Power Shortage

* Your Dec. 6 article on the lighting of the Capitol Christmas tree was very enlightening. First we see a picture of the illuminated tree and an illuminated capitol dome, then a picture of a dark tree and a much more brightly lit dome. Did the extra power from the tree lights go the dome lighting circuit? And if there’s such a power shortage, why in the dickens is the dome lit at all? Gov. Gray Davis should take care of this immediately.

MAYNARD KEITH FRANKLIN

Goleta

* Re “State Inspectors Visit Idled Power Plants,” Dec. 7: So there is a power crunch? My, my--I call that malfeasance on the part of the utilities’ executive administrators. Officials of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power say they have no such situation. Did they plan ahead, or are they just more efficient? And which power companies caved in to activists to shut down our nuclear power facilities after millions and millions of investment dollars went into their construction. (California has four sites by comparison to Illinois, which has 13; Pennsylvania has nine and even South Carolina has seven.) I just ponder where we could be.

TED GRINSTEAD

West Covina

* I remain shocked that in moderate temperatures, in a state as sophisticated as California, we are so dramatically short of power that interruptible rate customers have had regularly to shut down, oddly, not at business hours, but after 5 p.m. in order to prevent a collapse of broader services. Our power reserves have run dangerously low.

I am a member of the faculty at Pomona College in Claremont and we were expected to shut down power at approximately 5 p.m. for the last several days, plunging our students into darkness and preventing the provision of dinner meals and lights in dorms and libraries during the final examination period. There are many safety concerns on a dark campus, even in our very safe neighborhood. Our choice was to pay very significant financial penalties to keep the lights on even as we made very dramatic efforts to conserve power.

This is but one small story, though it raises enormous questions about the management of our state power distribution under a deregulated system. There is a desperate need for additional power-generating capacity and for a very serious investigation into what is going on right now with decision-making by those who literally may be called “power brokers.”

BRUCE POCH

Claremont