California escaped another round of rolling blackouts Saturday, amid the start of a broiling heat wave expected to last through the Labor Day weekend. But about 15,0000 San Diego Gas & Electric customers went to bed without power for reasons the utility was still trying to determine.
The California Independent System Operator, which oversees the grid for about 80 percent of the state, lifted a Stage 2 Emergency it had issued at 6:30 p.m. A Stage 2 Emergency is just one step below a Stage 3 Emergency, in which rotating outages are triggered in order to make sure that electricity demand does not exceed available supplies.
“No outages tonight,” the grid operator said on its Twitter page shortly after 9 p.m. “Thank you for doing your part!”
Earlier in the evening, things were looking shaky after CAISO officials said about 1,600 megawatts of generation had been lost due to a combination of hot weather, increased demand loads and fires scattered across the Golden State. The grid operator called on household utility customers to cut back on their energy use to help prevent blackouts that hit the state in mid-August amid a similar heat wave.
But unrelated to the CAISO’s issues, some 15,088 SDG&E customers across the country experienced outages in locations dotting the county.
An SDG&E spokeswoman said about 1,000 customers lost electricity because a fast-moving brush fire in East County impacted the utility’s equipment. Dubbed the Valley fire, the blaze burned 1,500 acres by early evening, threatened homes and forced evacuations in Japatul Valley and Lawson Valley.
But many more customers had their lights go out in areas not affected by the Valley fire. Neighborhoods such as City Heights and Golden Hill reported outages, as did inland areas locales like El Cajon and La Mesa that were sweating under triple-digit temperatures.
Past nightfall, SDG&E officials were still assessing what led to the shutoffs, saying that “some are weather related.”
According to the utility’s outage map, some areas lost power around 2 p.m. and the outages then spread to other areas for the next four hours.
By 9 p.m., the outage map recorded 27 circuits out of commission. Some of the downed lines were not expected to come back into service until Sunday morning.
For example, a circuit in Lemon Grove that went down at 5:07 p.m., affecting 1,368 customers, was estimated to stay inactive until 7 a.m. Sunday.
The downed circuit with most affected customers — 1,896 — covered an area that included University Heights, North Park and Normal Heights. That circuit was also expected to remain out of commission until 7 a.m.
The broiling wave of heat that hit San Diego and virtually all of California on Saturday is expected to last through Monday, putting the grid under stress as customers crank up their air conditioners. Saturday marked the first of three days of Flex Alerts ordered by the CAISO.
Under a Flex Alert, customers are asked to voluntarily reduce their electricity consumption to ensure the power demand does not outstrip supplies. The current Flex Alert runs through Monday from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. — the critical hours in which solar production ramps down rapidly as the sun sets and grid operators must find other energy sources to replace it.
Back on Aug. 14 and 15, the CAISO issued a Stage 3 Emergency, leading to rotating outages across the state for the first time since 2001. It affected about 400,000 customers the first day and about 200,000 the next.
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California averts rolling blackouts Saturday but 15,000 SDG&E customers left without power - The San Diego Union-Tribune
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