RE: California electric power on the ragged edge

[Karyn Ulriksen <kulriksen () publichost com>]

It appears that SCE has been seriously degrading voltage in an attempt to
keep most of us in SoCal happy, but some of the datacenters have already
leaned into generator power due to low voltage (10% down).  It ain't pretty.
There was some brown outs occuring in the San Fernando Valley that I noticed
weren't highly publicized.

We've powered down the unnecessaries in our datacenter to minimize impact
and have defined plans to further power down secondary power supplies *when*
(as in not *if*) the rolls hit so that we can extend what our Lieberts can
deliver.  LA and the Coachella valley are just starting to hit the triple
digits on the thermometer, so by the end of August and throughout September
when we regularly his 105 - 120 F, the rolling blackouts are highly likely
to be a reality.

Refer to http://www.caiso.com/awe/systemstatus.html  or simply
http://www.caiso.com.

Note that on http://www.caiso.com/thegrid/ they state:

  "Power plants meeting up to 45,000 megawatts of peak demand are connected
to the Grid. "

Yesterday we hit 44776 per
(http://www.caiso.com/marketops/OASIS/moload/ISO_Load_20000802.pdf) although
the system status page reported an even higher number.



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sean Donelan [mailto:sean () donelan com]
> Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2000 5:09 PM
> To: nanog () merit edu
> Subject: California electric power on the ragged edge
>
>
>
> As you may remember in may the NERC, the National Electrical
> Reliablility Council issued a press release announcing that
> generation and transmission resources are expected to be
> adequate in most areas this summer.
>
> Today's New York Times has a story about the close call
> in California yesterday.  Available electrical capacity
> dropped near 3% reserve in the afternoon, leading to concern
> CAISO would need to declare a "stage three emergency" and
> begin controlled rolling blackouts across california.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/080300ca-power.html
>
> In June, PG&E used rolling blackouts around the San Francisco
> Bay area.