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Power restored temporarily during blackouts in California

WEB EXCLUSIVE Greg Lefevre on the lights going out in San Francisco Rolling blackouts cut electricity to parts of Silicon Valley January 17, 2001 Web posted at: 5:57 p.m. EST (2257 GMT)

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With utilities low on cash, lawmakers act

Outage could harm orange crop

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From staff and wire reports

SAN FRANCISCO, California -- Power officials found a "small parcel of additional electricity" Wednesday, enabling them to temporarily halt the state's first rolling blackouts ordered after weeks of electricity emergencies.

But officials predict the rolling blackouts will resume at 4 p.m. PT (7 p.m. ET), near the highest peak for power use during the day.

"Now we find ourself in the situation where we are having to conserve a little bit over the afternoon so that we can mitigate the sharp peak we will get around 5 o'clock when people start going home and turning on the electricity," said Terry Winter, president and CEO of California's Independent System Operator, the state's power manager.

Much of Northern California was in the dark Wednesday afternoon because state regulators ordered rolling blackouts after lower electricity reserves threatened to crash the state power grid.

Neighborhoods on the Pacific Gas and Electric system were darkened one by one, including parts of Santa Cruz, Capitola, San Jose, Cupertino, Oakland, Burlingame, San Francisco and Richmond.

The blackouts cut off all electricity to homes, schools, businesses, factories and even street lights and traffic signals.

Among the first to be hit by the lack of electricity were Apple Computer in the San Francisco Bay area, San Francisco's tourist areas of Fisherman's Warf and Pier 39, and the famous Haight Ashbury neighborhood. Also darkened were the suburbs of Burlingame and areas of Silicon Valley in Cupertino and San Jose.

The scattered outages were restricted to Pacific Gas and Electric Co. territory in Northern California and part of the central area of the state, said Stephanie McCorkle, a spokeswoman for the Independent System operator (ISO), keeper of the state's power grid.

Each block -- clusters of electronic circuits that may or may not be geographically linked -- is darkened for an hour to an hour and a half.

The next block is turned off before the power is restored to the first block, a process that could take up to an additional 30 minutes.

The ISO issued a Stage 3 alert early Wednesday -- the third one in less than a week. The advisory comes amid cooler-than-normal temperatures in the state, which boosts demand for power.

A Stage 3 alert means electricity reserves have fallen below 1.5 percent and rolling blackouts are a possibility.

The state avoided rolling blackouts Tuesday after huge state pumps that move water from Northern California to the south were turned off temporarily, conserving enough electricity to power 600,000 homes, said Kellan Fluckiger, the ISO's chief operating officer.

With utilities low on cash, lawmakers act In Sacramento, the state Assembly approved a plan in which California would buy electricity from wholesalers and sell it to utilities at low rates -- about one-fifth the going market rate.

A transmission dispatcher monitors the power grid at the California Independent System Operator in Folsom, California, on Tuesday California's two largest utilities, Pacific Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison, support the measure, which now moves to the state Senate.

Both companies say they've lost billions of dollars because they have not been allowed to pass on skyrocketing wholesale power costs as the result of a rate freeze imposed under the state's much-criticized power deregulation program.

SoCal Edison said Tuesday it cannot pay $596 million in bills for wholesale energy and debt service, including $215 million to the California Power Exchange, which manages the wholesale buying and selling of electricity.

The Power Exchange is considering whether to make the utility buy its power elsewhere.

With just $500 million in cash left as of January 10, PG&E faces due dates on bills totaling $1 billion during the first two weeks of February.

A major power provider, Dynegy Inc. of Houston, has threatened to take SoCal Edison and PG&E to bankruptcy court if they didn't make payments due this week.

Outage could harm orange crop Wholesale power prices have risen dramatically since June, in part because of a hot summer and a cold winter. In 1999, they averaged perhaps 3.5 cents a kilowatt. Now they are running about 30 cents, and sometimes far higher.

With demand remaining high, supplies are strapped because no new power plants have been built in the state in recent years. Imports are tight because other states are fighting over the power.

In addition, spiraling prices for natural gas are forcing power plants to raise their prices. Most power plants are fired by natural gas.

California orange growers said they hoped the state's strapped electricity supply would hold out to keep their delicate crops from freezing. They rely on electricity to power fans and water pumps that work together to warm groves when it freezes.

"We're terribly exposed," said Joel Nelsen, president of California Citrus Mutual, a trade association of 800 growers. "The loss of power for a short time could wreak untold damage on our crop."

http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/01/17/power.woes.03/index.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), January 17, 2001

Answers

Well, it finally hit. No power blackouts yet in Paradise, Ca., but big parts of Oakland and San Francisco were shut down today.

This is the "tip of the iceberg," as they say. If rolling blackouts are happening at a time of year when the power grid is--normally--only taxed at 55% of capacity (with a theorectical 45% reserve), what will occur this summer, when the temperature hits 100, and a normal imposition on the grid is 95% of capacity (with only a 5% theoretical reeerve)?

There won't be "rolling blackouts" of 60-90 minutes then. It will be more like days at a time.

-- JackW (jpayne@webtv.net), January 17, 2001.