State Keeps the Lights On but Struggles to Meet Power Demands

Californians were unplugged and uneasy Friday as the state’s energy crisis burned into another day with blackouts still unrealized but huge utility bills already making unwelcome appearances.

Zapped by power shortages, many residents and businesses across Orange County and elsewhere pledged Friday to step up efforts to conserve energy. At the same time, others engaged in an unusual form of civil disobedience, vowing to burn their holiday lights and use energy as they see fit.

Thanks to serious conservation and the frantic efforts of dozens of exhausted engineers, California power officials were able to avoid another Stage 3 power emergency and keep the lights on even though several electricity-generating plants remained out of commission. But customers’ patience was wearing thin from the twin crises in the electricity and natural gas markets, and many called for government action to ease the growing woes.

Orange County electricity users braced Friday for an unprecedented flirtation with the pre-industrial age as state officials warned that rolling blackouts may be needed this weekend to keep California’s power grid from crashing.

Heavy users such as businesses and schools were being asked to honor contracts with power companies and voluntarily draw less from the strained system--or face stiff surcharges.

Orange County officials have hundreds of barricades and portable stop signs stored strategically throughout the county in case of an electrical emergency. And small businesses and homeowners turned an eye to hardware store shelves overstocked with generators left over from the Y2K scare.

“I sold two this morning,” said Claude Guy, a salesman at Home Depot in Santa Ana. “One guy owned a company and said he couldn’t take a chance that the power would go out on him.”

California’s energy headaches have reached migraine pitch for businesses such as Higgins Brick Co., which plans to shut down its two huge kilns in Chino Hills next week and idle 80 employees because the family-owned company’s utility bills have jumped more than tenfold. Repeated electricity interruptions this week, which left employees sitting in the dark for six hours at a time, have hampered the manufacturer’s ability to make enough bricks to tide the company over until electricity and natural gas rates drop enough so the company can reopen.

“This is amazing. It’s going to affect the whole economy,” said Josh Higgins, one of the owners and a great-grandson of one of the company founders. Higgins Brick is trying to keep as many employees on the payroll as long as possible, he said, “but who knows how long we’ll be able to do that?”

The pain that businesses and consumers are feeling now won’t end soon, as Friday’s events demonstrate:

* The threat of rolling blackouts across California loomed again as the electricity grid for most of the state came close to running out of power for the fifth straight day.

* Gold-plated electricity prices in neighboring states, which have no market caps, drew electrons out of California on Friday, further tightening supplies. The California Independent System Operator, which runs the grid and procures emergency power supplies for the state, took steps to keep electricity within the state, chiefly by lifting the current price cap of $250 per megawatt-hour.

* Scant power supplies in the Pacific Northwest threatened electricity interruptions there and cut in half needed imports to California.

* Natural gas prices in California continued to set records at levels 25 times higher than normal.

Electricity use peaked at about 32,600 megawatts on Friday while power plants generating about 11,000 megawatts--enough to power about 11 million homes--sat idle because of planned and emergency repairs or because of air pollution limits.

The grid serving about 75% of the state reached a Stage 2 emergency--the 26th this year--because the state was within 5% of running out of power, Cal-ISO reported. However, no businesses lost power Friday under the prearranged contracts that allow electricity cuts when supplies are short.

The state endured its first Stage 3 emergency Thursday because electricity reserves were projected to fall below 1.5%, but no blackouts were required to keep the grid from collapsing. Rotating blackouts are a strong possibility on the Cal-ISO grid, which covers the territories served by Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric.

“Our neighbors are husbanding their [electricity] resources,” Cal-ISO spokesman Patrick Dorinson said. “This is going to be a problem from Salt Lake to San Francisco and from Seattle to San Diego.”

As the next few days bring near-freezing temperatures to the Pacific Northwest, Dorinson said, “It’s going to be a real experience for the whole Western United States.”

Californians must conserve more electricity, Dorinson said, and keep in mind two key times each day--first in the morning, when people are getting ready for work, and again, between 4 and 6 p.m.

Not plugging in the holiday lights really does help, he said.

“I know everybody says we’re the Grinch that stole Christmas,” Dorinson said, “but we’re trying to keep power on in their homes.”

Up and down the state, reaction to the unprecedented power crunch varied dramatically Friday. Although government and business leaders were anxious, many skeptical homeowners doubted the dire warnings.

Southern California Edison detected signs of energy conservation Friday across its 50,000-square-mile territory and noted that some customers were phoning the customer-service line to report neighbors who switched on holiday lights before the recommended 8 p.m.

But Jack Danielson, a third-generation rice farmer in Butte County, said his friends and family think the situation is a ploy by the power companies.

