[Fair Use: For Educational and Research Purpose Only] Published Saturday, May 27, 2000, in the Miami Herald

FPL Plant Failures Cause Brief Outages BY BARBARA De LOLLIS bdelollis@herald.com

Power plant failures cut off electricity to 95,000 Florida Power & Light customers for 15 minutes Friday afternoon and kicked in the utility's voluntary power reduction program.

The outage occurred after two FPL power plants in Manatee County failed at 2:40 p.m., around the hottest part of the day, said Betty Nuqez, an FPL spokeswoman. The plants were running at normal capacity by early evening.

``We don't anticipate further problems,'' she said.

The outage affected about a 10th of FPL's 895,000 customers.

The plant failures reduced power in FPL's statewide territory by about 1600 megawatts, roughly the same amount used by a city of 95,000. The system automatically targeted Miami-Dade for the temporary outage, Nuqez said.

FPL further moved to correct the power shift by starting its voluntary power reduction programs with homes and large business users.

Commercial customers that sign up for the program receive discounts on their electricity bills for agreeing to cut power for nonessential equipment, such as escalators, when FPL makes the request.

Residential customers can get discounts for agreeing to cut power on any or all of the following -- swimming pool pumps, air conditioning, and hot water heaters, Nuqez said.

http://www.miamiherald.com/content/today/business/digdocs/053621.htm ====================

-- (Dee360Degree@aol.com), May 28, 2000