With a new major entity in the state’s energy mix — a $5 billion power authority — California’s lineup of pending natural gas and electricity reports is growing, and two existing ones are getting more fine-tuning at the state’s energy commission. After the five-member California Energy Commission postponed adopting reports on electricity/natural gas “trends” and the state’s gas transmission/storage infrastructure, revised versions of those studies may be delayed until Sept. 19, according to energy commission sources.

Ultimately the positioning of power plants — and hence, the new power authority — are going to play a larger role in the state’s gas planning, according to energy commission gas analysts.

“If there is a lot of generation built around, but outside, the state and those supplies are available to California by wire, it very well could reduce the gas demand in California and therefore the additional (pipeline/storage) infrastructure needs in the state,” said Bill Wood, the energy commission’s chief natural gas analyst. Wood said that another factor in determining gas demand will be the amount of electrical transmission capacity available to bring the added electrons from other states into California.

The unusually mild, blackout-free summer with higher-than-expected conservation and new in-state supplies have caused the energy officials to view the gas report as less critical. And still waiting in the wings is a state “natural gas market outlook” study that the commission wants to have ready this fall so it can be used by the California Public Utilities Commission in a state legislatively mandated natural gas report the utility regulators are required to provide to the new state Consumer Power and Conservation Financing Authority by Nov. 15.

The gas infrastructure report, originally compiled in the midst of the state’s electricity/gas woes this past winter and early spring, was focused on the effects of the worst summer conditions of excess demand and hot weather in which storage levels would suffer.

“Those concerns are no longer there,” said the energy commission’s Wood. “The question now is whether the report should talk about those things, and to some extent now, those things are being pulled out of the current draft. We received additional comments from PG&E [the utility], SoCalGas and TURN [consumer group The Utility Reform Network] that are being looked at also.”

Wood noted that a revised version of the infrastructure report was expected to be released for further comment this week, prior to its ultimate approval by the commissioners.

On a near-term basis, the report assesses northern California’s gas supply situation as adequate and focuses on several bottlenecks identified on the Southern California Gas Co. transmission pipeline system in the South, but those by now are all being addressed in an expansion and upgrade program underway to add almost 400 MMcf/d of new capacity by January 2002.

“SoCal has done a lot of things — revising three pipes and adding a new one, as well as putting about 14 Bcf in the system by taking some old cushion gas in storage [at two underground storage facilities] and making it working gas. And that is gas already in the system that doesn’t have to go through the pipeline bottlenecks.

“So at least in the short term, it looks like some of the things we were concerned about in southern California have been alleviated, so we’re now in the process of looking at the longer term to see how things will stack up in the next five to 10 years. A lot of analysis will depend upon what kind of power plants we put in where.

“It is a crap shoot to figure out where these plants are going to go. There are so many of them that have been proposed and granted licenses, as well as a bunch proposed — not only in California, but also all over the western states. Who builds what, when and where really is going to impact a lot the gas demand and generation inside the state.”

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