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HomeMy WebLinkAbout1996-08-19 #7 G Augtisf g: 1996 TD• Board of DIrectoxs FROM Pefer'L. Holimeifer Genrat Manager' Sf WECT. .duly Sfafif Deport 'l EN A � 1. Truckee River Operating Agreement: Pat Sutton and I continue to participate in TROA negotiations. There have been meetings with the Nevada parties and some progress has been made in resolving outstanding issues. The issue that I am most involved with is the regulation of the location and construction of new wells under TROA. That issue is not yet resolved. I have shared information from out groundwater management plan with the Piute Tribe and SPPCo in an effort to educate them about our practice of constructing wells. I will know in a week or so if I am making any progress. 2. IBEW: I am still meeting with the union to try to reach agreement on a new MOU for 1996. We have resolved several issues. We are left only with the most substantive issues, and we are certainly having difficulty reaching agreement on them. We are now discussing whether we may be at impasse, and what process follows impasse. 3. Sphere of influence reports: We have been working on a series of reports for Nevada and Placer County LAFCos. We and other districts have submitted reports to Placer County LAFCo regarding our proposed spheres of influence in Martis Valley. Placer County LAFCo has prepared a report entitled Martis Basin Study, 1996, and they have scheduled a public hearing for August 22, 1996 in Auburn to discuss that study. I will attend that hearing. I also spent time during the last month reviewing and analyzing the Town Sphere of Influence report, which contained many references to Truckee's special districts. The Board hosted a meeting of special district and Town representatives at which the town's report was discussed. As a result of that meeting the Town staff modified their report to remove references to the special districts. We now have a draft Sphere of Influence report for our district prepared by Sauers Engineering which will be sent to the Board for full review. 4. Electric power outage in western US: There have been a couple of large wide- spread power outages effecting customers in several Western states. Fortunately Truckee has not lost power during these outages. Attached is a newspaper article and an NCPA staff memo which describes aspects of the outages, for your information 5. NCPA annual meeting in Monterey: NCPA is holding its annual meeting in Monterey on september 25, 26, and 27, 1996. The meeting is sure to focus on restructuring of the electric utility industry, an issue of extreme importance to us. I plan to attend the meeting and would encourage Directors to attend if you are able. 6. Water quality report: During August we conducted our normal weekly regimen of water samples. During one of the weeks we received notice from the laboratory that seven samples were showing the presence of coliform bacteria. This is highly unusual. It is so unusual that we believe it must be caused by contamination of the test equipment, not by the water. We have gone months with no positive tests; how could we suddenly have seven positive samples from widely divergent sampling points? As we are required, we resampled immediately and one of the resamples was positive. Pete Markovich has had discussions with Jess Morehouse, who is our contact at the too"*, California Department of Health Services. Jess has given us a temporary waiver from the requirement that we provide notice to our customers of the positive samples. He wants to see what develops during the next few sample periods. However, Jess tells us that we will be required to publish a notice in the newspaper describing the positive samples. Jess is drafting the working of the notice. I will send a copy to the Directors and let you know when it will appear in the Sierra Sun. 7. NCPA meeting in Truckee: This is just a quick reminder that the regular monthly NCPA Commission meeting for August will take place in our Board room on Thursday, August 22, 1996 beginning at 9:00 A.M. You may want to attend just to see what NCPA is doing these days. 8. SPPCo: Things have slowed down considerably since SPPCo and WWP terminated their plans to merge. There is still one matter pending at FERC, the SPPCo Rule 888 filing. We are intervenors in that matter to make sure that SPPCo follows the FERC rule in setting its open access tariff. I will keep you informed at things develop further. 