CA Power

Fri Jul 12 14:35:17 UTC 2002

I'm a little late to this discussion but the first stage two alert (two days
ago?) resulted from a large power plant going off-line for "unspecified
reasons" to quote the spokesperson. Does make you go hmmm...

-Al Rowland

Just my 2¢, feel free to use your delete key.

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Hannigan [mailto:hannigan at fugawi.net] 
Sent: Thursday, July 11, 2002 3:42 PM
To: Gary E. Miller
Cc: nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Re: CA Power

At 03:03 PM 7/11/2002 -0700, Gary E. Miller wrote:
>Yo Martin!
>
>If there is plenty of power in CA then howcum there was a "stage 2" 
>alert yesterday and a "market alert today"?  Today's "projected demand" 
>equaled "available resources" today  If demand played out as expected 
>there would have been big trouble in CA today.

A lot of data surrounding the Enron collapse suggests that power traders
artificially manipulated CA's power market, and also suggests that a lot of 
the
previous summers warnings of power problems were also artificially created.

All over the country, building of "extra" capacity has slowed. Some due to
new sources that came online, some due to the fact that a decrease in power
was realized as a result of the falloff in the economy.

Could it be that CA is experiencing a normal surge in power utilization and
the warning is part of a normal cycle?

Regards,

--
Martin Hannigan                    hannigan at fugawi.net