Production resumes at power plant blamed for Vegas blackouts

KEN RITTER, Associated Press Writer

Thursday, July 5, 2001, ©2001 Associated Press

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2001/07/05/state1155EDT0166.DTL&type=news

(07-05) 08:55 PDT LAS VEGAS (AP) --

One of two idled units at a desert power plant resumed operation Wednesday, boosting hopes that Las Vegas will avoid a repeat of this week's unprecedented rolling blackouts. "We're pumping out 720 megawatts at Unit Two," said Don Hendren, a spokesman for Southern California Edison at the Mohave Generating Station in Laughlin. "The other unit should be up later this week."

A megawatt is enough power to supply 1,000 homes.

Mohave, a coal-fired generating station 90 miles south of Las Vegas, supplies power to the towns of Laughlin, Searchlight and to about 200,000 homes in the Las Vegas area. It also supplies California and Arizona. The idling of the plant was blamed for Monday's rolling outage.

Nevada Power Co., which co-owns the plant with Edison, said it had to shut off power to about 10,000 customers for about 45 minutes. Hendren said Unit Two sprung a boiler tube leak on Friday and the other unit developed a similar leak on Sunday.

Nevada Power also blamed the blackouts on the loss of 50 megawatts of production at its Sunrise Station plant in east Las Vegas. Heagan said operations resumed there on Tuesday morning. One unit at the Reid Gardner plant, 50 miles north of Las Vegas, remained down. But Nevada Power officials said they expect to meet customers' needs for power for the remainder of the week.

The state, meanwhile, is reviewing how Nevada Power handled the first rolling blackouts in Nevada's history. Tim Hay, state consumer advocate, said Tuesday that the company might have been able to prevent the outages "if there had been some concerted effort to encourage conservation."

But Paul Heagen, vice president of Sierra Pacific Resources, Nevada Power's parent company, said he believes price caps put in place by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission contributed to the power outages.

He suggested that electricity suppliers might have opted not to sell power to Nevada and nine other Western states because they can collect a 10 percent premium for selling to California, which is in the midst of an energy crunch.

Don Soderberg, chairman of the Nevada Public Utilities Commission, hesitated to draw any conclusions about the issue on Tuesday. But he called it "conceivable" that the price mitigation plan contributed to Monday's rolling blackouts.

©2001 Associated Press

-- Swissrose (cellier3@mindspring.com), July 05, 2001