[32729] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: California power - its cold, its dark
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Roeland Meyer)
Thu Dec 7 23:53:00 2000
Message-ID: <9DC8BBAD4FF100408FC7D18D1F0922869AA4@condor.mhsc.com>
From: Roeland Meyer <rmeyer@mhsc.com>
To: 'Nathan Stratton' <nathan@robotics.net>,
Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
Date: Thu, 7 Dec 2000 20:47:24 -0800
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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:nathan@robotics.net]
> Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2000 7:47 PM
> To: Sean Donelan
> Cc: nanog@merit.edu
> 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.
> nathan@robotics.net nathan@exario.net
> http://www.robotics.net http://www.exario.net
>
>
