PUC Issues Lineup for Blackout Exemptions

The most exclusive list of the summer is out, and it’s not for a movie premiere or a restaurant opening--it’s the roster of California businesses that have won exemptions to rolling blackouts.

The California Public Utilities Commission has issued a proposed lineup of 405 businesses that would get the coveted exemption from rotating outages. The agency is scheduled to vote on the matter Sept. 6.

Although the much-anticipated blackouts have been a no-show so far this summer, six days of outages early in the year pushed the PUC to offer a dose of immunity to a limited number of businesses. The final 405 were selected from a pool of nearly 10,000 hopefuls who had to prove a threat to public health and safety.

Not surprisingly, the winning applicants on the list released late Friday are largely from the health-care field.

But alongside the dentists and doctors, nursing homes and dialysis centers are 15 manufacturers, who contended that a sudden shutdown of operations would harm workers.

Among the applicants rejected as not sufficiently threatened by darkness were cemeteries, churches, animal hospitals, nightclubs, retailers, restaurants and attractions.

The disappointed included such big names as La Scala restaurant of Beverly Hills, which had projected 26 to 100 deaths from contaminated food; Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific; and Pacific Bell Park, home of the San Francisco Giants.

“The majority of them are health-care facilities that are critical to keep on line,” said Subodh Medhekar, project manager for Exponent, the Menlo Park engineering consultant that ranked the applications by risk for the PUC. But many who applied “clearly exaggerated the risk” to public health and safety, he said.

The PUC already exempts a fairly lengthy roster of those whose services are needed to protect the public’s health and safety, including fire and police stations, acute-care hospitals and oil refineries, as well as any “nonessential” customers who are lucky enough to share a circuit with an essential customer.

Those customers now account for about 50% of the electricity load at Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric.

To maintain system reliability, a pool of customers representing at least 40% of total system load must be available for rolling power outages. All 405 businesses could be exempted without jeopardizing the 40% limit, the PUC’s draft decision said. (Customers of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and some of the state’s other municipal utilities are not subject to the rolling blackouts.)

But the PUC also will investigate future exemptions for all 1,200 skilled nursing and dialysis centers in the state.

That would reduce the pool below 40% now, but improved technology and redistribution of circuits could make such exemptions possible, the proposal said.

The PUC exemption list brought good news to a company that melts steel but bad news to a small business that melts chocolate.

Tamco Steel won an exemption.

The Rancho Cucamonga foundry melts scrap metal to 3,000 degrees and forms it into reinforcement bars used in construction. A loss of electricity means “we could kill some people . . . and our equipment would be jeopardized,” Chief Executive Jack Stutz said.

“We’re grateful that we got the exemption,” said Stutz, whose company employs 350 people. “But the whole blackout thing was handled very, very poorly.”

Ye Olde Fashioned Candy Shoppe in Long Beach did not get its hoped-for exemption. The 3,000-square-foot shop produces fudge, molds chocolates and displays about $60,000 worth of chocolate in refrigerated cases.

“If they knock me out, I’ll melt,” co-owner Toby Zimmerman said. “I don’t think I could come back from that.”