WECC Daily System Status (Cal ISO-Oops I did it again!)

WESTERN ELECTRICITY COORDINATING COUNCIL ^ | March 11, 2003

[Robert357]

Monday’s Notable Events: From 2323-2345 PST the CFE was separated from the CISO and the Western Interconnection when the Miguel-Tijuana 230-kV Line relayed. The Imperial Valley-Rosita 230-kV line was out of service for scheduled work. Cause was unknown. Fault was on CISO side of the line and SDGE reported fog in the area. There was no customer outage.

[Robert357]

Now many of you will think so what, a simple problem and no obvious cause. Well what if you looked back a week ago and found out that the same thing happened on March 2nd. Would you think, hey its OK to let a transmission line fail until the cause becomes obvious?

I for one hope the FERC steps in and takes charge of the management of the Cal ISO as it is jeopardizing the entire west coast power grid with the way they do not make sure that problems get fixed and the way the ISO does not follow reliability requirements.

For those that want details please check out essentially the same failure roughly a week ago and documented in the following Daily Report of System Status for March 3, 2003

Click here for March 3rd Achieved report

Sunday’s Notable Events: From 0547-0609 PST the CFE was separated from the CISO and the Western Interconnection when the Miguel-Tijuana 230-kV Line relayed. The Imperial Valley-Rosita 230-kV line was out of service for scheduled work. Cause was unknown.

For those interested CFE stands for Comision Federal de Electricidad

[Robert357]

Thought that you might be interested in learning that the California ISO is still not controlling the electric transmission system it is suppose to regulate.

The entire California power system seems to be held together by bailing wire and chewing gum. This bodes really poorly for what is likely to happen when peak loads occur on the system.

[snopercod]

We really need to start a pool on when the entire state will be blacked out.

I'm going with July 13th.

[Robert357]

We really need to start a pool on when the entire state will be blacked out. I'm going with July 13th.

Hmmm.....July 13th is a Sunday, power loads are ususally down during weekends. Loads are usually highest on weekday afternoons. Usually air conditioning loads are the highest after a couple of days of extreme temperature when people just give up and turn the damn thing on and to hell with the cost. So that would mean sometime between say Tuesday and Friday. California loads are also the highest during July and August. Early July sometimes catches folks off guard.

OK, I vote for the afternoon of July 17th and guess that major blackouts in California occur then.

Something bad is going to happen to the power system, it is just a mater of time, the way the Cal ISO has been runing things. One would expect that the CPUC, CEC, WECC, or NERC would be doing something. The only party that seems to care is FERC. I find it disturbing that other agencies are up in arms about the performanced of the California power system.