More rolling blackouts in California on Sunday

[Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>]

A brief rolling blackout was instituted on Sunday in the following
areas Sacramento, Roseville, Turlock and Modesto.

California ISO reports:
 About 120 megawatts of load shedding in Northern California was
 initiated when electricity that normally flows on the 500 kilovolt
 Pacific DC (Direct Current) Intertie was automatically redirected
 on to the California Oregon Intertie, a 500 kilovolt AC (Alternating
 Current) line linking northern and southern California. The
 transmission disruption occurred when the DC Intertie sensed an
 equipment malfunction at a substation operated by the Bonneville
 Power Administration 90 miles east of Portland. The California ISO
 issued the controlled outage to keep the AC lines from being
 overloaded at Path 15, a group of high-voltage lines in central
 California already at their limit because of low resources in the
 northern part of the state. By issuing the outage, the California
 ISO averted possible rotating blackouts for Northern California
 should Path 15 have overloaded to the point that the transmission
 lines were damaged.

On Saturday there was a blackout affecting Menlo Park due to equipment.

There have been approximately 60 hours of interruptible load blackouts
since January 1, and approximately 5 hours of "firm" load blackouts in
California.

According to a survey by the Silcon Vally Manufacturing Group approximately
72% of the companies have backup generators on-site.  26% plan on installing
additional backup capacity.  73% of the companies have voluntarily curtailed
power consumption in the last year.  And 19% experienced a blackout on
June 14, 2000 (the summer rolling blackout).

http://www.svmg.org/htm/Energy/baseline%20survey%201-2001.htm

The State 3 Alert has been extended through Midnight Monday.

Although the rolling blackouts have not affected any major Internet
facilities, Kinder Morgan Energy Partners and GATX Terminals Corp the
operators of the two major oil pipeline systems warned fuel supplies
are in short supply due to power interruptions to their pumping stations.
The California PUC has exempted the pipelines from voluntary load
shedding for the next 7 days.