Emergency Western Power Plan Sent to White House

March 26, 2001 5:15 pm EST

By Patrick Connole WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A sweeping plan by Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives and sent to the White House over the weekend seeks emergency measures to ease the electricity shortage crisis in the West, such as steps to prepare the public for widespread blackouts.

The plan's key points were obtained by Reuters on Monday from legislative and interest groups sources.

The outline contains 17 steps aimed at freeing California's congested transmission system from gridlock, siting new power generation, and even mentions the possibility of connecting Navy nuclear ship generators to the electric power grid.

California is expected to be short by some 5,000 megawatts of power this summer, as demand outstrips supply and the state is unable to tap once flowing sources of hydropower in the rain-starved Pacific Northwest.

Experts fear that if California continues to suffer, a deeper crisis could spread and engulf the region in a battle to supply consumers with electricity amid soaring prices. Power in California was around $230 per megawatt hour in February, 10 times higher than normal.

The Republican outline comes as both federal and Western state political leaders prepare with public outcry over predicted blackouts this summer, and rising power bills in some locales to pay for dramatically dearer electricity.

Sources said the emergency plan -- organized by Texas Rep. Joe Barton, chairman of the House energy and air quality subcommittee -- was sent to the White House over the weekend.

Barton's office would not confirm details, except to say the measures would not slap price caps on wholesale electricity prices paid by nearly bankrupt California utilities.

"It did go to the White House," said Barton spokeswoman Samantha Jordan.

Numerous state and federal lawmakers, and even one member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), have pushed for temporary cost-based price caps to prevent a disaster this summer in California and elsewhere in the region.

The Bush administration is firmly opposed to caps, saying they would discourage generation and not solve the essential supply-demand imbalance. Republican FERC Chairman Curtis Hebert is a leading anti-price cap voice.

The Barton plan includes the following steps:

+ Build PATH 15 (transmission line in California) expansion as quickly as possible with federal assistance by directing the Western Area Power Administration to "get it done." Federal payments would pay for all or part of the project.

+ Authorize additional funds to help low income consumers pay power bills.

+ Direct the Federal Emergency Management Agency to prepare for blackouts by setting up state offices. Also, an educational campaign would prepare the public for blackouts and an emergency plan would be readied to provide outages assistance.

+ Direct FERC to ease 1970s-era power purchase rules.

+ Direct FERC to establish an interconnection standard for distributed generation, the electricity produced on-site at businesses and industrial locations.

+ Direct FERC to initiate a formal Federal Power Act probe to determine if wholesale electricity prices in the West are unjust and unreasonable or discriminatory. Thus far, FERC has ordered refunds of $124 million from extremely expensive wholesale prices. The state's power regulators has put the overcharges for a 10-month period at some $6.2 billion.

+ Allow states to adjust Daylight Savings Time.

+ Direct federal facilities to cut energy demand by 10 percent compared to last year.

Other steps were proposed as possible aids for the region if the governor of a given state declared a power emergency.

These include directing the Defense Department to explore the connecting of nuclear ship generation to the grid, making federal and Indian lands available for new power plants and have the Pentagon run portable generators and maximize output from the federally owned Bonneville Power Administration.

Air rules would also be relaxed under the emergency directives, such as having the Environmental Protection Agency establish a nitrogen oxides (NOX) emissions credit bank for power plants and waiving NOX rules which keep plants off-line.

http://www.iwon.com/home/news/news_article/0,11746,111449|politics|03-26-2001::17:15|reuters,00.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), March 26, 2001

Answers

Nuclear submarines to the power grid. I'd like to see that. Sounds like President Carter's idea to launch cruise missles from commercial aircraft.

-- David Williams (DAVIDWILL@prodigy.net), March 29, 2001.

Leaving aside the downside of taking major strategic hardware out of combat readiness for this purpose: it *has* been done before -- using naval vessels as emergency civilian generators, I mean. The major example was New Zealand, wasn't it Auckland around 1998 that had serial failure of 4 major power cables into the city, and for a while ran key services via diesel destroyers tied up at the dock?

Of course, such an approach is hardly a long term solution. And just how many MW could the U.S. Navy supply, anyhow? They do have dozens of nuke-powered subs and something like 13 nuke-powered carriers... they all could be tied up at the dock in SF Bay, with a big red circle painted on them...

Boy, talk about demoralization of the fleet...

-- Andre Weltman (aweltman@state.pa.us), March 29, 2001.

I do not think submarines have a way of connecting to shore power like a destroyer.

-- David Williams (DAVIDWILL@prodigy.net), March 30, 2001.