Blackout shows need for power plant

Monday’s power outage would not have been so extensive for Glendale

and Burbank had a new Magnolia Power Plant been up and running, power

officials said.

Although the outage lasted less than two hours and originated in

Los Angeles, it still showed the effects of the delay in getting the

$230-million state-of-the-art plant commercially operational, Burbank

Water and Power General Manager Ron Davis said.

“The impact would have been a lot less,” Glendale Electrical

Services Administrator Ramon Abueg said. “We still would have seen

some loss but not as extensive.”

The Magnolia Power Plant is a joint project between Burbank,

Glendale, Pasadena, Anaheim, Cerritos, Colton and the Southern

California Public Power Authority to provide reliable and cleaner

power to residents.

The facility, with its blue, soaring 150-foot exhaust stack,

employs a combined cycle technology in which heat produced by one

turbine is used to power a second generator, increasing the plant’s

efficiency.

The Magnolia plant would have carried the power load the city

needed to keep operating, Davis said.

“The operators of the system in Burbank and Glendale would have

had to collaborate to isolate it quickly from the Los Angeles grid

and then balance the load,” he said.

The 310-megawatt natural gas-fired plant is set to go online for

commercial use on Sept. 22, more than three months after it was

dedicated, to much fanfare by the leaders of the six cities that will

receive its power.

Monday’s power outage hit nearly 2 million people in Los Angeles

and the San Fernando Valley, including Burbank and Glendale. A Los

Angeles Department of Water and Power employee accidentally cut wires

at a receiving station in North Hollywood causing of the outage.

Glendale had three of its eight generators working at the time of

the outage, which is why the entire city did not lose power, Abueg

said.

“We had to match generation with the load,” Abueg said. “We have

to match those two to keep the lights on.”

Burbank was using 170 megawatts of power at the time of the

outage. Two city-owned generators contributed 69 megawatts with the

balance coming from outside sources delivered to the city through the

receiving station where the outage originated and from Glendale,

Burbank Water and Power Assistant General Manager Greg Simay said.

Had the Magnolia plant been operating, the city would not have

been importing power from outside sources, Simay said.

“That power would have allowed us to avoid an outage,” Simay said.

As the first utility to use the new General Electric Co.-made

turbine, the department is having to work out the bugs and deal with

a troublesome turning gear that wasn’t meshing with gears on the

steam turbine.

GE has been providing substitute turning gear assemblies

free-of-charge to keep the plant working, Davis said.