9. Snow removal contractors: A group of snow removal contractors voiced concern over that fact that our crew handles much of our snow removal needs. I have drafted a report for Jim Maass to use in having further discussion with those contractors, a copy of which is attached. Electrical wid prone to failure 16A—Reno Gazette-Journal Thursday,August 15,1996 David Foster AS Power Power out- .aSOC[,�TED PRESS It seems farfetched: A high- From page 1 A Two major power outages in the West this summer have g P g highlighted weaknesses in the nation's largest power grid �,oltage line sags near a tree and in the Reno-Sparks area and 1.5 How an outage can occur: cuts power to miilions across the million in eight western states Hydroelectric -%!rorican-'.Nest. But it happened and parts of Canada lost power power station thi° summer — twice — and that day. Sierra Pacific officials OSoaring temperatures expand the metal and utility watchdogs warn it could said the failure of three majorNy insulation of a high-voltage transmission line, happen again. lines caused the local blackout. causing it to sag as much as eight feet.The line Soaring demand, industry de- Last Saturday's outage was even k; drops close to trees.Electricity in the air blackens regulation and complex trades bigger, affecting 4 million homes the tree,as the.line short-circuits.Remaining lines of electricity across the West are and businesses throughout the become overloaded. making the nation's biggest West. It also started with a line power grid more prone to wide- sagging toward trees, this time in �" ....... spread failure, the watchdogs Oregon. The resulting short cir- ©The power ©Power does not reach say. cuit triggered a chain reaction station shuts homes and businesses. Under no circumstance that shut down the main Pacific down when there Power companies may should this happen, let alone connection between the North- is too much power Feeder shut down certain areas to twice in one summer," said Bob west and California. backed up. cables on stop the cascading effect Jenks, executive ryrector of the In both cases, the blackouts pylons of an overload in a grid. Citizens Utility Board in Port- might have been smaller if not land, Ore. "A tree shouldn't be for the power grid that lets utili- Substations able to cause the power system ties trade electricity around the Cascading outage Homes and across the American West to go region, moving it from where The powergrrd in the West is Transformer businesses down." supply is the cheapest to where made up of 112,798 miles of the first blackout occurred demand is the greatest. high voltage lines.Last f ?, when hot weather made a The West's interconnected Saturday's outage: 3,+.,,000-volt power line in Ida- system, with 88 member utilities 2:Olp.m—A transmission line about .' ho droop too close to a cotton- and more than 112,000 miles of �miles east of Portland,Ore.,sags wood tree. An electrical arc transmission lines across 14 and shortcircuits.The electricity instead short-circuited the line, and dur- states, covers the most territory flows through other lines in the area ,. ; ing the next 35 seconds, one line of any of the continent's nine re- 2:06 p.m—Overloaded with the new x after another went out across the gional grids. 9Z surge,a line south of Portland West, cutting power to '_ million In the July 2 outage, swelter- shuts off. customers in 14 states. ing residents of Utah, Idaho and More than 37,000 customers California were turning on air A 2:52 p.m.—Another line south of conditioners and drawing huge rtiand shuts off. • See POWER on page I GA amounts of electricity supplied 3:42 p.m.—Near Hillsboro,Ore by dams in the Northwest and alother sagging line short-circuits q�h — - coal-fired plants in Wyoming 3:47 p.m.—The sensing instability in and Last Utah. Saturda 's outage still is system,two units on the Columbia E Y g River shut off automatically. � •� '�� .flg � ; under investigation, but what officials do know is that it was a 3:48 p.m.—Voltage fluctuations shut case study in the domino effect: �wn the main intertie from Oregon to k At 2:01 m. Saturday, sag- California.Two units at the Diablo P• Y, a g- Ca�rort power plant in San Luis Obispo, ging transmission line sent an Calif.shut down. s arc of electricity into the trees 60 miles east of Portland, Ore. The line short-circuited, and the re- Heat sulting surge of electricity Average Departure Average Departure knocked out two other lines in wave temperature of from normal temperature of from normal the last 7days temperature the last 7 days temperature Oregon during the next 50 min- Portland 75.8° +6.8* Phoenix 98.8*' +4.4- utes. San Francisco 84.0° +0.7' Base 83.8° +9.8° At 3:42, another sagging line Riverside,Calif. 