Outage Raises Concerns About Energy Demand

As vast swaths of the Western United States recuperated Sunday from the second massive power failure in six weeks, federal energy officials called an emergency meeting today to address whether the region’s energy grid has been overwhelmed by burgeoning demand.

The outage Saturday, which stretched from Canada to New Mexico and knocked out power to 4 million customers amid a triple-digit heat wave, was believed to have been caused by unusually high demand and transmission lines outside a tiny town near the Oregon border that sagged in the heat and brushed trees, setting off a cascade of power shutdowns.

The chain of outages left homes without air-conditioning and electric lights, trapped people in elevators and snarled traffic up and down the coast. By Sunday, power had been restored in nearly all the affected areas, but normalcy was harder to regain.

Engineers had to plug away all weekend to reset the thousands of stoplights that went on the blink. Timed sprinklers whirled into action at the wrong hours all over town. ATM scanners at gas pumps remained inoperable in some areas. A 10-mile stretch of beach between the Venice and Redondo Beach piers was closed on one of the most gorgeous days of the summer, due to an outage-related spill at the Hyperion sewage treatment plant.

At Manhattan Beach, where a nationally televised professional beach volleyball tournament featured the Olympic men’s gold- and silver-medal teams, lifeguards warned the throngs to stay out of the surf.

“Nobody likes to go to the beach for the sand,” grumbled Manhattan Beach surfer Tim Patrick, 35, who stomped out of the water reluctantly.

“It’s California. We have earthquakes. Don’t they have a backup generator?”

Western utility officials said that power failures such as the one Saturday are extraordinarily rare, and that it was a sign of the efficacy of their contingency plans that power was up and running within hours in most spots.

But as recently as July 2, another brief but widespread outage knocked out electricity to 2 million customers in 14 states. The cause, according to an Aug. 2 report, was strikingly similar to Saturday’s snafu: a tree in Idaho that fell on a power line.

In that report to President Clinton, the U.S. Department of Energy said that in the Western states, the specific equipment failures and deficiencies that contributed to the July 2 outage had been dealt with and probably wouldn’t cause such a problem again.

“These corrective actions have substantially reduced the possibility that a similar sequence of events could occur in the region,” the report said.

Eight days after the report was released, one of the largest outages on record occurred. On Sunday, officials questioned whether the back-to-back emergencies were a sign that the demand for power in the West may be overtaxing the delivery system.

Customer demand in the region has increased 20% in the past 10 years, said Dennis Eyre, executive director of the Western Systems Coordinating Council, an industry group formed to promote reliable electrical service.

Eyre said that utilities have addressed that demand by setting up a system of regional power grids that allow cities to swap electricity during times of peak demand. But it was during such a transfer that the outage occurred, and Eyre predicted that the antidote to a repeat of Saturday’s shutdown might mean a limit on the amount of power that can be transferred from state to state--a constraint that probably would translate into higher electrical bills.

Other officials called for similarly expensive improvements in the grid’s contingency mechanisms.

“We may need a greater backup system. Situations that were once freak may be becoming more common,” said Dulcy Mahar, a spokeswoman for the Oregon-based Bonneville Power Administration, which operates a section of the region’s grid.

Eyre, whose members were to meet with the energy department today, said the group will review the recent outage and make sure that utilities are doing what is needed to address the issues.

The gigantic and complex power grid that delivers California’s electricity is fed by utilities as far afield as Utah and Oregon. When the Northridge earthquake hit in 1994, power flickered in neighborhoods as far away as Alberta, Canada.

The system is designed to help avert crises like the New York City blackout of 1965, when massive demand for power during a heat wave darkened the Eastern Seaboard for 13 chaotic hours. The grid allows local utilities to share power during periods of peak use, so that Southern California, for instance, can draw on cheap electricity from the Pacific Northwest for air-conditioning during the dog days of August and Seattle can pull power from Phoenix to ward off the winter chill.

