Mitigation

California regulators Thursday instituted a blackout mitigation program among nonresidential customers in which they can schedule reductions of their power use during peak-demand hours in exchange for a fixed per-kilowatt-hour payment. The action by the California Public Utilities Commission is a smaller version of a proposal made earlier in the month by Houston-based Reliant Energy for a “negawatt” program that would include an auction of voluntarily reduced load, rather than a fixed payment amount.