Rolling blackouts pose purely random menace Published Thursday, January 25, 2001 12:00:00 AM --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By Rod Leveque

Staff Writer

Hospitals, police stations and airports are protected. Businesses, houses and schools could be hit at any time.

The threat of rolling blackouts is expected to loom large over California at least through the summer, as the state's 33.9 million residents use up electricity faster than power plants can make it.

That's the certain part.

But exactly who the blackouts will hit and just when they will come amounts to little more than a matter of chance.

Rolling blackouts occur when electricity reserves in the state dip below 1.5 percent, forcing utility operators to cut power to customers to avoid crashing California's power grid.

The outages are referred to as rolling blackouts because they last about one hour in any specific area before shifting to new regions. This procedure ensures that the burden of the blackouts is shared and that individual communities are not unfairly impacted by the outages, Southern California Edison spokesman Tom Boyd said.

Southern California has not yet been hit with a rolling blackout, but cities in the northern part of the state suffered from them Jan. 17 and 18, cutting power to as many as 500,000 people each day.

When power does go out locally, it will be in portions of several cities so that entire communities are not left dark, he said.

"An effort is made to spread out the situation as much as possible to impact as little area as possible," Boyd said. "Instead of shutting down 1,000 customers in Monrovia, it would be better to shut down 100 customers in 10 different areas."

Edison's 50,000-square-mile coverage area comprises about 3,000 circuits carrying power to about 11 million people. Each city in the coverage area is powered by multiple circuits. Ontario, for example, is covered by nine separate circuits.

Each circuit serves from 800 to 2,000 customers.

The 3,000 circuits are bunched into about 115 groups, which are shut down indiscriminately if rolling blackouts are needed, Boyd said. Areas in as many as 10 counties could be on the same circuit group, he said.

"They're purely random," he said. "The groupings are put together to create equitability and balance."

Once an area is shut down, Edison moves it to the bottom of the list and it won't be called on again until the remaining groups of circuits are cycled through.

Edison will not shut down circuits that power critical functions such as police stations, fire departments, prisons, air traffic control, water pumping stations or Department of Defense facilities, Boyd said. Other than that, the company gives little notice about what areas will be shut down and precisely when the blackouts will happen.

"There's a reluctance to name names," Boyd said. "The situation could change at anytime, which is why there have been shortfalls forecasted and potential rotating outages that never occurred."

Edison will give basic warnings to cities and law enforcement agencies when it gets word from the California Independent System Operator - the agency that monitors power flow in the state - that the blackouts are imminent. But those warnings are vague, and would probably come less than two hours before a blackout hits, Edison officials said.

"They are given notice," Boyd said. "It doesn't mean it's going to happen. It's a warning."

The city of Chino got such a call Jan. 17, when Edison informed the Police Department that outages in the city were imminent, Sgt. Stuart Jones said. The message was so vague that it wasn't much help, he said.

Rod Leveque can be reached at r_leveque@dailybulletin.com or at (909) 483-9391

http://www.dailybulletin.com/news/articles/Rollingb.asp

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), January 25, 2001