‘We Were Completely Blindsided’

Dale Shull, vice president of power distribution for Southern California Edison, found out about Monday’s blackouts the way thousands of other electricity consumers did: The lights went out.

He was in a Long Beach restaurant. It got dark, fast. His pager blared, sending him scurrying back to Edison’s Distribution Operations Center in Santa Ana--command central for blackouts in the utility’s 50,000-square-mile territory.

Edison had been drilling for this day for months. But when the rolling outages finally came, they surprised even the people in charge of turning off the power.

“We were completely blindsided by this,” said Bob Woods, who manages the operating center, one of four in Edison’s territory. He strode from room to room, a pager in one palm, a cordless phone in the other. His hands shook slightly; he had that look of having consumed too much caffeine.

Woods, Shull and Ron Ferree, Edison’s director of Grid Operations, gathered in Ferree’s office every 30 minutes or so for conference calls with other Edison executives and technicians, trying to anticipate problems and coordinate solutions.

At one point, the discussion came around to the merits of shutting off air conditioners vs. traffic lights. Many customers, lured by a 25% discount, volunteered to have their air conditioners shut off during severe shortages. The units were fitted with boxes that Edison could control remotely.

But the voluntary program wasn’t supposed to start until June. Should Edison cut them off early or take out an additional two blocks of power, which could include traffic lights?

“It’s a public safety issue,” Shull declared to the executives on the other end of the speaker phone. The air conditioners went off.

During more than a month of Stage 3 alerts, Edison engineers were warned of impending blackouts by early morning pages from the state. They would then alert public officials and police departments in cities likely to be affected. Blackouts were averted every time.

That’s why Monday’s directive caught so many by surprise. Just before noon, an unsuspecting Woods was called to his supervisor’s office for a conference call with the Independent System Operator--the state’s energy monitor. In the minute it took him to walk there, the need for blackouts had already been announced.

From then on, technicians and engineers scrambled to stay on top of the region’s first intentional “firm load interruptions,” tracking the blocks of customers who were out and checking that they came back on an hour later.

Meanwhile, they also had to sort out the outages caused by failed transformers, downed utility poles and other problems. Woods said the system received “thousands and thousands” of calls from customers without power early Monday afternoon.

Woods’ priority was to ensure that no essential customers, such as hospitals and fire and police stations, were disconnected. That’s harder than it sounds, because the energy system is constantly in flux. A healthy circuit can sometimes prop up a troubled one. During an intentional blackout, however, engineers must ensure that they don’t cut off that healthy circuit if it’s keeping the lights on in an operating room.

The blackout plan had been worked out months ago. Edison bundled customers in blocks of 100 megawatts--the equivalent of 100,000 homes. To spread the pain, it made the bundles from circuits throughout its territory. One block could include customers in Beverly Hills and far away Covina.

Edison created about 100 blocks. When told to take out a total of 500 megawatts, a technician cut power to the first five blocks on the list. An hour later, the next five blocks went out. Edison will run through the entire list before it goes back to the first customers.

Just before 5 p.m., the blackouts ended as quickly as they began. “Restore power” was ordered.

Shull collapsed in a chair. “It worked the way it was supposed to,” he said. “But this was hardly our finest hour. Here’s a company with more than a 100 years of keeping the power on, and today we had to turn it off.”

Another round of blackouts was ordered an hour later.