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Californians could find themselves 'powerless' on Monday Transmission glitch causes 24-minute blackout January 21, 2001 Web posted at: 10:15 PM EST (0315 GMT)

In this story:

Unprecedented weekend alert

Businesses suffer power 'shutdowns'

Conservation efforts and hot sales

From staff and wire reports

SACRAMENTO, California -- Californians will begin another day Monday of living under the threat of rolling blackouts as the state continues to suffer a power crisis. Parts of Northern California were blacked out Sunday after a major south-north transmission line malfunctioned, prompting state authorities to shut down power temporarily to thousands of customers.

"Today, fortunately, was not a supply problem," said Patrick Dorinson, spokesman for the California Independent System Operator (ISO), which runs the state's power grid. "But once again it proves the fragility of the system, and it also proves that we certainly need to make some upgrades to it."

The outages, affecting up to 75,000 customers in the Sacramento, Roseville, Turlock and Modesto areas, lasted about 20 minutes.

Dace Udris, spokesman for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, said a transmission line from Southern California to the Oregon border "tripped" and went off-line.

The ISO then ordered a "controlled outage" to keep the backup lines from being overloaded. Roughly 26,850 Sacramento customers were affected, and other surrounding utilities also suffered blackouts.

"It went out and was off-line for around 24 minutes before they were able to get it back," Udris said, calling the problem a transmission issue.

"If this transmission line went [out] at any other situation, you would have experienced similar problems," Dorinson said. "It's a major line, and when something like that happens, it wouldn't matter what the supply crisis was."

Unprecedented weekend alert Sunday's problems come after weeks of electrical emergencies in California, where officials have issued alerts and urged consumers to cut their power usage because of limited supplies exacerbated by financial troubles of the state's largest utilities.

California residents endured a full weekend of Stage Three power alerts. Stephanie McCorkle, with the ISO, said the emergency would likely continue Monday, and rolling blackouts remained a possibility.

The ISO -- which manages 80 percent of the state's electricity grid -- earlier had declared a Stage Three alert through Monday, an unprecedented action on weekends, when demand usually eases.

Stage Three alerts are announced when reserves dip below 1.5 percent. They allow the grid operators to impose rolling blackouts to cope with demand.

Blackouts imposed Wednesday and Thursday in Northern and Central California darkened hundreds of thousands of homes and business for up to two hours. The state avoided another round of blackouts on Friday and Saturday.

Businesses suffer power 'shutdowns' The alerts were prompted by tight supplies and the idling of power plants for maintenance or repairs. The alerts were accompanied by urgent requests for Californians to conserve energy.

"Californians really need to be conserving as we try to get through this crisis, because other states are definitely sharing their megawatts with us," McCorkle said.

The ISO had hoped for a reprieve from the emergency over the weekend, when power needs generally drop by 2,000 megawatts.

But it was forced to once again demand shutdowns Saturday of some Northern California customers who pay lower utility costs in return for agreeing to have their electricity interrupted during power emergencies.

Those businesses had hoped to use the weekend to catch up on production that was repeatedly shut off last week.

California's electricity system has been in turmoil for months. The state's largest utilities, operating under a rate freeze imposed by the state's 1996 deregulation law, have been unable to pass on to their customers the spiraling costs of wholesale power.

Since June, Southern California Edison Co. and Pacific Gas & Electric Co., which serve 25 million people between them, have lost some $11 billion and are facing bankruptcy.

A PG&E spokesman declined to comment on persistent reports that the utility could file for bankruptcy as early as Monday.

"We are not going to speculate on what may happen. The only certainty of next week is that the generators will continue to charge high prices for the power they sell to California," said PG&E spokesman Ron Low.

Conservation efforts and hot sales Among those implementing conservation measures was San Francisco International Airport. Although it is exempt from rolling blackouts, the airport has turned down the lighting and cooling systems and brought its emergency generators online.

The generators will run "as long as we have a cutback order from PG&E," said Gerry Alley, airport duty manager. That could be expensive, both for fuel and for increased maintenance costs, he said.

Some other businesses and homeowners also are going a step beyond conservation by supplying their own power.

Jerry Twentyman, owner and president of Electro-Motion Inc. in Menlo Park on the northern edge of Silicon Valley, said his home-generator sales are three times normal at $4,000 and up for each unit, while rentals and service calls have doubled.

His largest customers are computer hardware, software and networking companies, but his 14 employees also provide backup generators to hotels, motels, factories, office buildings and homes.

"It's been a disruptive boom," Twentyman said Sunday. "We're in for the long haul, so we're not trying to take advantage."

http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/01/21/california.blackouts.02/index.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), January 21, 2001