Holiday weekend expected to ease California power crisis

VIP customers could still lose power

Storm battered California narrowly escaped having to order rolling blackouts across the state Thursday when a federal agency in the Pacific Northwest agreed to send down about 1,000 megawatts.

WEB EXCLUSIVE Online coverage of the energy crunch in California   MESSAGE BOARD Power crisis

The state moved back to a Stage Two power alert Thursday evening, after previously being under a Stage Three emergency for only the second time in history. The highest alert is issued when electricity reserves drop below 1.5 percent.

Patrick Dorinson, a spokesman for the California Independent System Operator (ISO), which runs most of the state's power grid, said emergency power from the Portland, Oregon-based Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) "is making our situation in California look better."

A Stage Two declaration means the state has less than a 5 percent power reserve, and the ISO asks customers who have signed up for a voluntary interruption program (VIP) to turn off their power. Customers in the program receive a 15 percent to 20 percent rate reduction, but are first on the list when blackouts are called and will have their power cut for hour-long periods until the situation ends.

Most of the VIP customers are large industrial power users. Should blackouts among these customers fail to improve power levels during a Stage Three emergency, utility companies would begin rolling blackouts.

Blackouts are an emergency measure to prevent a collapse of the power grid. Rolling blackouts involve switching off entire neighborhoods for about an hour at a time to relieve the strain on the system.

Weather and federal help

The ISO blamed the low power situation on heavy rain, cold temperatures and high surf along the coast. State power production fell more than 15,000 megawatts, or one-third of all available power, as the storm battered the state. One megawatt is enough to power 1,000 homes for an hour.

California Power Exchange spokesman Jesus Arredondo said 15,000 megawatts of power generation is off-line, "the most power California has ever had off-line at any given time."

North of Los Angeles, the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant was forced to reduce generation by 80 percent -- down to 20 percent of normal output. The plant, like many others along the coast, uses vacuums to bring in cold water to cool its systems. But the high surf has dredged up increased amounts of kelp and ocean debris, forcing the plant to close the vacuums to avoid clogging them.

Other plants are down for scheduled maintenance, Dorinson said. Another plant that produced 1,600 megawatts of power went off-line suddenly Wednesday night, he said.

More than 39,000 Pacific Gas & Electric customers temporarily lost power in Marin County, north of San Francisco, because of an underground switch failure.

Under an emergency stopgap order from Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, neighboring states were selling power to California. Richardson extended that for a third time Thursday, until midnight Wednesday, after talking with Gov. Gray Davis.

Richardson spokesman Matt Nerzig said the order was extended after the governor's office submitted a conservation plan to the department.

"I think the secretary felt it was a good start," Nerzig said.

Earlier, Nerzig described the orders as unpopular with Western regional governors. "They are intended only to be stopgap, short-term measures," he said. "What the prior order required was a certification from the state of California that they had a plan to reduce demand by 5 percent, and that didn't happen, so the order wasn't extended."

Most of the generation outages, which do not necessarily result in blackouts, are concentrated around San Francisco Bay and Silicon Valley. Transmission in that area is hindered by the limited number of high capacity transmission lines available to deliver power from outside sources, Arredondo said.