ENERGY CRUNCH | Nail-Biting Season Summer blackout fears spread across U.S. Western states, New York City may share California's pain

Carolyn Said, Chronicle Staff Writer Sunday, July 8, 2001 ©2001 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/07/08/MN146243.DTL

We are not alone.

As you stock up on candles and batteries, you might find solace in knowing that Californians are far from the only Americans enduring an electricity crunch.

This summer, other regions of the country will share our pain -- or at least our angst.

Although California has the bleakest outlook, with up to 260 hours of rolling blackouts predicted, the Pacific Northwest, New York City, other Western states such as Nevada and Arizona, and even Texas might undergo some nail-biting times.

"This is one of the worst years in terms of outlook for our seasonal assessments," said Eugene Gorzelnik, a spokesman for the North American Electric Reliability Council, which oversees the nation's interlocking grids.

In a summer assessment issued in May, NERC identified several regional "areas of concern" where a prolonged spell of hot weather or an inordinate number of plant outages could trigger problems. They include:

-- New York City. Outside of California and the West, the Big Apple has the grimmest summer prognosis.

The city is rushing to build 11 small power plants that could make the difference between lights on and lights off. The plants have run into neighborhood opposition because of pollution and noise.

Silver Cup Studios, the television production studio where "The Sopranos" and "Sex and the City" are filmed, is a plaintiff in one lawsuit that seeks to block a pair of plants in Queens. It says noise from the nearby plants might force it to move across the river to New Jersey.

Still, most of the miniplants are online, giving New York City what grid operators call "a razor-thin" margin. Of the 10,500 megawatts New York needs at peak, it must generate 8,428 megawatts internally, because its ability to import power is limited by transmission capacity.

With the miniplants, New York will just hit 8,468 megawatts, according to Ken Klapp, a spokesman for the New York Independent System Operator. "We're cautiously optimistic," he said. That 40-megawatt margin could be erased if just one plant goes down.

Long Island also has limited transmission connections to other areas and a similar mandate to generate the bulk of its own power. It, too, will operate on thin margins this summer.

The big wild card is the weather. And, yes, it's not so much the heat, it's the humidity. The city had a hot spell recently, but thermometers hovered below 90 and it never got sticky, so the grid wasn't really put to the test.

"If the city approaches 95 with humidity and no relief from offshore breezes; two or three days of that, you'll be up near peak," said Klapp. That's when grid operators are likely to break out the antacid.

-- Pacific Northwest. If all the stars align -- if the weather is mild, if the water supply holds up, if there are no extended plant outages, if demand meets expectations -- everything could be fine up north.

But that's quite an array of ifs. If some of those ifs do not come to pass, NERC expects the region to have an internal energy shortfall -- which it won't be able to fix by borrowing from the neighbors. In that case, it would suffer from power shortages.

The culprit is the drought. Low reservoir levels have left the region's hydroelectric facilities unable to generate as much electricity as usual.

"It's a real risk there," said Steve Cochran, senior economist at Economy. com, a Pennsylvania consulting and forecasting firm. "There are shortages because of low reservoir levels and strong demands from California. And many of the industries there are energy-intensive, not energy-efficient."

Aluminum smelting is the quintessential example; several aluminum plants in Oregon and Washington have shut down this year. Cochran said eastern Oregon and eastern Washington -- concentrated around Spokane -- are the primary centers of heavy industry.

-- Texas. The Lone Star State, home of the big power companies that have guzzled big bucks from California's predicament, is on NERC's watch list.

It's not that Texas is actually suffering from a shortage of power plants, or a dearth of fossil fuels to run them. Instead, the state is switching how it operates its electricity grid, combining the current 10 control areas into a single one. At the same time, it's launching a pilot program that will let customers choose new electricity suppliers. And, of course, it's in a region that can get pretty long spells of pretty hot weather.

"They'll have their hands full," Gorzelnik said. "There's every reason to believe it could work OK, but you never know. That's why we said to keep an eye there just in case."

As for the cognitive dissonance of Texas, of all places, having jitters about energy, Gorzelnik said, "That would only be ironic to the people in California. I would hope they'd get a smile out of it."

-- West and Southwest. Although NERC didn't finger them, some observers see plenty of potential pitfalls for all of the states that are linked with California in the Western supply area of the United States.

"The Southwest is precariously tight heading into the summer," said Michael Zenker, California-based director for Cambridge Energy Research Associates. "The Southwest is very air-conditioning intensive. Both Arizona and Nevada have shown very strong demand growth and population growth.

"That dries up the surplus capacity that used to be available. If there is a series of power plant outages or transmission line outages, they could come up short."

Nevada already got a taste of California-style blackouts on Monday, caused by sweltering summer heat and problems at several key power plants. Compounding the problem, California had Stage 1 and Stage 2 energy alerts that day and had no surplus power to spare.

The Las Vegas blackouts show "it's not just a California problem," said Roger Bohn, an economist at the University of California at San Diego. "Everybody's going to the same producers and trying to buy their electricity. If you've got it locked up sooner, then somebody else gets whacked out there."

In the various problem spots, "it really snuck up on us all," said Cochran of Economy.com. "No one really imagined that the rapid growth of the economy over the past few years would be enough to surpass the generator capacity that we had. We really just had a blind eye to it."

The result could be the world's richest country giving its citizens a taste of the developing world's infrastructure.

"I lived in the Philippines in a town where we had scheduled power outages every single day," said Cochran. "It became very clear to me how important the role of electricity is.

"When you went to an area that had 24-hour power, you saw a vibrancy and vitality that was completely lacking from the areas that did not have full- time power."

With all the variables and unknowns, it's even possible an East Coast/West Coast negative vortex could develop for a day or two, producing the spectacle of the lights going out simultaneously in both the biggest state and the biggest city in America.

E-mail Carolyn Said at csaid@sfchronicle.com.

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), July 08, 2001