There was no shortage of hand-wringing and news mediaannouncements in the West in the wake of recent electricity pricespikes and multi-million-dollar estimated consequences fromCalifornia’s relatively modest round of rolling brownouts aroundthe San Francisco Bay Area. The big question — particular inCalifornia — is whether new solutions will come from regulators,lawmakers or the market.

A report due Aug. 1 to California’s Gov. Gray Davis on therecent managed series of power outages and some of the generatingplant problems contributing to that will provide a clearerindication, but that assumes there are no recurring power peaksthat strain the state’s struggling electricity transmission grid.

A number of the state’s merchant power plant developer/operatorshope the reliability crunch will prompt state energy policymakersto accelerate the state’s often cumbersome siting process for newgas-fired generating plants. However, a check of the current statusof proposed plants, aside from five that have been approved (fourunder construction), indicates more, not less, time for approvalsfrom the California Energy Commission.

A CEC project manager indicated last week that very few of theactive pending applications are likely to be approved anytime soon,with the exception of a proposed new plant near Elk Hillsco-sponsored by Sempra Energy and Occidental Petroleum and theremodeling of Duke Energy Services’ Moss Landing plant along thecentral California coast. And those plants may not gain thego-ahead before the end of the summer at the earliest.

The delays of more than a year now for another Duke plantremodeling — at Morro Bay, about 80 miles south of Moss Landing— is an example of the predictment facing California. At the sametime that local and environmental concerns delay the start of thestate’s formal siting application process, demands on the oldgenerating facility targeted for remodeling have doubled since 1996when it went on the sales block.

“The existing plant’s production levels have increased 194%since 1996 due to the increasing demand for electricity inCalifornia,” according to Duke officials. “We forecast the year2000 production levels to be the highest since 1988.”

Richard Nemec, Los Angeles

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