Rolling blackouts and CAISO status

Richard A. Steenbergen ras at e-gerbil.net
Thu Jan 18 19:42:26 UTC 2001


CAISO just ended a morning press conference which I don't believe any
major media organization followed fully. Some of the specifics they gave
were:

Of the 11,000 megawatts which are currently offline, 4,000 megawatts are
offline due to maintanance of plants, and 7,000 megawatts are offline due
to "forced outages". Of the forced outages, 2,000 megawatts are offline
due to lack of water for hydroelectric generators.

One of the major reasons given for today's rolling blackouts being
a) worse then yesterday, b) so much earlier and at a lower load is that
yesterday they used today and tomorrow's water resources for hydroelectric
plants in order to keep blackouts minimized yesterday.

They are anticipating reducing the rolling blackouts to 500 megawatts for
the duration of the business day due to a larger then anticipated impact
from power conversation requests. However, the peak power usage which
begins at 5pm, maxes at 6pm, and lasts until 10pm, is expected to cause
large rolling blackouts potentially from 6-9pm in both northern and
southern California.

They are also anticipating 3000-4000 megawatts coming back online in
upcoming weeks, but only 28,000 megawatts are actually being generated
within California so the struggle to import power from outside generators
will continue.

The next ISO press conference will occur at 1pm this afternoon.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>   http://www.e-gerbil.net/humble
PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177  (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA  B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)





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