Washington CNN —

Former President Donald Trump, now a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, falsely claimed in a Thursday speech in Texas that California had widespread blackouts this summer because the state didn’t have sufficient electricity to meet demand.

“They want to go all electric,” Trump said while criticizing the Biden administration, “even though we don’t have enough electricity to cool down California in the summers. Did you see, they had blackouts all over the place this summer? It was a disaster. The winter’s no good … the whole thing is crazy. ‘Let’s go all electric, but we don’t have enough electric to take care of somebody’s air conditioner in California.’”

Facts First: Trump’s claim that California “had blackouts all over the place this summer” is false. California was able to meet its electricity demand throughout the summer.

“California didn’t experience any outages this year because of a load imbalance. We haven’t since 2020,” Erin Mellon, spokesperson for California Gov. Gavin Newsom, said in an email on Friday. Mellon added, “We’ve drastically expanded our clean energy portfolio, and recently CA hit 6,600 MW of battery storage – enough for 6.6 million homes for 4 hours.”

As CNN reported in August, when Trump made a similar false claim that California was “in a big brownout,” the state was also aided this summer by the large quantity of snow and rain that fell in the winter and spring, which refilled reservoirs that generate...

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