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December 17, 2000 Power Shortage Sends Ripples Across West By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK

EDRO WOOLLEY, Wash., Dec. 14 — Power flows south in the summer and north in the winter. For years, that has been a cardinal rule in the vast interlocking grid that distributes electricity across the Western United States.

The rule makes perfect sense: the peak demand season for power in California and the Southwest comes in summer, while demand hits a high point in winter here in the Northwest, where nearly half of all homes are heated with electricity.

But as California searches desperately outside the state for electricity, one half of that basic rule has been abruptly rewritten. This week, federal energy officials took the unusual step of ordering suppliers in the Northwest to send emergency electricity to California, where regulators say the state is at the brink of a breakdown in its power system.

And because California's demands are likely to continue in coming weeks, there are strong signs that power problems are spreading across the West. Elected officials and energy executives are worrying aloud about possible electricity shortages and skyrocketing rates for consumers, as well as the environmental problems that could arise from the intense pressure to change the normal schedules for drawing down the water behind the huge network of hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest.

Those problems are already compounded by abnormally low rainfall this autumn: here along the icy Skagit River, for instance, low water levels in the Skagit and two dam reservoirs recently left thousands of salmon eggs exposed and many more threatened, precisely at the time the region is facing increasingly stringent mandates under the Endangered Species Act to protect the fish.

In addition to those immediate concerns, the relatively good relations among Western states on power issues could also become a casualty of the emergency. Up until now, those states have shared supplies of electricity with few problems, as evidenced by the two-way transmission cycle that has routinely occurred in the past. But some finger-pointing has already begun.

"We are really at risk of having the state of California and its energy problems drag the rest of us down with it," Gov. John Kitzhaber of Oregon said today in calling for an energy summit meeting to work out the problems.

The governor, a Democrat, blamed California's "failed deregulation experiment" for the shortages.

"Events are happening so fast they're running over us," Mr. Kitzhaber said. "We're really in a reactive mode, and obviously the big dog on the block is California."

After decades of state-governed pricing, California decided to deregulate its power industry four years ago in a bold step that advocates said would soon deliver cheaper, cleaner and more efficient power across the state by allowing the marketplace to set rates. At the time, reserves were often as high as 30 percent.

But while proponents of deregulation still say it will work in the long run, the state is by all accounts in a crunch these days, with shortages, soaring rates and widespread concerns that the crisis has been manufactured in some way to drive up the profits in selling electricity.

About one-fourth of California's generating capacity has been offline at times in recent weeks, prompting criticisms and calls for an investigation by consumer advocates. Industry officials say that many of the plants are in dire need of repair or regular maintenance after going full tilt to meet the record demands of last summer.

Whatever the reasons, the result has been pressure on other states, especially those in the Northwest, to deliver power south at precisely the time they would normally be looking to buy extra supplies to meet higher demand here.

It is not yet officially winter, but officials warn that a prolonged period of frigid temperatures could push supplies to a danger point. California has hovered at the edge of a genuine crisis in recent days, a so-called Stage 3 alert, in which electricity reserves fall to less than 1.5 percent of total supply and the authorities can order rolling blackouts to cope with the problem.

At a minimum, the problems in California have frayed relations among power suppliers in the West.

"I'd liken it to strains on a pretty good marriage," explained Bob Royer, director of communications for Seattle City Light, the public utility serving that city. "The power system has been mutually beneficial in a big way. But it's no longer mutually beneficial."

The problems could worsen on several fronts.

One is the straightforward issue of meeting demand, though some here in the Northwest find it a bit perplexing that questions about how to do so are even being asked. The network of hydroelectric dams long gave the region a cheap and seemingly inexhaustible supply of power.

But population growth and the out- of-state demands have caught up with the network. And those who operate the dams must also maintain a keen awareness of environmental considerations, especially the best flow rates in the rivers for salmon. Many species of salmon are now listed under the Endangered Species Act because of the very existence of the dams.

