Heat stretches power supply Wire Service, Associated Press July 05, 2001 PHOENIX (AP) - One Arizona utility rescued another when a rare set of generating station outages threatened the area's power supplies, and officials say there are more tough days to come. Record or near-record heat was producing record or near-record demand for electricity as temperatures ranged between 115 and 122 in portions of Arizona early this week. On Monday, Arizona Public Service Co. - Arizona's largest utility - asked its large customers to cut consumption when three of its generators went out at the same time for a period. That reduces the APS supply by the amount of power that normally would serve about 440,000 homes.

The Salt River Project, which also serves metro Phoenix, offered to sell APS its extra power. Otherwise, APS would have had to ask all of its customers to cut back, spokesman Alan Bunnell said Tuesday.

"We're very early in the summer," said Mike Clester, who manages power scheduling and trading for SRP. "We still have three months to go. We're considering all the way through September to be fairly tight. I would expect to see more days like (Monday)."

For one thing, recently imposed price caps reduce incentives for out-of-state generators to sell scarce power to Arizona. That in turn makes it more difficult for utilities to secure the extra power needed to protect the state from energy problems.

"In the old market, we would have all been trying to outbid each other for (available power)," Clester said.

Bunnell said the energy situation is tight not only in California, the home of rolling blackouts for some time now, but in all the West.

"We had a significant amount of stress on our system (Monday) due to three reasons: the very high temperatures, the correlating high energy use by our customers and lastly, we lost a number of generating units to mechanical problems and Mother Nature," Bunnell said.

On Monday, demand peaked at 5,163 megawatts, surpassing last year's record of 5,002 megawatts, SRP spokesman Jeff Lane said. He said peak demand Tuesday reached 4,992 megawatts - the fourth-highest consumption rate the utility has seen.

APS customers, meanwhile, exceeded Monday's usage by about 86 megawatts, but the company was able to meet the demand because the three generators that broke down under heat stress were up and running, company spokesman Damon Gross said.

To meet the demand, a New Mexico utility sold power to SRP Monday while SRP sold excess energy to APS, southern Nevada and rural Arizona.

"We're trying to do the best we can to help each other out," Clester said.

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=2051089&BRD=1817&PAG=461&dept_id=68561&rfi=6

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), July 06, 2001

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