‘Dr. Strangelove’ Meets N.Y. Stock Exchange
Tim Van Blaricom is a soft-spoken man with his finger on the pulse of California’s daily struggle to eke out enough electricity to keep the lights on.
The 34-year-old former Navy aircraft engineer is the shift manager for the California Independent System Operator, the nonprofit agency that controls the state’s surging power grid.
It is a stressful, sometimes thankless job, he says, one that can fray your nerves like an old electrical wire. The windowless room where he works crackles with the tension of Houston Control, the buying frenzy of the New York Stock Exchange and the surreal atmosphere of “Doctor Strangelove.”
At 9:50 a.m. Thursday came one of its worst moments. As Van Blaricom monitored his bank of computers in the bowels of Cal-ISO headquarters, he suddenly sensed that the state’s supply of megawatts was plummeting.
“What I saw made my blood pressure rise. I knew that we weren’t going to have enough juice to get by.”
What he saw was that just as residents were running through the last of several thousand megawatts Cal-ISO had purchased from the Pacific Northwest, the state was plunging into another emergency. The technicians call it “Path 15”: The electrical lines feeding Northern California from the southern part of the state were bottlenecked at Bakersfield.
Van Blaricom picked up the phone and summoned a conference call with managers from the state’s three largest utilities. Trying hard to maintain his composure, he ordered Pacific Gas & Electric to conserve 1,000 megawatts of electricity by immediately cutting power to about 670,000 customers, beginning in the north, which is made especially vulnerable by a lack of transmission lines.
Then he sat back, bit his lower lip and watched nervously for the next two hours as the blackouts rolled through areas of San Francisco, Fresno and Sacramento.
Van Blaricom and several dozen colleagues labor at the heart of California’s battle to keep the lights on. Often working 20 hours a day, drinking coffee to stay alert, they make the wrenching, split-second decisions to avoid what in the past two days has become inevitable: temporarily putting unwitting Californians in the dark.
“Giving the order to cut off people’s power is one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever had to make,” he said. “Because everyone here understands the consequences of our actions, maybe putting people who live alone in darkness. But we also understand our responsibility not to do something to threaten the entire electrical grid.”
For Van Blaricom and his Cal-ISO colleagues--many with decades of experience in the electricity business--the goal is to ration power quickly enough to avoid the catastrophe of Aug. 10, 1996.
An incident in the Pacific Northwest triggered a domino effect across the 14-state Western power grid of which California is a member. The result was a cascade of blackouts across the Western United States, Mexico and Canada, thrusting pockets of the American West into darkness.
“That,” says emergency response coordinator Tami Elliott, “was the day all of us will remember. It’s what we want to avoid.”
Cal-ISO and another state nonprofit agency, the California Power Exchange, work in concert to keep the state’s power flowing. Cal-ISO workers monitor the ebb and flow of electrons on the part of a massive grid that serves 75% of the state, making sudden purchases of electricity at whatever price necessary to keep up the flow. Prices are set by a digital auction at the Power Exchange. Companies interested in buying electricity submit, via computer, the amount of electricity they will need the next day and the price they are willing to pay. Those with electricity to sell offer a quantity and a proposed price.
The problem Thursday morning was the same one as Wednesday: Because of hydroelectric power shortages, unplanned outages and hesitance on the part of some sellers, the state could not purchase enough electricity to meet its needs.
When Van Blaricom gave his blackout order, Elliott and a dozen other Cal-ISO staffers quickly gathered in a large glass-enclosed conference room known as “the fish tank.”
Dividing up responsibility, they began calling the press as well as state and federal regulatory agencies--spreading the word to emergency response teams across Northern California that power would soon be cut.
Outside, the main Cal-ISO control room floor is vaguely shaped like a baseball diamond, with Van Blaricom’s desk situated at home plate. At 10 a.m., moments after the shutdown order, he looked up at the far wall to a bank of computer-generated bar charts and liked what he saw: PG&E; had begun closing down its nonessential customers in a patchwork array across hundreds of miles. The state’s electricity usage had begun to wane, thanks to the blackouts and the conservation they inspired in unaffected areas, restoring enough reserve power to create a small buffer.
Van Blaricom explained that PG&E; officials, not Cal-ISO, decide which areas will lose power: “We tell them it’s got to go and they make the decision.”
He still didn’t think he was out of the woods. So just after 11 a.m., Van Blaricom gave a second shutdown order. To spread the burden of inconvenience, he told PG&E; officials to bring up the power to the first batch of customers, but to cut power to 500,000 more.
Around noon, Van Blaricom--whose duty as shift manager is so exhausting that he only works the job for two consecutive days-- gave the order to end the second blackout.
But the drama wasn’t over. Technicians continued to monitor the dispatch board, the mammoth 180-foot-long electronic wall that shows where the electricity is located at hundreds of substations with names like Coolwater and Four Corners spread across California and neighboring states.
Meanwhile, others scoured the Western electricity market, looking for generators, power companies and other sellers who could provide the state with electricity for the critical surge of usage in the early evening, when people return home from work and children get home from school.
At 1 p.m., an Internet server glitch meant that technicians could not keep track of electricity available on the open market and had to get on the telephone to do business.
Dennis Leahy, a senior grid resource coordinator who began his career in the electricity business 30 years ago digging ditches for a utility company, looked on warily.
“There isn’t anyone out there who is not being contacted,” he said. “If people have power out there, we want it.”
Over his shoulder, a technician lowered a phone and called out: “Seattle’s down. They’re not coming through!”
Elliott likened the frustration of Cal-ISO’s job to that of air traffic controllers.
“We don’t own the airport. We don’t own the planes. And we don’t sell the tickets to passengers. we just try to keep things moving on time,” she said.
By midafternoon, thanks to a few last-minute power purchases from Canada and Arizona and lower usage because of warmer weather, Cal-ISO officials were expecting to avoid further blackouts for Thursday and perhaps even over the weekend.
Van Blaricom tried to force a smile. Arriving at 5 a.m., he had expected another 15-hour day. For a moment, his thoughts turned to home and a comfortable spot on the couch.
“Last night I went home and watched ‘Gilligan’s Island’ on Nickelodeon,” he said with a smile. “Something totally mindless. It was great.”
Confused about why California is in an electricity crisis? A simplified Q&A; explaining how the shortage came to be is on The Times’ Web site at https://www.latimes.com/powerq&a;
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How an Edison Blackout Works
A rolling blackout begins with the California Independent System Operator directing the state’s investor-owned utilities to reduce the electrical load by a certain number of megawatts. The utilities use radio and television to notify their customers about five to 10 minutes before outages begin.
Edison has identified circuits--or electrical lines--available for use in rotating outages. Each circuit supplies power to a combination of residential and commercial customers within a large geographical area. These circuits are arranged into 100-megawatt groups. For example, a group may include customers in Los Angeles, Kern, Tulare and Santa Barbara counties.
In the event that Edison is asked to reduce the load by 500 megawatts, service would be interrupted to about five groups for about one hour. The duration of an outage may vary depending on the circumstances.
At the end of the hour, power is restored to the affected groups. If needed, service may be interrupted for another group or groups. Once a group has undergone a blackout, it is moved to the bottom of the list.
Customers who provide essential public health, safety and security services, such as large hospitals and fire and police stations, are exempt from these outages.
Customers can contact Edison at (800) 655-4555 to find out if they are part of a controlled outage. For Pacific Gas & Electric customers, group numbers printed on their bills indicate whether they are affected by outages announced on radio and TV.
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Sources: Times archives, Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric
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Researched by MALOY MOORE/Los Angeles Times
