Expansionary Institute

Michael Zey
futurist3000@aol.com

By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK

SEDRO WOOLLEY, Wash., Dec. 14   Power flows south in the summer and
north in the winter. For years, that has been a cardinal rule in
the vast interlocking grid that distributes electricity across the
Western United States.

The rule makes perfect sense: the peak demand season for power in
California and the Southwest comes in summer, while demand hits a
high point in winter here in the Northwest, where nearly half of
all homes are heated with electricity.

But as California searches desperately outside the state for
electricity, one half of that basic rule has been abruptly
rewritten. This week, federal energy officials took the unusual
step of ordering suppliers in the Northwest to send emergency
electricity to California, where regulators say the state is at the
brink of a breakdown in its power system.

And because California's demands are likely to continue in coming
weeks, there are strong signs that power problems are spreading
across the West. Elected officials and energy executives are
worrying aloud about possible electricity shortages and
skyrocketing rates for consumers, as well as the environmental
problems that could arise from the intense pressure to change the
normal schedules for drawing down the water behind the huge network
of hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest.

Those problems are already compounded by abnormally low rainfall
this autumn: here along the icy Skagit River, for instance, low
water levels in the Skagit and two dam reservoirs recently left
thousands of salmon eggs exposed and many more threatened,
precisely at the time the region is facing increasingly stringent
mandates under the Endangered Species Act to protect the fish.

In addition to those immediate concerns, the relatively good
relations among Western states on power issues could also become a
casualty of the emergency. Up until now, those states have shared
supplies of electricity with few problems, as evidenced by the
two-way transmission cycle that has routinely occurred in the past.
But some finger-pointing has already begun.

"We are really at risk of having the state of California and its
energy problems drag the rest of us down with it," Gov. John
Kitzhaber of Oregon said today in calling for an energy summit
meeting to work out the problems.

The governor, a Democrat, blamed California's "failed deregulation
experiment" for the shortages.

"Events are happening so fast they're running over us," Mr.
Kitzhaber said. "We're really in a reactive mode, and obviously the
big dog on the block is California."

After decades of state-governed pricing, California decided to
deregulate its power industry four years ago in a bold step that
advocates said would soon deliver cheaper, cleaner and more
efficient power across the state by allowing the marketplace to set
rates. At the time, reserves were often as high as 30 percent.

But while proponents of deregulation still say it will work in the
long run, the state is by all accounts in a crunch these days, with
shortages, soaring rates and widespread concerns that the crisis
has been manufactured in some way to drive up the profits in
selling electricity.

About one-fourth of California's generating capacity has been
offline at times in recent weeks, prompting criticisms and calls
for an investigation by consumer advocates. Industry officials say
that many of the plants are in dire need of repair or regular
maintenance after going full tilt to meet the record demands of
last summer.

Whatever the reasons, the result has been pressure on other
states, especially those in the Northwest, to deliver power south
at precisely the time they would normally be looking to buy extra
supplies to meet higher demand here.

It is not yet officially winter, but officials warn that a
prolonged period of frigid temperatures could push supplies to a
danger point. California has hovered at the edge of a genuine
crisis in recent days, a so-called Stage 3 alert, in which
electricity reserves fall to less than 1.5 percent of total supply
and the authorities can order rolling blackouts to cope with the
problem.

At a minimum, the problems in California have frayed relations
among power suppliers in the West.

"I'd liken it to strains on a pretty good marriage," explained Bob
Royer, director of communications for Seattle City Light, the
public utility serving that city. "The power system has been
mutually beneficial in a big way. But it's no longer mutually
beneficial."

The problems could worsen on several fronts.

One is the straightforward issue of meeting demand, though some
here in the Northwest find it a bit perplexing that questions about
how to do so are even being asked. The network of hydroelectric
dams long gave the region a cheap and seemingly inexhaustible
supply of power.

But population growth and the out- of-state demands have caught up
with the network. And those who operate the dams must also maintain
a keen awareness of environmental considerations, especially the
best flow rates in the rivers for salmon. Many species of salmon
are now listed under the Endangered Species Act because of the very
existence of the dams.

