U.S. Power Grid Suffers Heat Stroke

California, New York, New England At Risk Critic Says Power Grids Are Neglected, Need Repair Overheating Economy, Computers And Gadgets Soak Up Juice

NEW YORK -- July 27, 2000 AP Detroit suffered a two-day blackout earlier this month. (CBS) America's power grid seems to be have a potentially crippling case of heatstroke.

This month San Francisco suffered hot-weather power shortages and southwestern California, New York and New England all face the threat of serious outages this summer. Chicago is at risk, too.

To Bill Glick of the Energy Department, figuring out the problem is easy: new power plant construction has cooled while the economy has overheated.

He says, "Weve had the economy growing at great lengths the last several years, combined with people having more access to more computers and more fax machines and again more technological innovations that use electricity."

To power company workers in New York, the end of June must seem like the dog days of August. On Monday night, New York City asked some big power users to switch on their own generators. The city had its third-highest power demand ever.

Con Ed spokesman Bill Donahue says, "Well certainly when you get into a high-load period that strains the system, and if everyone has air conditioning on you have to watch that."

New York temperatures are in the 80s, not the 90s. What about when summer really heats up? On a normal summer day, Americans use 700,000 megawatts of power. The most Americas power plants can generate is 780,000 -- not much of a cushion.

With warmer-than-average summer weather predicted for most of the country, that could be national forecast for trouble.

Jon Coifman studies power shortages. He says the answer is not more supply, but fixing long-neglected transmission and distribution grids.

He says, "If you have a little bit of hot weather, particularly if it extends over a couple of cities in a region, then you are really setting yourself up for a utility disaster.

"Approaching this simply by building more power plants is like trying to fix a traffic jam by building a new automobile plant if you are going to be pumping more power into a system that is overloaded and congested and suffering years of underinvestment

http://cbsnews.cbs.com/now/story/0,1597,210084-412,00.shtml

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), June 27, 2000