“It’s a joke,” said Danielson, who has turned his house into a display of 11,000 icicle lights. “They’re up and burning. Turn them off? Nope. No, no, no.”

At Santa Ana College each afternoon this week, an alarm from Edison has sounded, signaling the college needs to power down by 60% or more within 30 minutes or face penalties that would total thousands of dollars each hour.

Classrooms are evacuated, then 31 of the 49 buildings on campus go dark, said Silvia Barajas, campus director of administrative services. Computers are powered down. The heat is turned off. Parking lights are dimmed.

With finals week starting today, Barajas said the challenge will be greater if the crisis continues as predicted.

Since the college signed its contract with Edison five years ago, it has reaped the benefits of lower energy costs in exchange for voluntarily stepping down usage in emergencies. Those emergencies have come more often--19 this year compared with just two during the previous four-year span. That has college officials wondering whether participating in the energy-conservation plan is worth the effort.

Santa Ana Unified School District plans to get out of the program as soon as it can, district spokeswoman Lucy Araujo-Cook said.

On Thursday, the district got the call to cut power at 7 a.m., as classes at district high schools on the program were set to begin. “We had thousands of people in classrooms,” she said. “We couldn’t afford to lose a whole day of instructional time.”

The price: about $10,000 in rate surcharges for the day.

For Costco Wholesale, stores have reduced use of air conditioners, dimmed lights, stopped using some cash registers and even turned off display computers and televisions. But the company still is being fined, said Shawn Parks, regional operations manager in Garden Grove.

“There’s not much more we can do to reduce the load on a winter night,” he said. “We’re already basically naked. . . . There’s no other clothing to shed.”

Costco cannot, for example, turn off freezers and refrigerators full of perishable food. It’s hard to sell blank-screened televisions. And customers are complaining that stores are too dark.

If Costco stores don’t halt power use when notified, they must pay 100 times the usual rate, which could amount to more than $25,000 a day--although there is a cap on how many days the company can be penalized--for each of its 23 stores in the area served by Southern California Edison, Park said.

Krause’s Furniture said it has adjusted factory workers’ hours to reduce the amount of energy it uses at peak times. Orange County workers who normally start making furniture at 5 a.m. now come in at 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. so they work more hours during off-peak times.

“They’re coming in early, leaving early, taking half-hour lunches,” said Stephen Gran, customer service supervisor. “We’re conserving energy everywhere we possibly can.”

At Knott’s Berry Farm, fountains and waterfalls on attractions like Big Foot Rapids and Calico Mine Ride were turned off Friday to save power, and the “Berry Merry Lights” display in the Christmas Crafts Village was left off.

Some computers were powered down, hallways were darkened and office Christmas trees no longer twinkled, Knott’s spokeswoman Susan Tierney said.

But steps weren’t quite as drastic as on Thursday, when the Buena Park tourist attraction shut down Big Foot Rapids, a simulated river-raft ride, and turned off the lights on its Christmas tree.

Still, keeping the park operating at a level satisfactory to guests has meant paying more than $30,000 in penalties under Knott’s contract with Edison, Tierney said.

Those penalties--the estimated total for November and December--more than offset the savings earlier in the year from the discount rate negotiated with the utility, she said.

Ingram Micro Inc., the world’s largest computer-products distributor, also has dimmed the lights at its headquarters in Santa Ana, minimized temperature controls and unplugged the Christmas decorations. Still, it hasn’t hit prescribed energy-reduction targets, resisting measures that would interrupt the flow of goods to clients.

Ingram’s balance sheet will suffer, but not as much as that of small businesses, manufacturers and retailers.

Felix’s Continental Cafe in Orange is one small business facing the power crunch.

“We’re trying to conserve as much energy as we can,” manager Kevin Aguirre said. “We’re such a small business that we haven’t prepared to put on a generator or anything like that.”

Among the 100 or so businesses in historic downtown Orange--considered the largest antiques district in California--merchants worried about holiday business.

The city of Orange decided it wouldn’t turn on decorations along the traffic circle and its towering Christmas tree, and asked merchants to do the same, said Carol Cox, president of the Downtown Business and Professional Assn.

Times staff writers Karen Alexander, Eric Bailey, Marc Ballon, James Bates, Marla Dickerson, Leslie Earnest, Robin Fields, Melinda Fulmer, Lisa Girion, Abigail Goldman, Karen Kaplan, Peter Pae, Tony Perry, E. Scott Reckard, David Reyes, Jesus Sanchez, Daryl Strickland, Mai Tran, Nancy Vogel, Jenifer Warren and Nancy Wride contributed to this story, along with Times researcher Norma Kaufman and correspondents Catherine Blake and Deniene Husted.

* PREPARING FOR DARK

Before the lights go out, consumers can prepare for the possibility of blackouts. C1