Study Warns of Future Summer Blackouts

Here’s a chilling thought as we enter the air-conditioner-hugging days of late summer: California’s power grid is up to the challenge of this season’s blast of heat, but blackouts could threaten in future summers, according to a California Energy Commission staff report.

The study of high temperatures and electricity demand in California, nicknamed the “heat storm” report by the Sacramento-based energy agency, casts doubt on whether the state’s complex network of electricity-generating plants can churn out enough electrons if the record temperatures that scorched the West last summer were to repeat.

That’s because growth in California is increasing the demand for electricity by nearly 2% a year and new power plants that are expected to produce more than 7,000 megawatts of energy will not begin to operate until 2002 and later, the report stated.

While the hot weather of last summer was extremely unusual, occurring only once in 40 years, the projected growth in demand for electricity by 2004 would stress the power system to the same extent as last summer’s heat wave unless new power plants are built, the study said.

Such problems already afflict other regions of the country.

“I would not call it an uplifting report,” said Daniel Nix, deputy director of the California Energy Commission.

“By the year 2001, things begin to look pretty iffy and more problematic because of increasing demand” that could outstrip the market’s ability to build new power plants, he said.

In the study’s gloomiest forecast, California’s power reserves would be thin enough within three years that extremely high temperatures--combined with power plant or transmission line outages and dry conditions in the Pacific Northwest that would reduce California’s supply of cheap hydroelectric power--”could seriously threaten system reliability,” the report said.

Under such a scenario, brownouts or rolling blackouts might be possible, Nix said.

“It’s certainly not a problem that we want to ignore,” Nix said.

Before California’s $28-billion electricity market was restructured by landmark 1996 legislation, the state’s investor-owned utilities built power plants under the direction of regulators to ensure the reliability of the grid.

Now, power plants will be built by developers looking to make a profit.

This new market places the burden of supply disruptions on consumers of electricity.

Some industrial users, for example, assume the risk of having their power interrupted when supplies are low in exchange for a rate discount.

Industry and government are searching for answers other than new power plants, Nix said, noting that U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson recently called for new efficiency standards for air conditioners and other home appliances to reduce hot-weather demand.