Worse May Come in State’s Lingering Power Emergency

Slim electricity supplies kept California in a state of power emergency for the sixth day in a row Saturday, with some generating plants kicking back on and others shutting down for maintenance.

The worst may be yet to come Monday, when near-freezing temperatures are expected in the Pacific Northwest. Electricity that would otherwise flow to California on a regional grid may be sucked up there to heat homes and offices.

“Monday’s going to be the big crunch day,” said Patrick Dorinson, a spokesman for the California Independent System Operator in Folsom, east of Sacramento. Cal-ISO was formed under the state’s landmark 1996 deregulation plan to stabilize the flow of electricity on a grid that serves 75% of the state.

For the 27th time this year, Cal-ISO declared a Stage 2 emergency Saturday, anticipating that electricity reserves would drop below 5%.

Cold winter days don’t usually trigger calls for Californians to conserve electricity--much more energy is consumed on hot summer afternoons--but all week long, power plants that could meet one-third of the state’s peak demand have been shut down.

By Saturday night, a plant in the San Francisco Bay Area with enough capacity to supply nearly half a million homes was expected to be up and running again, Dorinson said. On Friday night, the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant near San Luis Obispo curtailed operations for scheduled maintenance. But it should be fully operational again sometime today, Dorinson said. The loss of power from Diablo Canyon was about 1,000 megawatts, or enough electricity to supply 1 million typical homes.

That’s about the same amount of electricity, Dorinson said, that Californians seem to be shaving off peak demand on the grid--which usually comes about 6 p.m. each day--through conservation.

Cal-ISO has been attacked in recent weeks as a Grinch for urging people to delay turning on holiday lights until at least 8 p.m., but grid operators say the state’s imbalance between power supply and demand is so great that the lights make a significant difference. Experts estimate that, statewide, holiday lights consume more electricity than the city of San Francisco.

Also crimping California’s supply are extraordinary prices for electricity in the Pacific Northwest, which at times reached $5,000 per megawatt-hour this week, and skyrocketing costs for natural gas, the main fuel burned to generate electricity. Gas prices have dissuaded some generators from running their plants, said Cal-ISO Chief Executive Terry Winter, while others are selling electricity out of state to earn greater profit.

To boost supplies available to California, Winter loosened a price cap of $250 per megawatt-hour Friday on what his agency can pay for electricity. He did so without the approval of the 26-member Cal-ISO board, but federal energy officials quickly approved the adjustment.

Dorinson said the easing of the price cap had increased the amount of electricity offered for sale to Cal-ISO grid operators by Saturday. Sellers that bid more than $250 per megawatt-hour must be prepared to justify to auditors their costs of production.

Winter said the price cap had to be lifted because his workers were spending too much time haggling over price with electricity sellers. Cal-ISO can pay more than the price cap to out-of-state power producers, and on Thursday alone paid $81 million to buy the electricity necessary to balance the grid. Much of that bill will be passed on to California’s three major utilities.

The move by Cal-ISO to raise the price cap infuriated Gov. Gray Davis, who argues that a firm cap of $100 per megawatt-hour is necessary. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is expected to announce major changes to California’s electricity markets on Wednesday, including adjustments to price caps.

In a press release issued late Friday, Davis called the Cal-ISO move “disastrous” for California consumers and utilities and vowed to dismantle the agency.

“We did what we felt we had to do to stabilize the situation,” Dorinson said Saturday.

Only once--on Thursday--has the 2-year-old agency ever declared a Stage 3 alert, in which power reserves are forecast to drop so low that deliberate blackouts of neighborhoods on a rotating basis may become necessary to prevent collapse of the electrical grid and uncontrolled and more widespread outages.

What helped rescue the state Thursday from forcing blackouts was a hurried shutdown of power-hungry pumping plants along the 600-mile-long project that siphons water from northern rivers to Southern California reservoirs.

If rotating blackouts were ordered, the only areas in the state exempt would be those served by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the utilities of Glendale, Burbank and parts of the Imperial Valley.