Outage Raises Concerns About Energy Demand

As Orange County recuperated Sunday from the massive power failure that struck most of the western United States, federal officials called an emergency meeting for today to determine if the region’s energy grid has been overwhelmed by burgeoning demand.

The outage Saturday, the second in six weeks, cut power to 500,000 in Orange County and 3.5 million from Canada to Mexico. Officials said the blackout may have been caused by an unusually high demand and heat-bloated transmission lines outside a tiny town near the Oregon border that sagged into trees and set off a cascade of power shutdowns.

By Sunday, power had been restored in nearly all the affected areas, but normalcy was harder to regain.

Already frazzled nerves in Garden Grove and Lake Forest were tested again Sunday by minor outages that may have been related to Saturday’s blowout, a Southern California Edison official said.

In Garden Grove, about 12 homes lost electricity from 8 to 10 a.m. due to “failed underground equipment,” said Edison spokesman Ken Perry. And in Lake Forest, 30 to 40 customers lost power for 10 hours--from 4 a.m. to 2 p.m.--because of a blown transformer.

“We are investigating to determine the cause,” Perry said, noting that such outages are not uncommon.

The blackout, which caused traffic lights to go on the blink, timed sprinklers to whirl into action at the wrong hours and ATM scanners at gas pumps to remain inoperable in some areas, nonetheless brought reassurance to local leaders that police and fire agencies could perform well in such emergencies.

Capt. Scott Brown of the Orange County Fire Authority said firefighters across the county jumped into what is a well-rehearsed emergency response mode, distracted slightly by a slew of 911 calls from residents.

Brown said the fire authority’s three divisions in 19 county cities treated the outage as if it were an earthquake.

“It really was an all-hands effort,” Brown said. “We had every position filled, and every phone line that could be manned was manned.”

But Saturday’s outage was still the topic of discussion Sunday.

Some business owners were bemoaning what the failure cost them on a Saturday night, for many the briskest night of the week.

David Carteni, manager of the Tutto Mare restaurant in Newport Beach’s Fashion Island, said: “We probably lost 50 to 70 [dinners], which means a couple of thousand dollars. I thought about closing if the power didn’t come back by 8 or 8:30.”

The Brea Mall was evacuated at about 4:15 p.m., shortly after the outage, except for Nordstrom, a department store that owns its building and remained open until 5:30. Typically, the mall remains open on Saturday until 7, said Don Ford, the Brea Mall general manager.

“We lost a good three hours of business on Saturday, which is a pretty busy day,” Ford said. “There was no power, no way to do any retail and it didn’t seem like it was coming back on any time soon. It seemed like the prudent thing to do, instead of having people wander aimlessly. . . . Safety was a definite concern.”

Remarkably, most cities reported no serious or lingering problems other than jangled nerves and traffic jams caused by dead signals. But the failure served as a reminder that emergency preparedness can never be overstated.

“It shows we are incredibly dependent, particularly on things like stop lights,” said Frank Benest, the city manager of Brea and president of the county’s association of city managers.

Helen Wilson, mayor pro tem of Lake Forest, characterized Saturday’s outage as a wake-up call for the complacent: “Whenever something like this happens it just reminds us how we take power and electricity for granted. This was probably a good lesson for people.”

Western utility officials said that power failures such as the one Saturday are extraordinarily rare, and that it was a sign of the efficacy of their contingency plans that power was up and running within hours in most spots.

But as recently as July 2, another brief but widespread outage knocked out electricity to 2 million customers in 14 states. The cause, according to an Aug. 2 report, was strikingly similar to Saturday’s snafu: a tree in Idaho that fell on a power line.

In that report to President Clinton, the U.S. Department of Energy said that in the Western states, the specific equipment failures and deficiencies that contributed to the July 2 outage had been dealt with and probably wouldn’t cause such a problem again.

“These corrective actions have substantially reduced the possibility that a similar sequence of events could occur in the region,” the report said.

Eight days after the report was released, one of the largest outages on record occurred. On Sunday, officials questioned whether the back-to-back emergencies were a sign that the demand for power in the West may be overtaxing the delivery system.

