It Doesn't Take A Crystal Ball To See Where This Is Going

Cassandra that I am, I'm going to make a prediction. The ignored problem that will hit us hard this summer won't be a terrorist attack or a hurricane. No, maybe during the week that Bush will be spending in Crawford (yeah, he's "cutting back" since he was for month long vacations before he was against them), there will be massive, essentially nation-wide, electrical blackouts. OK, you don't need to have a crystal ball to see this, but, THAT'S THE POINT! I don't want to hear Condi or Energy Secretary Bodman explaining in August that no one could have anticipated that the entire grid would go down. Not when, in my world, all the signs are flashing red. And we know that the odiously- and ironically-named Department of Homeland Security is completely not ready for this. People are already dying here and in Europe due to the heat and lack of electrons. More will die when the blackouts are larger.

Today's EEI newsletter tells the story:

In California, the world's seventh largest economy: Stage 2 Emergency Declared in California as Demand Soars

The California ISO declared a Stage 2 emergency Monday afternoon as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, R-Calif., and regulators called on state agencies and private businesses to reduce their usage to prevent blackouts, the Los Angeles Times reported today.

The Times reported that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and Southern California Edison "acknowledged Monday that their systems — parts of which were built in the 1920s and 1930s — were not designed to handle anywhere near the power demand produced during the heat wave." DWP General Manager Ron Deaton was quoted by the newspaper as saying: "When these transformers were installed, you had neighborhoods that weren't air-conditioned, homes without two computers and five television sets."

As of Monday afternoon, about 32,000 residents remained without power, though DWP officials said it hoped to restore all of it customers within the next 24 hours, the Times reported.

Southern California Edison spokesman Steven Conroy said the company already has had to replace more than 715 transformers, some due to the age of the equipment and some because of the stresses created by the power demand, the Times reported. The utilityÂ’s plan is to use money from a $9-billion infrastructure upgrade to replace transformers over the next five years.

In a news release, Ron Litzinger, SCE senior VP for transmission and distribution, said the heat wave is making it difficult to get help from other utilities: "We've issued a call to our neighboring utilities for help, but they're also coping with heat-storm conditions and have no personnel available to help us at this time. We are currently assessing the availability and response time of personnel from utilities in other states."

CAISO CEO Yakout Mansour said this heat wave is the worst since 1998 and has led to demand that was 40 percent higher than the peak of the Enron crisis, the Times reported. . . .

While experts agree that the state is in better shape with regards to its energy situation, most of the gains that have been made are being wiped out by surging demand, the Times reported. San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Gas President Debra Reed was quoted by the newspaper as saying: "The peaks that we're seeing now are way above the peaks that we were seeing during the energy crisis." Cooler temperatures were expected today.

In New York City, the nation's financial center:

ConEd Still Struggling to Resolve Queens Outage; Restore Power

Consolidated Edison officials believe the massive outage in Queens was caused when about half of the feeder cables that supplied the western portion on the borough failed, the New York Times reported today. Wrote the newspaper: "At a command center near Union Square in Manhattan, top managers at the utility had to choose: keep the power running and take the risk of causing more damage to the system, or shut down the network serving western and northern Queens, guaranteeing a wide blackout but one that could likely be resolved quickly."

UPI wrote: "Just why ConEd's other 56 distribution areas came through without problems while the Queens area crashed remained a mystery; however the localized nature of the problem seemed to raise the distinct possibility that it was a simple equipment failure somewhere in the vast labyrinth of underground cables and transformers." The utility expected the "vast majority" of customers to be back online by today.

In an analysis of the outage, UPI questioned whether the situation in Queens was a sign of things to come: "The big question - make that the multibillion-dollar question - to be illuminated by the pending ConEd report is whether or not the local grid in New York can still handle the growing amount of power consumers are demanding, and if not, are other major American cities about to hit the wall as well?" In comments, Elizabeth notes that parts of Pennsylvania are without power and haven't gotten national news.

