Blackout Blues

The first bolts of California’s deregulation of the electric power industry have shocked customers in San Diego and southern Orange counties: Residential power bills doubled in just two months, to an average of more than $100 a month. Customers in the rest of the state will be protected from such price spikes for at least a year. But there’s been a rude awakening for all of California this summer--the fact that the state is skating dangerously close to a shortage of electric power.

The power crunch will be solved by building more generating plants--efficient, clean ones--over three or four years. In the meantime, the state will face the threat of brownouts or rolling blackouts during times of peak demand, especially hot summer afternoons.

In the short term, much more can be achieved in conservation and energy efficiency, though the state is already in the forefront of conservation techniques. Californians need to learn to save energy the way they save water in times of drought.

Once the supply is adequate, the threat of escalating electric bills should ease. But the promise that the creation of a competitive market in electric power would lead to lower light bills now appears to have been either a sham or an incredible miscalculation.

The Legislature is expected to be flooded next month with bills to roll back deregulation--it’s too late for that--or impose other “solutions.” However, most of what needs to be done can be achieved without legislation. A plan should be developed in a highly public forum such as a governor’s energy summit. But officials should resist speeding up power plant construction by gutting environmental regulations. In fact, the greatest impediment to new power plants now is local opposition, not state environmental rules.

Not all that is wrong today can be blamed on deregulation, approved by the Legislature in 1996 and launched two years later. But the timing was incredibly bad, occurring as electric power consumption soared, fueled by the growing economy, especially in the power-hungry computer industry. Meanwhile, California has gone more than a decade without building major new power plants or transmission lines.

San Diego Gas & Electric Co., which serves about 100,000 customers in Orange County, bore the brunt first because it was the first utility to shed itself of its own power plants and to be freed from a transition period of rate controls. The idea was for each utility to end its monopoly on generating power and start buying it in a free market, presumably at lower cost. But this summer’s general shortage of power, compounded by a heat wave, has driven up wholesale prices. The state’s other two big private utilities, Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric, will operate under rate controls for at least a year more. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, a municipal utility not regulated by the state, generates much of its own power.

Much of the power problem in California can be blamed on a lack of planning and leadership in both government and business. True, power use has grown faster than expected. But, with or without deregulation, no one should be surprised that California now is short of electricity. In 1990, the state Energy Commission warned that without new plants, the state’s system would be hard-pressed to meet demand in 2001.

Now the state needs to deal calmly with the immediate problem, and its response should include an ambitious conservation program. Then should come a long-range plan to make sure the state has adequate electric energy for the Deregulation Age, with no more surprises.