On Thu, 03 August 2000, Karyn Ulriksen wrote:

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.

I wonder if CAISO is smart-enough to do this on purpose. If you drop the voltage 15% for 5 seconds you could coerce several datacenters off the grid onto backup generators. Its possible CAISO could free up several megawatts of power for 30 minutes or so, depending on the size of the datacenters in the area. But most people wouldn't notice the brief brownout, and I've noticed utilities don't seem to track events less than 5 seconds in length. It would be nicer if they called and asked.