"When you drop more water than usual out of those reservoirs now,
you have to hope you'll have sufficient rainfall and snowfall to
meet your flow requirements next spring and summer," said John
Harrison, a spokesman for the Northwest Power Planning Council,
which represents the governors of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and
Montana and seeks to balance energy planning with environmental
concerns. "That's simply the $64,000 question. You don't know with
sufficient precision what the weather will do."

In any event, he said: "The system remains stressed. There's no
question about that."

Even in the best of times, the procedures for allocating power out
of the Northwest dam system are complex. Under normal regulations,
which take into account the average precipitation figures for past
years, the reservoirs must be drawn down in such a way that there
is at least an 85 percent probability that there will be enough
water the following spring to meet the optimum flow requirements
for salmon to spawn and for their eggs to yield fish.

"So when you have to run the system a little harder than you'd
planned, which is what we've been asked to do, you may lower that
probability," said Mike Hansen, a communications official with the
Bonneville Power Administration, which sells power from more than
two dozen dams in the region and was among those suppliers ordered
by the federal energy secretary, Bill Richardson, to sell power to
California this week.

"And if we have to do that too much," Mr. Hansen said, "you could
have real consequences in the future, in terms of our ability to
produce power later in the winter or meet the fish flows in the
spring."

Under this week's arrangement, Bonneville arranged to ship 1,750
megawatts of power, about enough to meet the demands of a city
one-and- a-half times the size of Seattle, at peak demand hours in
California. Officials there said the power was critical to help
them avoid a Stage 3 emergency, and have pledged to return power
during off-peak periods.

Secretary Richardson said his order was necessary. "We must act,"
he said in a statement, "to ensure there will be a sufficient
supply of electricity to keep the power flowing to homes and
businesses in California."

But by any measure, the exchange is unusual, and if a prolonged
cold snap hits here, Northwest energy officials say it may be
extremely difficult to replicate the aid.

The two regions can exchange power through a set of large
transmission lines, known as the intertie, that stretch from the
Dalles Dam on the Columbia River in Oregon to the Los Angeles area.
The intertie can send as much as 6,900 megawatts in either
direction, according to the Northwest Power Planning Council.

Both Governor Kitzhaber in Oregon and Gov. Gary Locke of
Washington, a Democrat, have urged their residents to conserve
energy and implored the federal government to impose a cap on the
price of wholesale electricity. Several California utilities have
warned that they face severe financial problems because of the
increase in electricity prices, and those economic forces have
clearly already spread north.

Earlier this month, Tacoma Power, the utility serving Seattle's
neighbor, said zooming wholesale prices and low reservoir levels at
its dams could lead it to seek an 86 percent surcharge for
residential customers and even larger ones for businesses. A
federal cap could reduce those proposed charges. And in Oregon,
Portland General Electric has asked the state's Public Utility
Commission for permission to raise electricity bills at least 13
percent.

With the demands on the system coming during a period of such low
rainfall, the complexities are on stark display here on the Skagit
River. When Bill McMillan, a field biologist with Washington Trout,
a conservation organization, went out to fish for steelhead on
Thanksgiving morning, he was stunned to see just how low the river
had dropped in a one-day period, he said.

Mr. McMillan blamed Puget Sound Energy, the company that operates
two dams on the nearby Baker River, which feeds into the Skagit,
for abruptly stopping the flow out of the dams in order to raise
the level of its reservoirs.

"They cut the umbilical cord on all these fish," said Mr.
McMillan, who has put down stakes with pink ribbons to mark the
dozens of salmon egg nests, known as redds, that were exposed. The
company says the drop in the river level was an unavoidable result
of the low rainfall this autumn and planned maintenance at the dam.


State officials, working with Puget Sound Energy and the Seattle
City Light, which operates dams upriver on the Skagit, say they are
trying to restore enough of the flow to help the fertilized salmon
eggs survive through the coming months.

But depending on how much rain and snow there is in coming months,
even the process of adding water to the river to help fish could
complicate the similar efforts that will be required in the spring
when other species of salmon come to spawn.

"You could do that," said David E. Pflug, senior fisheries
biologist with Seattle City Light. "But you'd be borrowing from
next year."