Tuesday, April 10, 2001 California crisis fuels summer fears in U.S.

Other states wrestle with the disturbing thought that power supplies could run short.

BY H. JOSEF HEBERT THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

A continent away from California, there's a scramble to start up 11 small power generators in time for the summer heat wave that is sure to hit New York City.

In Kentucky, 18,000 people are worried about being cut off by their utility because of unpaid natural gas bills from the winter.

And in Iowa, politicians are debating something they haven't talked about in years: whether to build more power plants. A move to deregulate the state's electricity market has been put in cold storage.

After months of watching California's deregulation fiasco and power outages from afar, Americans in state after state are asking, could blackouts occur here?

While most officials in a 50-state survey by The Associated Press say they expect to have enough power, utilities are sprucing up their systems, pitching conservation to customers and searching for ways around likely power grid bottlenecks when humming air conditioners produce peak demands this summer.

In board rooms, power plants and state government offices, they're holding strategy sessions on how to deal with the unexpected, which is sure to strike somewhere.

"We're cautiously optimistic," says Maureen Helmer, a member of the New York Public Utilities Commission. "I think everyone wants to make sure we don't end up where California ended up."

In Washington, the words "energy crisis" are used almost daily as the new Bush administration and lawmakers worry that California's blackouts could spread and possibly drive the already faltering economy into recession.

"The bad news is that the situation in California is not isolated," says Energy Secretary Abraham. Nonetheless, he adds, "America's energy problems can be solved."

Electricity demand rose 3.6 percent last year and is expected to climb 2.3 percent this year, says the Energy Department. In the Northeast, South and Midwest as well as Texas, dozens of new power plants have come on line, easing supply problem, but more are still needed to meet future growth, energy experts say.

The safety margins to deal with peak load demand on the hottest days has been shrinking, according to the electricity industry's North American Reliability Council, which likes to have a generating capacity of at least 15 percent above the peak summer demand.

People almost certainly will pay more for energy this summer. Many utilities already have filed requests to state regulators for price increases -- in some cases to pay for losses from the winter's high natural gas prices.

A growing number of power plants, including almost all of the new ones, run on natural gas, which was once cheap but has more than doubled in price over the past year, sending electricity prices skyward as well.

The worst problems this summer are expected in the West as managers of California's electricity grid scramble for supplies outside the state.

There could be "a meltdown in the Western power market this summer," says Robert Glynn, chairman of PG&E Corp., parent company of the state's biggest utility, which took refuge in bankruptcy court last week.

In the Pacific Northwest, where cheap electricity has been viewed as a given, price shocks are now reverberating. A severe drought is expected to dramatically cut power production from the region's hydroelectric dams.

Residential users and businesses have been asked to cut power use by 10 percent in Washington state to avoid electricity disruptions. Some Northwest customers are seeing surcharges of 40 to 75 percent on their bills.

While most of the Rocky Mountain states are expected to have enough power, residents there also will be paying more.

Outside the West, the greatest concern about potential blackouts is in New York, where transmission logjams could place New York City short of power on some hot summer days, industry officials say.

As a safeguard the local utility wants to set up 11 mini-generators in case of a shortage, but that's being challenged in court by citizens who don't want the turbines in their neighborhood.

The rest of the Northeast ought to have adequate supplies, says Stephen Allen, a spokesman for the Northeast Power Coordinating Council. Still, he says, even in New England "they're not in a total comfort zone."

New power plants in the mid-Atlantic states, Texas, the Midwest and much of the South have eased concerns about summer outages in those regions, say utility executives and energy analysts. No blackouts are expected though officials give no guarantees.

The nation's network of high-voltage transmission lines is barely keeping pace with the new competitive electricity markets, experts say. Simply put, power at times can't find a highway on which to travel where it is needed.

"The grid was designed for different circumstances," says Robert Shenker, a power transmission expert at the Electric Power Research Institute, the electric utility industry's research center in Palo Alto, Calif.

In a competitive market where power is being bought and sold across the country, transmission lines now "are carrying much more capacity than they were designed for," says Shenker.

Published 4/10/2001

http://www.inlandempireonline.com/news/power/power121.shtml

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), April 10, 2001