"When you drop more water than usual out of those reservoirs now, you have to hope you'll have sufficient rainfall and snowfall to meet your flow requirements next spring and summer," said John Harrison, a spokesman for the Northwest Power Planning Council, which represents the governors of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana and seeks to balance energy planning with environmental concerns. "That's simply the $64,000 question. You don't know with sufficient precision what the weather will do."

In any event, he said: "The system remains stressed. There's no question about that."

Even in the best of times, the procedures for allocating power out of the Northwest dam system are complex. Under normal regulations, which take into account the average precipitation figures for past years, the reservoirs must be drawn down in such a way that there is at least an 85 percent probability that there will be enough water the following spring to meet the optimum flow requirements for salmon to spawn and for their eggs to yield fish.

"So when you have to run the system a little harder than you'd planned, which is what we've been asked to do, you may lower that probability," said Mike Hansen, a communications official with the Bonneville Power Administration, which sells power from more than two dozen dams in the region and was among those suppliers ordered by the federal energy secretary, Bill Richardson, to sell power to California this week.

"And if we have to do that too much," Mr. Hansen said, "you could have real consequences in the future, in terms of our ability to produce power later in the winter or meet the fish flows in the spring."

Under this week's arrangement, Bonneville arranged to ship 1,750 megawatts of power, about enough to meet the demands of a city one-and- a-half times the size of Seattle, at peak demand hours in California. Officials there said the power was critical to help them avoid a Stage 3 emergency, and have pledged to return power during off-peak periods.

Secretary Richardson said his order was necessary. "We must act," he said in a statement, "to ensure there will be a sufficient supply of electricity to keep the power flowing to homes and businesses in California."

But by any measure, the exchange is unusual, and if a prolonged cold snap hits here, Northwest energy officials say it may be extremely difficult to replicate the aid.

The two regions can exchange power through a set of large transmission lines, known as the intertie, that stretch from the Dalles Dam on the Columbia River in Oregon to the Los Angeles area. The intertie can send as much as 6,900 megawatts in either direction, according to the Northwest Power Planning Council.

Both Governor Kitzhaber in Oregon and Gov. Gary Locke of Washington, a Democrat, have urged their residents to conserve energy and implored the federal government to impose a cap on the price of wholesale electricity. Several California utilities have warned that they face severe financial problems because of the increase in electricity prices, and those economic forces have clearly already spread north.

Earlier this month, Tacoma Power, the utility serving Seattle's neighbor, said zooming wholesale prices and low reservoir levels at its dams could lead it to seek an 86 percent surcharge for residential customers and even larger ones for businesses. A federal cap could reduce those proposed charges. And in Oregon, Portland General Electric has asked the state's Public Utility Commission for permission to raise electricity bills at least 13 percent.

With the demands on the system coming during a period of such low rainfall, the complexities are on stark display here on the Skagit River. When Bill McMillan, a field biologist with Washington Trout, a conservation organization, went out to fish for steelhead on Thanksgiving morning, he was stunned to see just how low the river had dropped in a one-day period, he said.

Mr. McMillan blamed Puget Sound Energy, the company that operates two dams on the nearby Baker River, which feeds into the Skagit, for abruptly stopping the flow out of the dams in order to raise the level of its reservoirs.

"They cut the umbilical cord on all these fish," said Mr. McMillan, who has put down stakes with pink ribbons to mark the dozens of salmon egg nests, known as redds, that were exposed. The company says the drop in the river level was an unavoidable result of the low rainfall this autumn and planned maintenance at the dam.

State officials, working with Puget Sound Energy and the Seattle City Light, which operates dams upriver on the Skagit, say they are trying to restore enough of the flow to help the fertilized salmon eggs survive through the coming months.

But depending on how much rain and snow there is in coming months, even the process of adding water to the river to help fish could complicate the similar efforts that will be required in the spring when other species of salmon come to spawn.

"You could do that," said David E. Pflug, senior fisheries biologist with Seattle City Light. "But you'd be borrowing from next year."

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/17/national/17GRID.html?printpage=yes

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), December 16, 2000