It appears that SCE has been seriously degrading voltage in an attempt to keep most of us in SoCal happy, but some of the datacenters have already leaned into generator power due to low voltage (10% down). It ain't pretty. There was some brown outs occuring in the San Fernando Valley that I noticed weren't highly publicized. We've powered down the unnecessaries in our datacenter to minimize impact and have defined plans to further power down secondary power supplies *when* (as in not *if*) the rolls hit so that we can extend what our Lieberts can deliver. LA and the Coachella valley are just starting to hit the triple digits on the thermometer, so by the end of August and throughout September when we regularly his 105 - 120 F, the rolling blackouts are highly likely to be a reality. Refer to http://www.caiso.com/awe/systemstatus.html or simply http://www.caiso.com. Note that on http://www.caiso.com/thegrid/ they state: "Power plants meeting up to 45,000 megawatts of peak demand are connected to the Grid. " Yesterday we hit 44776 per (http://www.caiso.com/marketops/OASIS/moload/ISO_Load_20000802.pdf) although the system status page reported an even higher number.

-----Original Message----- From: Sean Donelan [mailto:sean@donelan.com] Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2000 5:09 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: California electric power on the ragged edge

As you may remember in may the NERC, the National Electrical Reliablility Council issued a press release announcing that generation and transmission resources are expected to be adequate in most areas this summer.

Today's New York Times has a story about the close call in California yesterday. Available electrical capacity dropped near 3% reserve in the afternoon, leading to concern CAISO would need to declare a "stage three emergency" and begin controlled rolling blackouts across california.

http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/080300ca-power.html

In June, PG&E used rolling blackouts around the San Francisco Bay area.