The New Energy Crunch

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With power from the Pacific Northwest slowed to a trickle, Northern California was further squeezed by bottlenecks in crucial supply lines--known as Path 15--that run through the state's Central Valley. The constraint--described by one expert as an "L.A.-freeway-type logjam"--placed the northern half of the state in a vise that made blackouts virtually inevitable. "We had some spare capacity, and we offered everything we had in the morning," says S. David Freeman, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, a municipal utility that opted out of the statewide deregulation scheme. "But we couldn't get all our power up there, so we could only offer limited help at first."

For Fluckiger, managing a rolling blackout calls for a jockey's nerves and instincts. The trouble starts when power supplies threaten to dip below the grid's projected hourly needs, which are arrayed on a bank of computers. Weather is typically the main factor. "A degree or two," Fluckiger says, "can make all the difference." And since supply and demand can shift rapidly, Fluckiger and his managers may have just moments to clinch a deal or notify utilities that they must cut their power. The companies then decide which areas to black out and use radio and TV to give their customers a 10- to 15-min. warning. When shortages persist for more than an hour, the utilities darken another area.

While all that may sound surgically precise, the results were naturally disquieting. At the San Francisco Zoo last week, members of the staff had to rush 150 cichlids--an endangered species of fish from Madagascar--to the warmth of the zoo hospital, lest they perish in chilling water. At the same time, seven West African gorillas found themselves trapped for 90 min. in their night quarters when the outage made it impossible to open the hydraulic doors of their cage. If the apes were irate, some San Franciscans may have been even more irascible. "I'm angry not just with the [utility] company but with the politicians who started all this," says Lawrence Mitchell, who feared for the inventory inside his darkened ice cream parlor. "I don't know what they were thinking." The crisis caused shutdowns and layoffs across the state. A Miller brewery near Los Angeles, which was spared blackouts, nonetheless shifted its production to Texas because of uncertainties about power.

The crisis showed no signs of easing last week. Wilson thinks that Governor Davis should use emergency powers to suspend tortuous regulations and start building plants pronto. And the ex-Governor calls for temporary power sources, perhaps sited on barges, to be rushed into service. Failing that, California's 34 million residents may soon hear calls for conservation reminiscent of the energy crises of the 1970s. "People go into their houses and turn on seven light bulbs, five computers, three TVs, and they're cooking dinner while the clothes dryer is running," Fluckiger says, with just a touch of exaggeration. "If they waited until after 8 p.m. to use some of those things and turned off some lights and a TV, it would have a major impact."

So would a less convoluted approach to deregulating an essential public service. But as Californians adjust their thermostats and turn off those lights burning in the basement, the lesson to the rest of the U.S. last week was pretty basic: a marketplace that is only partly free is a prescription for complete disaster.