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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical RE: California power - its cold, its dark
Thanks for the links guys. Now, here's the summary. 1) California power load is still 10,000 MW below peak delivery of last Summer. 2) Slightly over 1/3 of the generation plants are down for "maintenance". 3) There was an unplanned 500 KW outage, which was compensated for by shuting down the pumps of the California Aquaduct sytem temporarily. 1) Blame is being placed on the early and extra cold winter. However, a quick perusal of the Farmers Almanac shows that this is expected and no surprise, or shouldn't be. 2) The REAL blame probably rests on the head of the yahoo that allowed so many plants to go on scheduled maintenance at the same time. 3) Shutting down the aquaduct is real bad. Some of Bill Mullholland's design depends on siphon effect and if the siphon breaks it takes weeks of massive power usage in order to resore it. Ergo, they can't shut it down too long or it'll cost too much power to bring it back up. Leaving it down isn't an option, too many people depend on that water. It's looking more like a management screw-up and more people are begining to realize it. The deregulators were so busy deregulating that future usage planning was foregone. Forcing the local utilities to sell off their generators may not have been very smart either. Current power capacity scheduling was also bungled. The timing can only be either gross incompetance or Machiavallien cunning. Thank you all for the additional links. I was actually researching this since a few days ago. Some of us are preparing grounds for suit, independently, in the event that they start long rolling black-outs. We have six-hours worth of bats, so we should be okay. But, our clients don't. > -----Original Message----- > From: Nathan Stratton [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2000 7:47 PM > To: Sean Donelan > Cc: [email protected] > Subject: Re: California power - its cold, its dark > > > > On 7 Dec 2000, Sean Donelan wrote: > > > Approximately one-third of California's power generating capacitiy > > is off-line. The California system operator has called a "stage 3" > > power alert, requiring *interruptiable* customers be interrupted > > until 10pm tonight. They are not instituting rotating blackouts > > of other customers at this time. > > Any word on the cause of the outage, did several reactors scram at the > same time or is this a transmission issue? > > ><> > Nathan Stratton CTO, Exario > Networks, Inc. > [email protected] [email protected] > http://www.robotics.net http://www.exario.net > >
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