Demand Grows for Early Warning of Blackouts

As California narrowly avoided a third day of electricity blackouts Wednesday, utilities and state officials continued work on early warning systems that would spare inconvenience to consumers and save millions of dollars for business owners.

Despite earlier claims that warnings would create a public safety problem, not warning people may create even more problems.

“When you’ve got heavy equipment suddenly shutting down and employees groping around in the dark . . . there is a real concern for worker safety,” said Julie Puentes, spokeswoman for the Orange County Business Council.

Cooler weather slowed air-conditioner use and helped grid operators avoid blackouts Wednesday, but not before a midafternoon scare. The agency that operates the statewide electricity transmission grid struggled with electricity shortages after a 750-megawatt generator broke down in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Blackouts Monday and Tuesday gave new urgency to the idea of notifying electricity customers before they lose power.

“Keeping the lights on is the No. 1 priority, but this communication issue is a close second,” said Maria Contreras-Sweet, a state cabinet officer, as well as a member of the board of the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), the agency that tries to keep electricity flowing through the state’s transmission system.

Business owners want to know why state officials have waited until the eleventh hour to implement a system that could minimize the impact.

Jack Stewart, president of the California Manufacturers and Technology Assn., said so much time was spent on rate increases, bond sales and other issues critical to keeping the electricity flowing, that everything else took a back seat. He said officials in Sacramento were hesitant to assume a “war room” mentality for fear of exaggerating the potential for power outages.

“My fear is that we downplayed the magnitude . . . when we should have been looking at the worse-case scenario,” he said. “This should have been like [planning for] Y2K.”

Constituents now have legislators scrambling for solutions.

State Sen. Debra Bowen (D-Marina del Rey) has scheduled hearings today to discuss advance notification. She said the issue has gained a new sense of urgency as a summer of routine blackouts approaches. There are solutions, she said, but the logistics of providing notification to millions of power users are daunting.

“You can create a system that does just about anything if you have enough money and time,” she said. “The question is, how much do we want to spend? . . . And I’m not sure we have enough time.”

When the state first experienced rolling blackouts last year, the utilities gave a few minutes’ warning, but only to police and other public safety officials.

Utility officials said they couldn’t warn the public of the outages because looters and burglars would have a field day if they knew where electricity-powered alarms were out of service.

That didn’t sit well with business managers. Though consumers might find it inconvenient to have their TV sets go black, an abrupt outage can wreak havoc on a company if an assembly line freezes or a computer system crashes. Business owners say they need time to methodically wind down production to protect machinery, products, data--and employees.

Businesses Lose Money

Profits have been imperiled. At Delco Machine and Gear, a maker of precision aerospace components in Long Beach, a brief March outage cost $30,000 in lost wages and spoiled production.

The stakes are higher in Silicon Valley. A single blackout last June resulted in cumulative losses of $100 million for the region’s companies, according to the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group. The losses were tallied from lost sales and productivity, forfeited wages and ruined products.

“We could be talking billions this summer,” said spokeswoman Michelle Montague-Bruno. Energy officials predict more than 30 days of rolling blackouts this summer.

A study released Wednesday by a business organization estimated that blackouts will cost California businesses $21.8 billion in lost productivity, reduce household income by $4.5 billion and result in 135,000 Californians losing jobs. The losses will be greater, the study said, if the weather is especially hot.

“The longer this continues, the greater our risk of a job-killing recession gripping California,” said Stewart. His organization sponsored the study.

Economist John Urbanchuk, who wrote the study, said that getting better information to companies sooner could substantially help reduce losses from blackouts.

With some warning, business owners could adjust scheduling and planning, said Urbanchuk, executive vice president with AUS Consultants, a New Jersey-based economic and market research firm. “Right now we’ve got a situation where businesses are at maximum risk.”

Utilities have responded to the call for information in varying ways.

PG&E; lists so-called outage blocks on customers’ bills. These are geographic areas that the utilities have devised to distribute power outages over a broad area. The utility’s Web site tells people which areas will be blacked out next--but not when. The utility itself doesn’t know for sure until minutes before.

Last month, the California Public Utilities Commission ordered Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric to begin the same warning system, beginning in June.

SDG&E; has started telling people what communities will be blacked out next. Edison has not.

“The reason we don’t provide the general public with information on the boundaries of where outages will be is because law enforcement believes it is not helpful,” Edison spokesman Steve Conroy said. “We’re talking about looting and other types of criminal activity here.”

But some law enforcement officials say the concern is overstated.

“The [criminals] would have to be very quick and opportunistic,” said Dale Carnathan of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office of Emergency Services. “I doubt that many of them are going to be listening to the news stations.”

Businesses said that even those warnings are not good enough. They want phone calls or e-mails telling them when power will go out.

Neither PG&E; nor Edison has agreed to active warning systems. PG&E; officials say the technical barriers are too daunting.

“Advance customer warning is good, but we can’t always do it,” said company spokesman John Tremayne. He said all utilities are required to alert their largest customers whenever the state declares a Stage 3 alert, indicating that electricity supplies are critically low. The utility also tries to notify its 22,000 or so customers who are on life-support systems.

But notifying everyone, he said, is “an impossibility. When you’re given less than five minutes warning yourself, the job gets pretty tough.”

Such warnings are not seen as insurmountable by SDG&E.; The utility has announced plans to offer an early warning system of e-mail and pager messages starting June 1 to commercial and industrial customers.

And in PG&E;’s own territory, the San Francisco Chronicle has started an e-mail warning system available to anyone who signs up online. The system is tailored to PG&E; customers, who receive an e-mail as soon as the newspaper learns about a pending outage in their neighborhood.

“The more informed people are, the safer they can be,” said Mindy Spatt, a spokeswoman for The Utility Reform Network (TURN), a San Francisco-based consumer group. “I can see how that information could be helpful to a lot of people.”

Warning System Bill Defeated

One state legislator tried unsuccessfully to force utilities to adopt an early warning system.

A bill sponsored by Assemblyman John Campbell (R-Irvine) was defeated for a second time in a key committee Tuesday. That bill would have required utilities to inform large energy users of upcoming power outages within four minutes of the utilities getting word from Cal-ISO.

Business representatives say they hope something will be done despite the defeat.

Carl Guardino, president and chief executive of the Silicon Valley Manufacturing Group and a member of Cal-ISO’s Board of Governors, said the grid operator is developing an advance notification system to better warn energy consumers when the region reaches minimal power reserves.

Guardino said the warning system is still in the planning stages and he could provide few details. He said Cal-ISO wants a system that is able to serve residential and commercial users and that utilizes a variety of technologies from fax machines and pagers to the telephone and e-mail.

“It’s going to get done,” Guardino said. “A two-minute warning is fine for football games, but it’s not enough to protect the health and safety of Californians and the California economy.”

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Times staff writers Robin Fields, Ofelia Casillas, Bob Pool and George Ramos in Los Angeles, Noaki Schwartz in the San Fernando Valley, Richard Winton in Pasadena, Nancy Wride in Long Beach, John Glionna in San Francisco, Anna Gorman in Ventura County, Matt Ebnet and Thuy-Doan Le in Orange County and Miguel Bustillo in Sacramento contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

How an Edison Blackout Works A rolling blackout begins with the California Independent System Operator’s directing 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. The 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 hospitals and fire and police stations, are exempt from the 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. Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric will add group numbers to their bills in June.

Sources: Times archives, Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric

Researched by MALOY MOORE / Los Angeles Times