019 PG&E PSPS events. Skeptical note: mapping a CA grid event to a generic climate_supply crop shock is a stretch — the grain-yield cascade is the wrong channel; this is a localized power-reliability and utility-liability story (PCG), not an ag shock.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. Wildfire-driven line de-energization plus demand spikes force CAISO into multi-day rotating outages across the state. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — European energy ▲ · Industrial demand ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.