Customer demand in the region has increased 20% in the past 10 years, said Dennis Eyre, executive director of the Western Systems Coordinating Council, an industry group formed to promote reliable electrical service.

Eyre said that utilities have addressed that demand by setting up a system of regional power grids that allow cities to swap electricity during times of peak demand. But it was during such a transfer that the outage occurred, and Eyre predicted that the antidote to a repeat of Saturday’s shutdown might mean a limit on the amount of power that can be transferred from state to state--a constraint that probably would translate into higher electrical bills.

Other officials called for similarly expensive improvements in the grid’s contingency mechanisms.

“We may need a greater backup system. Situations that were once freak may be becoming more common,” said Dulcy Mahar, a spokeswoman for the Oregon-based Bonneville Power Administration, which operates a section of the region’s grid.

Eyre, whose members were to meet with the energy department today, said the group will review the recent outage, and make sure that utilities are doing what is needed to address the issues.

The gigantic and complex power grid that delivers California’s electricity is fed by utilities as far afield as Utah and Oregon. When the Northridge earthquake hit in 1994, power flickered in neighborhoods as far away as Alberta, Canada.

The system is designed to help avert crises like the New York City blackout of 1965, when massive demand for power during a heat wave darkened the Eastern Seaboard for 13 chaotic hours. The grid allows local utilities to share power during periods of peak use, so that Southern California, for instance, can draw on cheap electricity from the Pacific Northwest for air-conditioning during the dog days of August and Seattle can pull power from Phoenix to ward off the winter chill.

It was, in fact, on that energy pipeline to the Pacific Northwest--known as the Pacific Intertie--that Saturday’s outage originated, officials said. Apparently, a heat wave in Malin, Ore. (population 539) expanded the power lines north of town, causing about half a dozen lines to sag into trees and shut themselves off, said Bonneville’s Mahar.

That contact, Mahar said, triggered a chain reaction of automatic switch-offs and oscillating surges of energy that ultimately shut down all four of the main power arteries between California and the Pacific Northwest.

If only one or two of those arteries had shut down, Eyre said, Californians probably would not have experienced even a flicker in their electricity. But when all four went out, utility officials said, thousands of megawatts of electricity--enough to power Seattle four times over--effectively disappeared.

Eyre and other utility officials said the contingency plan for such sudden power drops is to divide the areas served by the Western utility grid into “islands” so that the whole region won’t be blacked out.

The “islands” then ration what electricity they can muster among their customers until power from outside sources can be brought in. On Saturday, that meant a patchwork of power outages that hopscotched the Western states for most of the afternoon and evening.

Some utilities were up and running in very short order. Southern California Edison, for instance, lost about half of its 11,500-megawatt energy load, but was able to fire up emergency “peaker units” and out-of-service generators, and restored power to all but about 100 of its customers within a few hours, spokesman Ken Perry said.

By Sunday morning, Edison had a surplus of energy and was funneling it to other utilities.

The huge Pacific Gas & Electric, which serves about 4.5 million customers in Northern and Central California, took a bit longer to come back up to speed. As of Sunday afternoon, about 1,000 of the 2 million customers who lost power were still waiting for it to be restored, spokesman Leonard Anderson said.

Mahar of the Bonneville Power Administration said her utility was concerned about “the challenges of growth” to the Western utility grid as a growing number of customers caused more power to be pumped through the system.

This seems to have become an issue on hot days when demand is particularly high, she said.

“We are seeing new operating conditions when temperatures rise, when there is so much power running through the system,” Mahar said.

V. John White, executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies, a nonprofit energy policy research and advocacy group, agreed with Mahar, but added that utilities were exacerbating the problem by not paying enough attention to their infrastructure.

Instead, he said, utilities have allowed themselves to become preoccupied with deregulation and the recent frenzy of mergers in their industry, White said.

“As you deregulate, the traditional boundaries are beginning to crumble,” he said. “Whose job is it to assure reliability, and to plan for the system to be reliable?”

Times staff writer David Haldane in Orange County, and Times correspondent Dade Hayes in Chatsworth contributed to this report.