83.1' +5.3° a Paso 79.5^ -1.5' short-circuited over a filbert or- San Diego 72.5° -0.3' Los Angeles 79.7° +3.6° chard just west of Portland. Five Las Vegas 940 +4.6° Denver 74.8° +2.4^ minutes later, two units at the Albuquerque 78.5° -0.5° Seattle 89.9° +3.9' McNary hydropower dam on Sources:Western systems Coordinating Council,AP research APrrracie Tso the Columbia River sensed the system's instability and shut down automatically. One min- ute after that, voltage fluctua- tions shut down the main con- nection - from Oregon to California. i with electricity. brittleness in the system," said The reality, if not monitored utilities this week are taking closely, could be messy, said steps to head off more blackouts. Bob Finkelstein, attorney for a Crews are out trimming trees, San Francisco-based consumer and engineers are running thou- Utility officials defended the group called Toward Utility sands of computer simulations system as an efficient way to bal- Rate Normalization. of events that could bring the ance supply and demand — es- "The system that's been un- grid down. pecially as the West, the nation's usually taxed twice this summer "They may no longer be aber- fastest-growing region, contin- is going to be facing even heavi- rations because of high power ues to demand more electricity. er traffic in the next few years," use and the complexity of the "If each part of the region had Finkelstein said. system," Mahar said. "It's clear to build power plants to meet California's version of deregu- there's a bug in the system, and peak demand, we'd have power lation is a new law designed to we're going to track it down." plants that were idle most of the end utility monopolies during As the utilities launched long- time," said Dulcy Mahar, the next few years by allowing term studies, Westerners faced �.•. spokeswoman for the Bonneville new companies to market elec- more pressing power concerns Power Administration, which tricity through the grid. Similar this week. markets Columbia River hydro- legislation is pending in most In steamy California, air con- power. states. ditioners blasted and govern- But watchdog groups are con- "Rather than five or six utili- ment officials urged conserva- cerned that power outages may ties, at any given time you'll tion measures. become more common as dereg- have hundreds if not thousands In Oregon, meanwhile, com- ulation increases the number of of buyers looking for cheap pow- plaints arose that Californians energy suppliers using the grid er from the Northwest and try- were using hydropower made to transmit power. The idea be- ing to figure out how to transmit with water supposedly reserved hind deregulation is to cut con- that across the system," Finkel- for ushering endangered sumers' costs by giving them a stein said. salmon down the Columbia choice in who provides them Mahar, conceding "there's a River. sae/i 746 16:43 riori rug 12 is :38 :42 1996 Page 1 NetFax Manager Northern California Power Agency 180 Cirby Way t*00�")seville, CA 95678 To: STEPHEN HOLLABAUGH From: ALP Co: "RUCKEE DONNER Co: Northern California Power Agency Date : 16:38 Mon 12 Aug 1996 Tel #: (916)781 -3636 Sub-' act: Fwd: Saturday Outage Fax #: 916-781 -4263 DTMF Number of Pages : 1 NCPA staff and generation resources played an important role in mitigating the effects of Saturdays electrical outage. We all can be proLra of the response of our staff . On caturday , all major high voltage transmission lines between Oregon and California tripped open . At the time, power was flowing into California to re t the demands of the hot weather. The resulting electrical dis'==.;rbances caused many generating units in California to shut down . As a result , there weren't enough generation resources on line in California to supply electric loads . The electric system then automatically dropped loads to regain balance between generation and loads . NCPA staff began an immediate response. ?00�1'_sr?atchers worked with plant operators to stabilize and keep our currently operating geothermal and hydro units on line. Dispatchers also contacted PG&E, our members, and other utilities to determine the natU e and extent of the problem. In a coordinated response with PG&E and ethers, our operating staff was called in to start the five Comb:-'stion Turbine No. 1 units and the Combustion Turbine No. 2 unit, and to L-,crease water releases from New Spicer Meadows reservoir to supply the down-stream Collierville generating units . Withi a short period of time, all NCPA units were on line at full power, h_ping to supply the California electric system. NCPA units were kept on line during the outage until power was restored to those customers who lost power . The above is the "Readers Digest" version of the event . The full drama and impact of this event is conveyed in the NCPA Dispatch logs for the ever -, and also the WSCC press release. Copies will be available in the lunc -i room at the home office and at each of the plant sites . It makes for some interesting reading. I ' d like to thank and commend NCPA home office and plant staff for their ded..c:aced response on Saturday . Mike FAcdonald