In the Heartland:

Sen. Talent Seeks State, Federal Investigation of St. Louis Blackout

Sen. Jim Talent, R-Mo., called for a federal and state investigation of the causes of the St. Louis blackout to begin once Ameren finishes putting its consumers back online, the Associated Press reported. The investigation would cover Ameren as well as other parties, including local and state regulators.

Talent said the investigation should look into the reliability of Ameren's grid, its crisis management system, and its program for trimming trees near lines. The senator praised Ameren for its recovery efforts and said he did not believe the utility was unprepared for storms.

Utility VP for energy delivery Ron Zdellar said the sudden impact of storms last Wednesday gave Ameren practically no time to prepare for damage, and that it began its response 15 minutes after the storms.

And across the Atlantic, things are no better:

Heat Wave Raises Electricity Consumption to Record Levels in Europe

A heat wave across Europe has raised electricity consumption to record levels in Spain while France's EDF skirted environmental norms by discharging hot water from its nuclear plants to meet the demand, Agence France Presse reported.

According to AFP, the death toll this year from the heat wave in Europe was about 40. The governments of Poland and The Netherlands have also warned that this year the potato and cereal harvests would be lower by 20 percent to 30 percent compared to last year due to the continuing heat wave.

So here's what's happening. Global warming is making the planet too hot. In order to get relief from the heat, people are running their air conditioning and staying inside, which generally means that they're running electrical devices such as computers, tvs, video games, etc. That increased demand for electricity is straining a system that wasn't built to deliver that many electrons for that long a time. We're running out of the margin of error that was once provided for by the fact that a heat wave in NY generally didn't mean a heat wave in, say, Ohio or Canada and you could ship power from the cooler place to the isolated hot spot. Now, just about every single spot is a hot spot. The increased demand also means that utilities are now having to run all their generators, including the older, more expensive, and more polluting generators -- coal plants, for example, in addition to baseload nuclear plants. So we've got a viciousous circle: carbon emissions create global warming, which causes people to use more electricity, which causes more carbon emissions.

Another factor is that global warming, and the heat that it produces, have led to more intense weather patterns. Serious storms take down transmission lines and strand larger and larger populations without power.

But it's not going to go on indefinitely. Sometime this summer a transformer will blow at the same time that a transmission line in the next grid is down due to a storm. Or some power trader will decide that it's more profitable to simply default on a contract to provide electrons than it would be to try to cover his short position in the open market when prices are sky-high. The public utility that needed that power to keep the lights on won't have enough time to find the power somewhere else and a cascading blackout will take down grids from one part of the country to the next. However it happens, large portions of the national grid will go down at the same time.

Bush will read My Pet Goat and look scared. He'll send out Bodman or someone else to say that NO ONE could have possibly predicted that this would happen. Homeland Security will fiddle around and screw things up. Rush will go on the air and suggest that the people looting ice from closed grocery stores should be shot on site for living while being brown, or poor, or whatever. Hastert will blame Bill Clinton. The oil execs will say that if we'd only drilled in ANWR this would never have happened. Cheney and Senate Republicans will throw the Federal Power Act in the trash can and ask Dynergy and Reliant to write the new law. In secret. And Americans will begin to learn to get used to not having a steady, reliable source of electricity, which will stand them in good stead next summer when the problem will -- strangely enough -- be even worse.

And I will say, "I told you so."

A real leader would be doing something about this right now. Mandatory conservation measures. Strict limits on the use of, just for example, decorative and advertising lights. Early closings for government offices. A standing Section 202(c) order in place that requires power companies to sell power whenever the temperature reaches a certain level or power reserves dip below a certain level. Bringing home the national guard and training them to help out power companies to get lines back up after storms. Those would be good first steps to take right now. Of course, sensible population and energy policies are the only long-term answer, but there are things a real leader could and should do to get us through this summer. The twenty to thirty percent reduction in potato and cereal harvests due to global warming will have to be dealt with this winter and fall, as well.

I understand Bush cut his vacation short so he could do more fundraising.