It was, in fact, on that energy pipeline to the Pacific Northwest--known as the Pacific Intertie--that Saturday’s outage originated, officials said. Apparently, a heat wave in Malin, Ore. (population 539) expanded the power lines north of town, causing about half a dozen lines to sag into nearby trees and shut themselves off, said Bonneville’s Mahar.

That contact, Mahar said, triggered a chain reaction of automatic switch-offs and oscillating surges of energy that ultimately shut down all four of the main power arteries between California and the Pacific Northwest.

If only one or two of those arteries had shut down, Eyre said, Californians probably would not have experienced even a flicker in their electricity. But when all four went out, utility officials said, thousands of megawatts of electricity--enough to power the city of Seattle four times over--effectively disappeared.

Eyre and other utility officials said the contingency plan for such sudden power drops is to divide the areas served by the Western utility grid into “islands” so that the whole region won’t be blacked out.

The “islands” then ration what electricity they can muster among their customers until power from outside sources can be brought in. On Saturday, that meant a patchwork of power outages that hopscotched the Western states for most of the afternoon and evening.

Some utilities were up and running in very short order. Southern California Edison, for instance, lost about half of its 11,500-megawatt energy load, but was able to fire up emergency “peaker units” and out-of-service generators, and restored power to all but about 100 of its customers within a few hours, spokesman Ken Perry said.

By Sunday morning, Edison had a surplus of energy and was funneling it to other utilities.

The huge Pacific Gas & Electric, which serves about 4.5 million customers in Northern and Central California, took a bit longer to come back to speed. As of Sunday afternoon, about 1,000 of the 2 million customers who lost power were still waiting for it to be restored, spokesman Leonard Anderson said.

(Sporadic outages, most of which officials said were unrelated to Saturday’s blackout, continued to be reported late into the day Sunday in communities including Santa Clarita, Bakersfield, Garden Grove, Lake Forest, Westchester and Monrovia . The Monrovia outage, affecting 6,700 customers late Sunday afternoon, was caused by a bird flying into a power line, officials said).

As disruptive as Saturday’s outage was, some officials said, it was preferable to the old system, in which utilities were on their own and inefficiencies such as idle power plants meant higher electric bills.

Ed Freudenburg, spokesman for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said the grid system has increased overall reliability. “If we had to stand alone, there would be no system to fall back on,” he said.

But Mahar of the Bonneville Power Administration said her utility was concerned about “the challenges of growth” to the Western utility grid as a growing number of customers caused more power to be pumped through the system.

This seems to have become an issue on hot days when demand is particularly high, she said.

“We are seeing new operating conditions when temperatures rise, when there is so much power running through the system,” Mahar said.

V. John White, executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies, a nonprofit energy policy research and advocacy group, agreed with Mahar, but added that utilities were exacerbating the problem by not paying enough attention to their infrastructure.

Instead, he said, utilities have allowed themselves to become preoccupied with deregulation and the recent frenzy of mergers in their industry, White said.

“As you deregulate, the traditional boundaries are beginning to crumble,” he said. “Whose job is it to assure reliability, and to plan for the system to be reliable?”

Meanwhile, the local fallout from the outage caused intermittent grousing throughout the day, particularly in the South Bay, where the water was posted off-limits from Venice to Redondo Beach until today at the earliest.

Los Angeles County lifeguard Chuck Moore said the power failure had cut off electricity at the Hyperion sewage treatment plant, forcing officials to dispose of a 6-million-gallon load of partially treated sewage through an emergency pipeline that ends a mile offshore.

Moore said that normally the waste from Hyperion is turned into sludge and dumped five miles out to sea. But because of the electrical shutdown, the plant had to rely on emergency generators that were able only to partially treat and chlorinate the waste, and to pump it the shorter distance, he said.

Times staff writers Alan Abrahamson in Manhattan Beach and David Haldane in Orange County, and Times correspondent Dade Hayes in Chatsworth contributed to this report.