A craving to stay cool challenges power grid anew

Each time the temperatures rise, so do Californians’ fears.

With the state’s first heat wave of the year, California’s power grid operators warned residents to conserve energy or face rolling blackouts as the state did in 2000 and 2001.


“There’s a number of factors that have already happened or could happen that could cause us to do rolling outages,” said Jim McIntosh, director of grid operations for the California Independent System Operator, which runs the statewide energy grid.

McIntosh’s concerns are three-fold: The state, which gets nearly 20 percent of its power from large hydroelectric pumps, lacks water because of the drought. Already, large hydro dams are producing 2,000 megawatts less a day than last year – enough to power at least 1.5 million homes – and that may get worse by the end of the summer.

Mercury News