Seattle: Shock to the System: Summer blackouts possible

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Shock to the System: Summer blackouts possible Growing power demand and rain shortfall make it likely crunch will continue and electricity costs will rise

Thursday, February 15, 2001

By BILL VIRGIN SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

If you think things are bad now, consider looking ahead a few months:

It's summer, and a heat wave in California and the Southwest has air conditioners humming overtime. Utilities are scrambling to find extra power, only to be charged hundreds of dollars per megawatt hour, if they can find any.

And just at a crucial moment, an equipment breakdown forces a power plant off-line, threatening the very reliability of the region's transmission system.

That scenario -- and its resulting blackouts, brownouts, mandatory curtailments and general energy market chaos -- is no flight of fancy. The West Coast got a preview of it in May and June, when power prices spiked, going from the usual $30 a megawatt hour to as high as $700, forcing some industries to lay off hundreds of workers.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, customers were cut off last year because of stability problems on the grid. A recent report by the Northwest Power Planning Council says conditions may have been even tighter than it appeared. "The evidence strongly suggests that the Northwest was operating under near-deficit conditions during the heavy-load hours of the day," the report says.

The summer of 2001 promises to be "very, very tight," said Richard Watson, the council's power planning director. "One thing I can predict with a small likelihood of being wrong: Prices are going to be very high."

California's peak demand last summer was 50,000 megawatts; the state itself has generating capacity of about 55,500 megawatts if everything is running, which often is not the case. The state has to buy from somewhere else to meet demand.

In the past, that "somewhere else" has been the Pacific Northwest, which doesn't have the population or the air conditioning load of California and has had surplus power to sell in summer. But between growth in regional demand, more demand in summer for air conditioning in office buildings and water flows that may be just two-thirds of normal levels, "The likelihood is we won't have that much to export," Watson said.

So what will help, both them and us?

The West Coast could get a break from the weather. While lower-than normal precipitation this winter is a problem, a cool summer would help reduce demand for air conditioning. "As prideful as we are about our technological prowess, we are still at the mercy of Mother Nature for a number of things, and this is one of them," Watson said.

California might suspend environmental restrictions on older oil and natural gas-fired plants to allow them to operate, Seattle City Light Superintendent Gary Zarker predicted. Similar environmental waivers have already been used in Washington for temporary generation such as diesel-fuel units in Tacoma.

More stopgap measures. City Light, for example, is negotiating for the use of temporary generators, described as truck engines, that run on natural gas.

Continued curtailment of aluminum smelters in the Pacific Northwest, which are already largely idled and have reduced the load on the system. California has told retailers to turn off the lights when stores are closed, and more-stringent conservation measures could come up and down the West Coast if it looks like supply won't meet demand.

The Bush administration has signaled its reluctance to impose price caps on wholesale power markets, despite the urgings of Govs. Gary Locke and John Kitzhaber of Oregon. But that reluctance may erode if the problem threatens to further weaken an already struggling national economy. Zarker notes that the Bush administration has called California's energy crunch a state problem, but in later weeks that language evolved to "an economic problem that is spilling over into the rest of the economy" and then "a problem affecting our national security."

"The problems in California are not politically sustainable," Zarker said. "Something has to give, and I believe it will."

If the administration won't impose price caps, it might be swayed to agree to a debt payment delay that would let the Bonneville Power Administration use that money to buy power. "Either the prices come down, or we need more money coming in," said Eric Bloch, vice chairman of and one of two Oregon representatives on the Northwest Power Planning Council.

Getting through the summer won't alleviate the Northwest's potential for energy problems, because it then faces winter -- the region's traditional time of peak demand for home heating -- with depleted reservoirs.

"We could be in real trouble next winter; we're looking at rolling blackouts of some sort," Kitzhaber said in a recent visit to Seattle.

Yet in two to three years, enough new generation and permanent conservation should be in place that "we should be over the hump," Kitzhaber said.

Some will show up as early as this summer -- City Light expects to start receiving 100 megawatts of energy from a 500-megawatt natural-gas-fired combustion turbine in Klamath Falls, Ore., in July, while Spokane-based Avista Corp. hopes an Idaho project in which it has invested can be fired up in July or August.

But those by themselves won't deliver power in quantities needed to make a significant difference to the region.

http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/local/dry15.shtml



-- Carl Jenkins (somewherepress@aol.com), February 15, 2001


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