In California, Thank God It's Friday

For California, a three-day holiday weekend couldn't possibly come at a better time. After yesterday's near power outages and Stage 3 alert (when the electricity reserves fell below 1.5 percent of demand), the Martin Luther King break might give the Golden State's overloaded power grid some much-needed time to cool off. Yesterday was just about as bad as it could get without going dark; a number of power plants were down for planned, necessary winter maintenance and a storm seriously crippled the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant on the central coast, knocking out a good portion of the state's dwindling supply of electricity. Only last-minute intervention by the state, which purchased emergency power from the Northwest, averted rolling blackouts.

Today, at least so far, looks a little better. While California's electricity system remains in a precarious position, most observers are cautiously optimistic that the lights will stay on over the weekend. Many of the plants that were down for repairs are going back online. The weather, while still bad, shouldn't be as rough as Thursday's torrential storms, and Diablo Canyon is already up and running to full capacity. Also, now that Energy Secretary Bill Richardson has extended the emergency order requiring generators to sell power to the strapped California market until next Wednesday, suppliers won't be able to turn off the spigot, no matter how debt-ridden the state's ailing utilities are. Fridays are typically the least demanding of weekdays, as people leave work early. And after all the near misses, pleas for Californians to conserve electricity finally seem to be working; on Thursday, the state saved almost 2000 megawatts, enough to power 2 million homes.

The real test will come later this afternoon, from around 4 to 7 p.m. Pacific Coast Time, the typical peak demand during the winter. If the state can manage that period — and it already did OK during this morning's peak —things should be fine. But everyone cautions that in this tight a market, one problem — like another plant unexpectedly going down — could throw everything else out the window. Still, by 2 p.m. on the West Coast today, state officials were hoping to have a "boring weekend." Of course, with the state still scrambling to get more power plants built and keep its utilities from going bankrupt, and summer just a few months away, California's energy crisis promises to be anything but dull.