With temperatures dropping considerably out of theirtriple-digit-heat conditions on Friday, California energy officialsbegan assessing the economic and operating impact of rotatingblackouts in numerous San Francisco Bay Area neighborhoods lastWednesday and the curtailment Thursday of 135 large industrialcustomers in Sacramento and Stockton totaling 300 MW.

The suspected cause of the rolling blackouts prompted CaliforniaGov. Gray Davis Friday to direct the state electricity regulatorybodies to investigate “the circumstances, including the reasons forthe generation maintenance and transmission problems and relatedimpact on electricity prices,” with an Aug. 1 deadline to provide areport with “findings and recommendations.” Earlier in the day,expectations surfaced that the state legislature wanted to assessthe situation, too, but nothing specific was announced in the midstof the lawmakers’ current budget-approval process.

The full statistical story is days, if not weeks, from beingwritten, however, according to the spokespeople with California’snonprofit electric grid operator, the California Independent SystemOperator (Cal-ISO). The governor wrote state energy regulatorypanel president Loretta Lynch and Electricity Oversight BoardChairman Michael Kahn requesting the investigation in a letterreleased Friday.

“The fact that we only had to ask for curtailment of 100 MW offirm load on a rotating basis for a few hours to protect theintegrity of the system and prevent further problems, is prettygood for a load in the Bay Area that runs at about 8,000 MW,” saidPatrick Dorinson, Cal-ISO’s communications director.

“It is worth noting that through May and into early June everyWednesday we had daylong, real-time drills with all of the marketparticipants to walk through similar situations to what the statefaced this week. And as a result, things worked very well from acommunications standpoint.”

Statewide there were some generating units still out of servicefor planned maintenance as part of routine pre-summer preparations,Dorinson said, but the most troublesome outages were the unplannedones concentrated in the Bay Area where temperatures were the mostextreme. In total, some 800 MW were unavailable at the peak of theheat wave Thursday afternoon.

“Some of the units are due back in the next week; some as earlyas Sunday (June 18) night,” Dorinson said. “So we expect to havesome of those units back.”

Officials with AES Corp., the giant international power plantdeveloper/operator, said its three plants along the SouthernCalifornia coast operated pretty much on a routine basis exceptthat they were all full-out simultaneously. Its Huntington Beach,Long Beach and Redondo Beach plants total about 4,000 MW.

“We strive to make the units available, but we only have so muchcapacity so our goal is to make them all available during thesummer months,” said Tony Chavez, one of AES’s Californiaoperations managers. “We’d only take units off if it involvesequipment that was going to fail causing the whole unit to beunreliable or unavailable. Really (the heat) didn’t change much forus because we had most available units running anyway.”

AES’s experience would have been much the same even if the heathad been concentrated in the southern half of the state, saidChavez, declining to define precisely how much natural gas hisplants have been consuming. California-based officials with DukeEnergy Services, which operates plants along the central coastserving parts of northern California, indicated that they had abrief outage caused by a fire at their Moss Landing plant Tuesday,but full operations were restored the following day; other problemsaffected part of the operations on a much smaller Bay Area plant inOakland.

“We caught the Moss Landing problem very quickly and workedthrough the night,” said Duke Energy Services’ Tom Williams. “Thebottom line is the state needs power and it is going to be hotteryet later in the summer, or certainly as hot. We all know thatoutages happen., but it is going to be an interesting summerbecause the summer [literally] hasn’t really started yet.

“The ISO has been forewarning people for some time, and so havewe. Maybe, the state will accelerate its siting process for newgeneration plants,” said Williams, noting that Duke expects to getthe go-ahead later this year to build new units at Moss Landing,and later in the summer file a new proposal to completely replacethe Morro Bay plant with a two-phase construction timetable.

Voluntary curtailments of electrical use by some medium- tolarge-size customers was implemented Wednesday in the northern halfof California. Cal-ISO issued Stage One Alerts two consecutiveafternoons at mid-week as northern California broke some 35-yeartemperature records. Natural gas loads to in-state power plantswere running at their maximum, and a Southern California Gas Co.spokesperson said late Thursday that SoCal’s system was operatingsmoothly all week despite the peak demand from generating plants.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. began seeking voluntarycurtailments among non-firm customers totaling about 200 MWcollectively, and then hastily on Wednesday implemented the rollingblackouts at the behest of Cal-ISO. Peak demand was expected toexceed 45,000 MW but never cracked the 44,000-MW barrier, settlingin Thursday afternoon at 43,900 MW.

“We had a good day [Tuesday] and burned our 300 MMcf-plus,” saida source at the City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power,the nation’s largest municipal utility.ÿ”We have no problem findinggas at market prices.ÿ I think one of the reasons is that SoCalGasis on schedule or maybe ahead of schedule in its storage program.ÿSome of the gas we are using is to support wholesale electricsales.ÿYesterday was a good day [for wholesale sales into themarket] as it was hot in the southwest.”

Wednesday, a PG&E set a new one-day peak demand for itssystem (23,361 MW), exceeding the previous record set in 1998 of23,128 MW. Earlier in the week, California’s other two majorindividual utilities were reporting demand well below theirall-time peaks, and they did not set any new records, althoughdemand was high.

Power prices on the state-chartered California Power Exchange(Cal-PX) also set an all-time record on Thursday in the day-aheadmarket, jumping to 464.86/mwh, more than $100 over the previousrecord ($359.94/MWh). Over a calendar year with all of the seasonalvariations, peak demand prices average in the range of $30 to$40/MWh.

Richard Nemec, Los Angeles

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