Crisis Darkens State Christmas Tree

Keeping a 70-year tradition Tuesday, Gov. Gray Davis presided over the lighting of California’s official Christmas tree. Then he turned it off.

With the state’s electricity supplies unusually low Tuesday evening and utilities begging customers to resist plugging in Christmas lights, First Lady Sharon Davis and a Bakersfield youngster sent power flowing to 4,000 bulbs on a towering fir on the north steps of the Capitol--but for just 30 minutes.

“Tonight while some Californians are going without power,” the governor told a festive crowd packed into the Capitol rotunda, “let the light in our hearts represent the true spirit of the season.”

A few minutes after 5 p.m., the first lady helped 7-year-old David Almberg press a button to light the tree. The crowd “oohed” at the sight of the sparkling, 56-foot white fir from the Sierra foothills near Placerville.

At 5:35, the governor pressed the “off” button and the tree fell dark. The crowd wandered away quietly.

“It’s a shame,” said Stella Levy, who works across the street from the Capitol as an attorney with the Agricultural Labor Relations Board. Half an hour earlier, like many other state workers, she had received an urgent e-mail from the governor, asking her to shut off her computer to save electricity.

“In state government we’re totally dependent,” she said. “If there is a typewriter, it’s electric. It makes you realize what a potentially profound impact this has on business and government.”

The tree will stay dark as long as the agency that operates California’s electrical grid has declared a shortage, the governor’s staff said. That could be many days, this holiday season.

Since June 14, when Pacific Gas & Electric Co. was forced for the first time in its history to deliberately cut off power to 100,000 customers, California has suffered blackout threats and soaring prices. An open electricity market was created by the Legislature in a 1996 deregulation plan.

The state’s fundamental problem, experts say, is that no major power plants have been built in 10 years to keep pace with a computer-based economy that steadily uses more electricity every year. That shortfall, plus flaws in the way California’s electricity market was designed, have allowed power plant owners to earn record profits this year. It has cost consumers and utilities billions of additional dollars.

At least 23 times this year, power reserves have dropped low enough to threaten blackouts in California , even in cold weather when demand for electricity usually falls. On Tuesday, supplies dropped so low that California utilities braced for an unprecedented Stage 3 emergency, in which they would be ordered to shut off power to small groups of customers in rotating blackouts.

Customers of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which has an adequate electricity supply, probably would not be subject to blackouts even in a stage 3 emergency.

Workers at the California Independent System Operator, a Folsom-based agency that balances supply and demand on the state’s transmission wires, scrambled to find enough megawatts to avoid those deliberate blackouts.

“I haven’t heard them this nervous before,” said Jan Smutny-Jones, head of the board overseeing Cal-ISO, a creation of the state’s deregulation plan.

With demand for electricity expected to peak Tuesday evening at 34,124 megawatts, California struggled to keep the lights on for a combination of reasons. Power plants that could produce as much as 11,000 megawatts were shut down, in some cases because their owners could not operate without violating air pollution rules. Other plant owners sold their electricity to the Pacific Northwest, where cold weather and high demand for electricity helped shoot prices to extraordinary levels. Before lighting the Christmas tree, Davis promised the crowd that he is working hard to fix California’s unreliable electricity industry. Last week Davis beseeched the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which has authority to control wholesale prices of electricity, to force power plant owners to return profits to California consumers and to lower price caps.

Just before he turned off the Capitol Christmas tree, the governor said: “We’re going to send FERC a picture of the tree going dark.”

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Times staff writers Dan Morain and Nancy Rivera Brooks contributed to this story.

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* LIGHT INFANTRY

An army of professionals is installing Christmas lights on homes across the Southland. B1

* DEODAR PARADE

Tighter utility regulations are threatening the traditional lighting of Christmas Tree Lane. B7