http://eetd.lbl.gov/EMills/pubs/grid-disruptions.html

“The blogger (a self-admitted “amateur”) created a straw man argument by asserting that the chart was presented as evidence of global climate change and was not verified with the primary source. The blog’s errors have been propagated to other web sites without further fact checking or due diligence.”

Interestingly there is another issue here. Only half of the breaks can be explained in Finland. The FinnGrid contacted me in the Finnish Museum of Natural History to investigate a possible unknown biological cause of the breaks, insects or spiders etc. I got a big data set on the breaks with different parameters of the electric grid net. I tried to correlate the unexplained breaks with different kind of data (temperature, precipitation, moisture etc.). Suddenly I found a time related connection with the length of day. They increased towards May and decreased after summer in September. About half of the unexplained breaks could be reffered to this phenomenon. I don’t know what mechanism could work here.
One shortcoming with the data was that I did’t get the coordinates for breaks because that is obviously strategic data.

did you get an answer to your question?

So I asked him why the increased vulnerability of the grid was not mentioned in the caption under the graphic in the report. I would imagine that can be rather accurately quantified but then that might call into question the “tenfold increase” claim. Why wasn’t it done?

It’s not really much different than using Graybill’s bristlecone chronologies plus some multivariate hocus-pocus and thinking that you have a unique world thermometer.

Actually, there is a huge difference in that this new data originates, from utility engineers who are generally skeptical of the AGW hypothesis. This data is readily available and up to date.

In other news…

“Unidentified weather” refers to a negative impact on some piece of equipment that resulted from bad weather (caused by AGW) in some other location that was teleconnected to the location of the piece of equipment negatively impacted upon.

This is a huge advance in the field of equipment maintenance. Prior to this such negative impacts were ascribed to gremlins which was awkward because everyone knows that gremlins don’t exist.

I was all keen on describing how the incidence of transformer overheating could increase over the recent past, without an increase in ambient temperatures, but Steve petty much ruled that out so I will settle on this instead.

No one claims all the events were caused by global warming.

Why do we care about this?

Uh, a new 750mw gas-fired plant just opened in San Jose 18 months ago. Several others have also been built and opened since the mishandled attempt to deregulate in 2000. California is fortunate in that it gets a lot of hydro, some geothermal, some nuke, and the rest is gas-fired. Very little coal. It also gets a lot of sun, and there are several solar-thermal plants in planning and a couple in development.

Scott, it should be pointed out that two plants-the Calpin and Sunrise both closed in 2009. Calpin closed its 811 mw delta gas plant may 22 2009 which opened in 2002 in Pittsburg outside San Francisco and Sunrise power closed a natural gas plant 545 mw on May 31 2009 so there is 1355 mw`s lost to the state. The rest of California is being strangled through environmental regulations.

As for your assertion that “deregulation” was at fault for the brownouts in 2000-2001 I refer you to this website: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf65.html

Here are the relevant passages:

From 2002 to 2006 ‘in-state’ generation from coal dropped by 36% due the closure in 2005 of the Mohave plant (out of state but Californian-owned, hence deemed ‘in-state’), and that from natural gas rose by 18% in line with 26% increase in installed capacity (after dropping back to pre-2000 levels in 2002). Supply from hydro rose 59%, evidently due to seasonal factors, there being no increase in capacity.

2000-2001 energy crisis

Several plants, totalling 2700 MWe, had used up their annual pollution credits so could not restart without severe fines. In particular, three gas-fired plants (2000 MWe) were shut down after the south coast Air Quality Management District required them to install emission control equipment for NOx. As the crisis developed, the state’s Independent System Operator (ISO), which operates most of the state’s power grid, called them back into service, but they were required to obtain NOx emission credits to cover the short-term impact of this. The price of such credits soared.

The shortfall in generating capacity is widely seen as being due to years of weak government appeasing extreme environmentalism. Defending proposals for new plant against advocates of renewables and demand management as being the total answer to provision of power, means that it takes up to seven years in California to turn a proposal into a functioning power station, compared with three years in Texas. This is despite price levels which would enable an operator in Northern California to pay off a new gas-fired power station (@ $600/kW) in a year.

Much newspaper coverage of the Californian crisis has pointed to deregulation as a factor, if not a cause.

Before “deregulation” electric utilities, which have a legal obligation to serve their customers’ demands, could build plants regardless of the expense and recover costs from customers. In 1996 utilities owned 81% of the total generating capacity and the average retail price was 9.5 cents/kWh, the tenth highest in USA. This arrangement locked in certain inefficiencies, and when deregulation loomed it raised the question of how utilities would recover their “stranded costs”, mostly the capital component which could not be amortised with expected lower electricity prices. Elaborate mechanisms were put into place to cover these, but there were conditions imposed to ensure that utilities did not exploit the situation.

Under the Electric Utility Industry Restructuring Act in 1996 the Californian government put into place a deregulation scheme sought to bring competition into generation – attracting needed investment, while leaving transmission and distribution as regulated monopolies. This required the major utilities to divest at least half their major generation assets, so that their ownership fell to 46% of the total capacity.

The scheme also prevented them from entering long-term hedging contracts that would limit the risk of large price movements, forced them to buy electricity at market rates from a centralised pool, and on top of all this committed the two main utilities to retailing the electricity at fixed 1996 prices until March 2002 regardless of the cost of wholesale purchase. The price cap provision incorporates a transition charge which is the mechanism for utilities to recover stranded costs.

Thus there was not so much deregulation as a much less effective form of regulation. The need for long-term contracts enabling generators to build and maintain adequate capacity was emphasised, as was the need for adequate reserves which consumers had to be prepared to pay for maintaining.

In short, deregulation consisted of being permitted to generate as much as they saw fit provided they obeyed draconian emissions regulations and did not raise their prices. That is rather like saying the USPS is a private business because it can fund itself by selling stamps.

California and the other “environmentally friendly” states have to import a large amount of power, and that means a greater strain on the grid.