Summer Starts, Power Doesn’t Stop

As unwelcome as the killer bees, as hyped as “Pearl Harbor,” the big, bad summer of 2001 officially arrived today and--did someone forget to turn out the lights?

After months of dread, the Blackout Summer began on a curiously bright note. Despite several days of summer-like weather, there was barely a whisper about blackouts. The state that couldn’t plug in a night light in January without tripping electrical shortage alarms managed to enter the summer with electricity to spare.

For the moment, power supplies look healthy. Wholesale electricity prices are a sliver of what they were just a month ago. Demand for power is down, apparently the result of a successful conservation campaign. And California officials appear to have won their months-long battle with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which imposed price and supply controls on the Western electricity market beginning at midnight last night.

All in all, an auspicious beginning for what many have warned would be a dreadful summer. So why aren’t California energy officials blowing up balloons for the big end-of-crisis party?

“We are not out of the woods,” said Richard Sklar, the state’s energy supply czar. “We are not out of the woods on price, and we are not out of the woods on availability.”

His view is echoed by most of those who closely watch the state’s electrical market. So far, California’s supply-demand balance is coming closer to best-case predictions than to the worst. But it is a delicate balance.

On Wednesday, with temperatures hovering around summer norms, operators of the statewide power grid managed to maintain--if just barely--the 7% of operating reserves they strive for. When reserves dip below that, the state begins ascending the ladder of staged emergency declarations that eventually lead to blackouts.

Total electricity use in the state peaked about 4 p.m. at 39,156 megawatts--a high for the year, but well below the state’s all-time record of 45,884 megawatts, which was set on July 12, 1999.

State officials credit conservation with shaving off about 4,000 megawatts, an amount that easily means the difference between blackouts or no blackouts on most days.

“There is no doubt in my mind that conservation . . . has led directly to the situation that we’re in now,” said Mike Sloss, who tracks conservation for the California Energy Commission.

Richard Roher, who crunches conservation numbers for the commission, said consumers appear to be continuing to cut their electricity use by about 11%.

There also has been good news on the supply side of the equation. After months in which power plant breakdowns and shutdowns were costing the state as much as 15,000 megawatts of electricity at a time, most plants are now online and outages were down to 4,300 megawatts Wednesday.

Most small, alternative energy suppliers finally reached agreement this week in their epic contract battle with Southern California Edison, putting that vital segment of the state’s energy production back in business. And in the next two weeks, the state’s first two new major power plants in a decade are scheduled to open, adding more than 1,000 megawatts to the power stream--enough to serve about 750,000 typical homes.

State officials are also hoping that the FERC ruling, which limits prices in the 11-state Western region and requires generators to sell available power to California, will ease the situation further.

“Everyone is very interested to see how tomorrow unfolds, price-wise and supply-wise,” Stephanie McCorkle, a spokeswoman for California’s grid operator, said Wednesday.

For all the positive signs, no one is predicting that the state will weather the summer without blackouts. No one knows how many power plants will break down. Nor does anyone know the extent to which Californians’ best intentions to conserve will melt away in a sustained heat wave.

While the past few days have been hot, they haven’t been searing. It was 81 in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday, 94 in Riverside, 102 in Sacramento, 109 in Palm Springs--toasty, but far from the hottest weather any of those places can expect this summer.

Nor was it unusually hot in surrounding states, whose ability to sell power to California depends in part on their own energy needs. Electricity use generally rises with the thermometer, because air conditioners use more power than most other appliances.

“If it gets hot in California, and it’s also hot in the Northwest . . . and it’s hot in Phoenix, we could run into some significant problems,” said Jan Smutney-Jones, executive director of the Independent Energy Producers Assn., a trade group for power plant owners in California.

The state has benefited recently from imports of electricity from the Northwest, where snow runoff is cascading through electrical turbines. But those imports are expected to dry up later in the summer as stream flowswhich have been kept high to assist salmon runs--are scaled back to levels that reflect the region’s winter drought.

So the summer of 2001 could still be interesting. And it may begin with a blackout after all. For weeks now, an e-mail campaign has spread through the Internet, calling on people to voluntarily cut off most or all of their power between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. tonight.

The protest, called the “Roll Your Own Blackout,” is the idea of a Southern California artist who worked in tandem with a software engineer from Berkeley. Their intention is to protest the energy policies recently announced by President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

“When you hear Mr. Cheney, who drafted the energy plan, deriding conservation as merely a personal virtue, it is as though he believes virtue has no place in government policy, and that would be a very dangerous thing,” said Dave Aragon, the software engineer.

The California crisis gave birth to their campaign, but Aragon said he is hoping that the protest goes beyond the state’s borders.

“Worldwide would be fine,” he said.