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Apologies if this was posted yesterday, but it's the first I heard of it in JG's post.

APS takes Palo Verde units offline
Arizona Public Service Co. took all three Palo Verde nuclear plant units offline following a "grid disturbance" on Monday morning, Reuters reported

"We had a grid disturbance. We have yet to determine the cause. It led to some short-lived customer outages and ultimately led to some units being shut down," APS spokeswoman Sheri Foote said.

The disturbance, which occurred around 7:40 a.m. Monday, initially resulted in the loss of service to around 30,000 customers of Phoenix-based APS, the largest subsidiary of Pinnacle West Capital Corp.

All threew units at the Palo Verde nuclear plant and 2 units at the Redhawk gas-fired plant were then shut down. The Palo Verde units can produce around 3,900 megawatts of electricity, enough power for almost 4 million homes.

The Redhawk units, which are run by a sister company, Pinnacle West Energy, can each produce about 530 MW. Both Redhawk units are now back in service, Foote told Reuters.

No estimate is yet available for when the Palo Verde units will return to service, she added.

Most of the impacted customers had service restored within 20 to 30 minutes.

The Palo Verde plant is located about 50 miles west of Phoenix.

The California Independent System Operator provided about 800 megawatts of emergency assistance immediately after the outage, ISO spokesman Gregg Fisherman said.

Electricity traders said there appeared to be a "large frequency disturbance" in the desert Southwest as trading in the day-ahead market was winding down.

APS has a 29.1 percent interest in the plant runs it on behalf of the ownership consortium. Other part owners are Salt River Project (17.5 percent), Edison International's Southern California Edison Co. (15.8 percent); El Paso Electric Co. (15.8 percent), PNM Resources Inc.'s Public Service Co. of New Mexico (10.2 percent); Southern California Public Power Authority (5.9 percent); and the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (5.7 percent).
http://phoenix.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2004/06/14/daily9.html

I guess yesterday was not the first incident at Palo Verde.....

One of the three power generating units at Arizona's Palo Verde nuclear power plant has shut down.

Officials say the problem is a control system malfunction that will take about a week to fix.

Palo Verde's operator has purchased a block of electricity from Idaho to cover any power shortfall.

Palo Verde supplies power to about 4 million customers in Arizona and other Western states.

Officials say there was no release of radioactive material as a result Tuesday's malfunction.

However, it's the fourth unexpected unit shutdown at Palo Verde this year and the other three did involve small radiation leaks.

http://kvoa.com/Global/story.asp?S=1929939&nav=HMO5Nmdh

From your post:
>>Electricity traders said there appeared to be a "large frequency disturbance" in the desert Southwest as trading in the day-ahead market was winding down. <<

What would constitute a large frequency disturbance? Or rather, what is this?

When we go to Phoenix we take the 8 to a smaller highway in AZ and then head up to Phoenix (can't think of the highway number right off). You can see the plumes of steam from Palo Verde most of the way up this highway. I didn't have any idea what it was the first time I saw it and thought it was either a tornado or huge whirlwinds. I was educated pretty quickly : )

This is very puzzling.

HomelandsecurityUS.com has that private "intel news". I never signed up, and pretty much stopped looking at the site, preferring Jill's.

However, yesterday, they posted an "intel alert" and ASKED that it be distributed- as long as they were credited and it was made clear that it was not a government report.

The intel alert also listed threats to flights in Japan and the EU based upon pictures their researchers have seen on the arabic sites.

The intel alert noted the power plant incident- and had more detail. There was concern because this plant was mentioned on the Arabic forums- for about a year or so. Also, the control room seemed to have experienced some type of unusual problem.

Authorities dealing with possible terrorism were involved in assessing the situation.