May 17, 2002 15:38
California Energy Officials Doubt Enron Had Role in Blackout
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San Jose Mercury News, Calif.
May 17--State energy officials said Thursday that they would look into a report that blamed Enron trickery for a 2000 blackout, but emphasized that the Bay Area's weak transmission lines were the primary cause.
CBS MarketWatch quoted former Enron energy traders as saying they had created a kind of power traffic jam on the state's high-voltage lines -- causing 97,000 people to lose electricity on that 100-degree day June 14.
The traders said they purposely clogged a 112-mile-long, high-voltage line known as Path 26 to force the state to pay Enron extra to free up the line. But the article said the congestion also prevented power from reaching Northern California to avert the blackout.
"These robber barons purposely put people and businesses in the dark to pad their own wallets," Gov. Gray Davis said in response to the report. "They put human lives at risk for the sake of profit." Davis hopes to use such allegations to convince federal officials that the state was hoodwinked by power suppliers and should be refunded billions of dollars for the high-priced electricity it was forced to buy as a result.
Enron official Karen Denne declined to comment. But others familiar with the June 14, 2000, blackout said it couldn't have been caused by manipulating Path 26, which connects the power grids of Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and Southern California Edison.
Jim McIntosh, director of grid operations for the California Independent System Operator, which manages the flow of power across the state, said the problems that day initially were caused by record temperatures, which caused demand for power to soar. On top of that, he said, several key Bay Area electricity plants, which normally power homes and businesses, failed.
That forced state officials to attempt to pump more power into the Bay Area from other sources. But despite the CBS report's contention, he added, there was no problem getting power from Southern California to Northern California that day. The real problem, he said, was an inability to ship it the final few miles to Bay Area customers, because some transmission lines here couldn't carry that much juice.
Enron traders "may have been playing those games that they referred to in this article and made money" on their deals, "but it had nothing to do with grid reliability" in Northern California on June 14, 2000, McIntosh said.
Nonetheless, ISO official Stephanie McCorkle said the agency would look into the possibility that other Enron trading that day might have played a role in the blackout. "We plan on taking a look at all that," she said.
PG&E official John Nelson was also skeptical of the report.
"It was not a shortage of power" from Southern California that caused the blackouts, he said. "If what they are alleging is that they caused a traffic jam in Southern California, that wouldn't have had the impact June 14." Creating congestion on certain high-voltage lines to make a bigger profit from their electricity was one of a number of schemes alleged in leaked Enron memos that were the subject of congressional hearings this week.
Federal officials investigating whether Enron manipulated California's energy market declined to comment on the CBS MarketWatch report. But David Sandretti, a press officer for Sen.
Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said Boxer's office "is open to pursuing every possible lead to get to the bottom of this, to find out what happened and how it happened."
By Steve Johnson and Jim Puzzanghera
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