LAS VEGAS SUN
They said it probably wouldn't happen.
The engineers and executives with Nevada Power were wrong.
Rolling blackouts hit the Las Vegas Valley, baking under a blanket of sweltering summer heat, as Nevada Power officials scrambled to find energy to power thousands of air conditioners throughout the region.
The company said it does not know if today will bring a repeat of Monday's blackouts.
Company officials said despite long-term contracts they thought would ensure adequate power over the summer, they could not buy enough electricity to supply Southern Nevada during an all-time peak in power consumption.
Although the company early Monday had predicted it had enough power contracts to make it through the day, at 4:10 p.m. the company shut off power to about 10,000 customers for about 45 minutes.
High temperatures throughout the entire West started the crisis, but problems at several key power plants in Southern Nevada compounded the problem.
The company said about 350 megawatts of power were "out of service." At least three area power plants suffered mechanical problems, company spokeswoman Helen O'Reily said.
The Mohave Generating Station in Laughlin, which usually produces about 170 megawatts for local use, was completely off line Monday. Owner Southern California Edison cited mechanical problems in the coal-fired plant's steam boilers.
The Mohave plant, which has already gone down because of accidents and scheduled maintenance this summer, could be out for days, complicating an already grim energy scenario, Southern California Edison spokesman Steve Conroy said.
"We are doing everything we can to bring those units back on line as soon as possible," Conroy said. "We are working around the clock."
O'Reily said the Sunrise Station plant near Henderson also lost about 70 megawatts in generating capacity because of mechanical problems, and the Reid Gardner plant 50 miles northeast of Las Vegas also dropped an unknown amount of power.
Nevada Power Vice President Paul Heagen said the crunch came when California, struggling with its own power shortages, suddenly pulled back about 200 megawatts. That move triggered the "condition red" and the cuts.
One megawatt is about enough electricity to power 500 desert homes during the summer months. The company has about 620,000 customers in Southern Nevada.
The cuts weren't supposed to happen.
For at least six months company engineers and executives had predicted that, short of a serious mechanical problem, they had contracts in place to adequately supply power to Southern Nevada.
"We had contracts to supply what we thought the needs would be this summer," O'Reily said. "It didn't turn out the way we forecast.
"Things don't just happen as a result of actions we take or can predict," she said.
The company has refused to identify what areas were hit by the outages or where the next ones will be. Company officials say the information is kept secret for public safety reasons.
But some government officials say they need to know, and they weren't informed.
Bob Andrews, Clark County emergency management director, said the outages appeared to strike at least three areas in the Las Vegas area. But he said his agency, police and other public safety agencies were not notified what neighborhoods would be affected before, during or after the blackouts.
Andrews said emergency response officials will discuss the information gap today.
Heagen said this morning that Nevada Power is still sorting out the company's response to the blackouts, including notifications.
"We're debriefing right now, to look at what happened, did not happen and should have happened," he said.
A cascade of events led to blackouts in a matter of minutes, Heagen said, providing little time to alert everyone. He said Nevada Power was in the process of notifying agencies when the blackouts cut in.
"Yesterday was a very unusual situation," he said. "Usually we know when we're heading into a problem."
Nevada Power has worked and will continue to work closely with all affected agencies, he said.
The county government asked county agencies to conserve power in a 4:48 p.m. message, about 30 minutes after the blackouts had already started.
Henderson Police Chief Michael Mayberry said he was informed through the city's emergency management officials as to approximately where and when the blackouts would occur.
Andrews said his agency, based on media reports and calls from public safety crews in the field, identified three general areas affected by the blackouts: West Sahara Avenue and the Summerlin community, Flamingo Road and Desert Inn Road, and Warm Springs Road and Paradise Road.
The policy in Southern Nevada is dramatically different in California, where the outages are not random -- as they are here -- but are cycled through with advance warning to neighborhoods.
The California utility companies keep lists showing what neighborhoods will be hit next if there are rolling blackouts. The policy was instituted by order of California Gov. Gray Davis.
Conroy, with Southern California Edison, said the policy is working in California because of close cooperation between public safety agencies and the utilities.
But Heagen said that policy is still controversial in California.
"There is a raging debate over whether they are doing the right thing in (Los Angeles)," he said.
People within public safety agencies and the utilities disagree over the policy, Heagen said. But the policy in any case would be much more difficult to implement here, he said.
"California does a lot of things differently," he said. "Blackouts are almost a way of life in California."
Public agencies and utilities have hired staff and are ready to respond with a high level of service to blacked-out areas, he said.
But in Nevada, "We still believe that blackouts are definitely going to be an exception," Heagen said.
"Staffing to that level doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense to devote those kind of resources and expense."
Also, in California, dense urban areas make targeting the blacked-out areas much easier, Heagen said. Companies can confine a power cut to an easily defined area.
That isn't as simple in Southern Nevada, where a circuit might include large rural areas, he said. The company would have to inform customers over a very large area that the power was going out.
The company, instead, relies on blanket warning and a general call for conservation of power. Nevada Power officials warned that conditions are similar to those that caused the outages Monday.
O'Reily said a combination of factors caused the blackouts. First among them was that unusually high temperatures hit the entire Western grid.
Usually, demand in some areas is low enough to spare power for those who need it, such as Southern Nevada residents and businesses, she said.
Southern Nevada imports about half its power needs during the summer months, company officials have estimated.
Despite long-term power contracts with wholesalers from throughout the West, the high demand led companies to hoard that power, using it for their own needs first, O'Reily said.
The contracts are only good as long as the companies have electricity they are willing to sell, she said.
Those contracts were the foundation of what Nevada Power officials had characterized over the past six months as the backbone of the company's effort to avoid blackouts.
Officials throughout the company had predicted that the most likely scenario for blackouts was a physical disruption of the power supply from problems with transmission lines or generating plants themselves.
O'Reily said the main problem Monday was that the company simply couldn't buy power promised under long-term contracts, but the loss of power from three local generating stations hurt the company's power profile.
California, which has experienced rolling blackouts this year, did not cut power to customers Monday. Conroy said hot weather helped push the state into a stage two alert, one level below the trigger for rolling blackouts.
Although the power went off for Southern Nevada businesses and residents, company officials said the blackouts were a victory for the company.
"The fact is, we had only 10,000 customers affected yesterday for less than an hour," Heagen said Tuesday.
"Efforts in Nevada to isolate our state from the California energy crisis paid off today," he said the night before. "While inconvenient for some customers today, this situation served as a fire drill to signify that conservation does matter."
The fire drill was a wake-up call for Charles Neely, kitchen manager for the Blue Ox Restaurant at Flamingo and Sandhill Road. The cuts hit his restaurant just before the dinner rush.
The grills and the video poker machines stopped working, and some customers walked out, bartender Anita Sholar said.
Sholar and Neely said they don't know how much money the bistro lost.
Company officials said conservation measures by major users, including the resorts, eased the power crunch and halted the cuts.
Their voluntary cuts saved about 50 megawatts, Heagen said. According to the company, the peak usage of 4,395 megawatts came at 3 p.m. Monday.
The previous usage high was Aug. 1, 2000, when 4,325 megawatts were in use.
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/sun/2001/jul/03/512036398.html
-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), July 03, 2001