Rolling blackouts: More than 2,300 Merced residents without power

California imposed its first rolling blackouts Friday evening since the energy crisis in 2001, as a scorching heat wave exhausted electricity supplies. The blackouts struck tens of thousands of households and included parts of Merced.

The California Independent System Operator, which runs the state’s power grid, declared a Stage 3 emergency alert around 6:30 p.m., the first time that had happened since 2001.

In Merced, 2,344 customers were said to be affected Friday night. Power appeared to have been restored to those customers shortly before 9 p.m..

Spokeswoman Anne Gonzales said the grid managers were initially “shedding” about 500 megawatts of power, blacking out between 50,000 and 75,000 households. In all, the grid had to deliberately cut out about 1,000 megawatts of demand to keep the entire system from failing. That meant, according to the ISO’s calculations, as many as 150,000 homes and businesses were shut off at a time.

However, PG&E alone at 8 p.m. had at least 120,000 homes and businesses in its territory without power due to the statewide emergency, according to the company’s outage logs.

The utility said the blackouts would generally last about an hour, and as many as 250,000 could be affected. But at 9 p.m., the statewide grid operator lifted the Stage 3 Alert, meaning no more rolling blackouts were being ordered, and power would be restored. PG&E officials said full restoration came by 11 p.m.

Among those areas that lost power were about 55,000 households in El Dorado County, in the foothills east of Sacramento. Residents there said the outage — coupled with the very high temperatures and ongoing coronavirus closures — made life difficult.

Scott Walker, 55, of El Dorado Hills said his air conditioning was broken, but he was able to keep the lights on with a generator purchased after the area suffered deliberate outages by PG&E last year for wildfire danger.

The heat in his town, about 20 miles east of Sacramento, has been “a little rough, but it’s been manageable.”

“If I didn’t have the generator it would be rough,” he said. “All of that piled on top, I’m just waiting for zombies or meteors or something. It’s a lot.”

In the Bay Area, tens of thousands of customers also went without power for an hour or more — in places like San Mateo, San Francisco, Marin County and East Bay cities including Berkeley and Vallejo.

In Merced, 2,344 customers were said to be affected Friday night. Power appeared to have been restored to those customers shortly before 9 p.m..

Also, San Diego Gas & Electric reported that at least 14,000 of its households lost power due to the rolling blackouts. Southern California Edison, which serves customers around Los Angeles, the Inland Empire and Orange County, said at least 132,000 of its customers were affected by the emergency.

Spared from the blackouts were government-run utilities like the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, Los Angeles’ city-run Department of Water and Power, and Modesto and Turlock irrigation districts. They aren’t part of the collective that buys power through the ISO and generate most of their own electricity.

In all, the blackouts were the largest in the state since the massive “public safety power shutoffs” imposed by PG&E last October, when fierce winds increased wildfire risks. Those shutoffs blacked out hundreds of thousands of customers for several days at a time.

Californians apparently will have the weekend to recover. The ISO said it believes it will have enough power to avoid outages Saturday and Sunday.

“We don’t anticipate any emergency declarations,” Gonzales told The Sacramento Bee on Saturday.

However, she said “conditions remain challenging” and the demand for electricity is expected to rise again Monday and Tuesday.

High temperatures across the Central Valley this weekend were expected at 105 and higher, with the thermometer predicted to reach 110 in Sacramento and other Valley locations on Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service.

“Every time the temperature goes up a degree or two, it affects the grid,” Gonzales said.

Gonzales said it could have been worse, except that neighboring grid systems — from within the state and from other states — were able to deliver more than 800 megawatts of “emergency assistance” to the ISO. If not for that 11th-hour aid, tens of thousands of additional customers would have been taken offline.

The ISO said demand Saturday was expected to peak at more than 46,000 megawatts, sometime around 5:30 p.m. The expected peak demand Sunday, when it’s supposed to be a couple of degrees cooler, is 44,000 megawatts.

ISO officials acknowledged that forecasting has become trickier because of office shutdowns during the pandemic. Gonzales said the agency believes Friday night’s outages were strictly a matter of excessive heat.

California has added a slew of new power generation since the energy crisis, including renewable energy sources, but the system was quickly overwhelmed by a heat wave that’s expected to extend into next week and top 110 degrees in the Sacramento Valley.

The state endured several days of rolling blackouts in spring 2001. Part of the reason was genuine shortages in electricity. But investigators later discovered that the blackouts were also the result of unscrupulous energy traders from companies like Enron “gaming” a badly-flawed grid system and deliberately withholding electricity from California to extort higher prices.

This story was originally published August 14, 2020 at 8:34 PM with the headline "Rolling blackouts: More than 2,300 Merced residents without power."