Key California energy players huddle amid Stage 3 alert, idled power plants

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Posted at 3:26 p.m. PST Saturday, January 27, 2001

Key California energy players huddle amid Stage 3 alert, idled power plants By John Howard ASSOCIATED PRESS

SACRAMENTO -- Power-starved California lurched into Super Bowl weekend under a round-the-clock electricity alert as state officials, utility executives and consumer groups huddled privately in the Capitol on Saturday to keep the lights on.

The manager of California's electricity grid declared a Stage 3 emergency through the weekend, which means reserves dipped to 11/2 percent or less statewide.

The Independent System Operator said it did not anticipate rolling blackouts during the weekend, but urged Californians to keep up conservation efforts that have had an effect on the state grid estimated at about 1,000 megawatts daily.

Ideas for reducing electrical demand have ranged from putting off laundry loads until off-peak hours to suggestions that people get together for Super Bowl-watching parties. The parties would happen anyway, but sports enthusiasts said they might help.

"I think it's a great idea," said Barry Penn, owner of Rookies, an Oceanside sports bar with 60 TV sets. "Our energy usage for tomorrow will be the same if one person or 300 people come to watch the game so that's 300 houses that saved all that energy."

ISO spokeswoman Stephanie McCorkle said the hottest TV day of the year likely would have little impact on energy supplies.

"Nope, it's not factored into our load forecasts for Sunday. It may mean slightly more megawatts, but not enough to make a difference," she said.

Although blackouts were not expected, many businesses still faced the prospect of being ordered to cut power under agreements to do so in return for favorable rates. Some 1,200 businesses were cut Friday in Southern California, where rolling blackouts have been avoided so far.

Southern California Edison warned, however, that the situation could change in its territory because of a state Public Utilities Commission decision Friday to suspend financial penalties imposed on "interruptible customers" who refuse to shut down.

Those businesses need relief, "but our customers' cooperation is the main reason our system has avoided rolling blackouts to date," SoCal Edison said in a statement.

Spokesman Paul Klein said that if all the companies in SCE's area complied with a request to cut power at once, they would save the state about 2,400 megawatts of load in the summer and 1,200 megawatts in the winter.

The plight of the utilities is at the heart of the state's electricity crisis.

In the Capitol, negotiators struggled to reach agreement on a rescue plan that would stave off bankruptcy for utilities and assure enough electricity to avoid blackouts. The scheme is likely to include rate increases, public ownership of the utilities and state-backed power purchases of electricity for the utilities at favorable rates.

In return for rescuing the utilities, California would be granted long-term options allowing the state to buy low-priced stock in the utilities. If the price goes up, the state could sell the stock and use the profits to help pay off the bonds.

The state's two huge utilities, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and SoCal Edison, say they have lost $12 billion since June because their rate structure in California's deregulated market blocks them from passing on to their customers the spiraling cost of wholesale electricity.

Stage 3 alerts -- once unthinkable in California -- have become commonplace as high demand, low imports, transmission problems and idled power plants stress California's grid. The state has been under a near-continuous Stage 3 alert for more than two weeks.

For the first time, the ISO began publicly identifying idled power plants in California.

A law signed last week by Gov. Gray Davis requires the disclosure, which was opposed by power generators but urged by consumers who complained some plants may have been deliberately withheld from operation to tighten supplies and boost prices.

The ISO listed 48 power plants as idled Saturday, including 21 with unplanned outages and 27 in scheduled outages. The list did not say when plants would resume operation.

The unplanned outages included a major 750-megawatt plant in Moss Landing owned by North Carolina-based Duke Energy, and several units formerly owned by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. in Pittsburg, northeast of San Francisco.

The Moss Landing plant, in the midst of a planned $30 million retrofit, was expected to resume operation in mid-January, but has been delayed. Crews there are working seven-day, 24-hour shifts.

"At one time this (idled power plants) was pretty secretive stuff. At a minimum, it has a limited effect on the market because traders know what units are down," said Duke spokesman Tom Williams.

California's electrical grid has a total capacity of roughly 46,000 to 48,000 megawatts, although on any given day the amount available is usually 8,000 to 15,000 megawatts less than that because of idled plants. One megawatt is sufficient to power 1,000 homes.

http://www.contracostatimes.com/cgi-bin/emailfriend/emailfriend.cgi?mode=print&doc=http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/leads/stories_one/power_20010127.htm

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), January 27, 2001

Answers

from the NRC website:

Megawatt hour (MWh) One million (1,000,000) watt-hours.

From above message and many others posted on this site:

One megawatt is sufficient to power 1,000 homes.

Please help me find my mistake - I cant believe so many US journalists can be wrong:

1 megawatt = 1,000,000 watts 1 kilowatt = 1000 watts therefore 1 megawatt = 1000 kilowatts if 1 megawatt = 1000 homes, 1 kilowatt = 1 home if this is the energy consumption the authorities have been planning for I'm not surprized you guys have a crisis! Average consumption of lightbulb is 60 to 100 watts (usually 100) i.e 1000 watts (1 kilowatt) = 10 to 15 lightbulbs a small heater uses 1 kilowatt. You'd be lucky to find an airconditioner that uses less than 1.5 kilowatts. The supply to my very small house in which I live alone is 60 amps. 5 amps will give about 1 kilowatt. Therefore I can draw about 12 kilowatts before my main circuit-breaker trips. I probably never use more than 3 but how the hell do you guys make do with one?? I won't go into the kilowatts and kilowatt-hours thing as someone else has already enlightened the list on this issue. 1 kW may be enough to LIGHT the average Californian home...just, but it does not begin to cover heating and other electrical appliances. Either I have made a very basic arithmetical mistake or your journalists don't know what they are talking about and are getting thier "facts" from other journalists equally ignorant. I still feel I must be wrong but cannot find my mistake. Please put me out of my misery.

This situation reminds me of the Y2K days where I saw the same lame, oversimplified, 2-sentence "explanation" of the problem repeated almost verbatim in every Y2k article I read (All hail the power of the internet)

Hope someone can help

clivus nondog

-- clivus nondog (clivus@ibm.net), January 28, 2001.


Sorry about the poor

punctuation in the

above answer but

the server stripped

out my line-breaks

-- clivus nondog (clivus@ibm.net), January 28, 2001.


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