calif. set to shut power off to up to 2 million

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Thursday January 11, 4:03 pm Eastern Time

Calif. set to shut off power for up to 2 mln (UPDATE: previous SAN FRANCISCO, adds byline, reworks throughout) By Nigel Hunt

LOS ANGELES, Jan 11 (Reuters) - California power officials on Thursday said up to two million residents faced enforced blackouts as the most powerful winter storm in three years tipped the state's power grid into crisis. The California Independent System Operator (ISO), which runs most of the state's power grid, said the outages could last as long as four hours from 4 p.m. (7 p.m. Eastern) with northern California, including San Francisco and Silicon Valley, taking the brunt of the blackouts. Kellan Fluckiger, the ISO's chief operating officer, said the expected loss of 2,000 megawatts of power would impact around two million of the state's 34 million residents. Power cuts would rotate with customers losing power for one hour before the blackout moved to another group, he said. The move to enforce blackouts on an unprecedented scale was expected to be needed later in the day as demand increases in the early evening hours when people returning home from work switch on televisions, heaters, and begin preparing their evening meals. Fluckiger told a news conference that the electricity shortage was most severe in northern California and transmission constraints were limiting the movement of power from south to north. ``Clearly the largest portion would be in the northern part of the state,'' Fluckiger said. Rolling blackouts, in which entire neighborhoods are shut off for about an hour at a time, are a desperate final step authorities can take to prevent an uncontrolled collapse of the power grid.

MUNICIPAL UTILITIES SPARED BLACKOUT THREAT The blackouts would impact customers of the state's three investor-owned utilities, Edison International (NYSE:EIX - news) unit Southern California Edison, PG&E Corp. subsidiary (NYSE:PCG - news) Pacific Gas and Electric and Sempra Energy (NYSE:SRE - news) unit San Diego Gas and Electric. Pockets of the state served by municipal utilities such as the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power would not be impacted by the outages. California has never before ordered rolling blackouts on a statewide basis, although a power crunch last June 14 resulted in blackouts in parts of the San Francisco Bay Area. Fluckiger said the state was appealing for help to both neighboring states and the federal government. The only region in a position to help, the Pacific Northwest, appeared however, to have no power to give.``We have no power to sell to California. The tank is empty,'' said Ed Mosey, spokesman for the Portland, Ore.-based Bonneville Power Administration, which operates massive federal hydropower dams in the Pacific Northwest. A lack of rainfall has left operators of the hydropower dams with critically low water reserves, limiting their ability to step in and help California. ``The (transmission) lines are not full coming in from Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. We are being given as much as they say they have available,'' Fluckiger said. Emergency supplies in the Southwest were not expected to be of much use due to the severe transmission constraints between southern and northern California.``I can't get it (the power) to northern California,'' Fluckiger said. The California ISO estimated that 15,000 megawatts of generation, or one-third of all available power in the state, were off line on Thursday. The winter storm forced an 80 percent drop in production from the two nuclear units at the 2,200 megawatt Diablo Canyon power station in central California as huge waves washed kelp into the plant's seawater cooling intakes. California issued its first ever statewide Stage 3 alert on Dec. 7, though emergency steps at the time, like shutting down giant pumps that move water to Los Angeles, helped grid operators avoid resorting to blackouts.The state's chronic power shortage is rooted in surging demand in both California and neighboring states linked to the region's buoyant economy. There have also been few power plants built during the last decade, partly due to uncertainly linked to the deregulation of California's power markets.

-- Swissrose (Cellier@azstarnet.com), January 11, 2001


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