Was there really an "energy emergency" yesterday, or 
was the "crisis" the sole creation of SDG&E's P.R. machine?

At 11:15 yesterday, SDG&E held a press conference at its "Emergency Operations Center" in the wake of news reports (generated by SDG&E) that the region was experiencing an energy emergency and might be forced to undergo rolling blackouts.

UCAN has been unable to verify any credible threat of a Stage Three power emergency at this time. In fact, so far, UCAN has determined that there was  little or no threat of rolling blackouts. SDG&E's problems were not related to a lack of power or the abilty to secure enough power. The problems have been caused by inadequate maintenance of SDG&E's local wire delivery (distribution) system.

UCAN sought to confirm that there was a credible energy emergency on Labor Day, and on Tuesday, September 4. To the extent that there were problems, they appeared to have been caused by local circuits overloading and local transformers failing.

1) There is no power shortage.

The California Independent System Operator (ISO), showed abundant power supplies yesterday compared to estimated demand. The ISO is charged with allocating and monitoring state energy resources to prevent blackout conditions. On Monday, when SDG&E reported record-breaking demand, the ISO's Web page indicated that conditions were normal and that the load came nowhere close to triggering a Stage One Alert, let alone a Stage Three Alert in its system. At this time, the Cal ISO Web site suggests that conservation would be "helpful" - a far cry from the threatened Stage Three Emergency.

2) SDG&E failed to note any emergency on its own web site until AFTER energy use peaked.

Yesterday, SDG&E's web pages were bereft of any emergency announcement until about 4 P.M. when it finally posted an after-the-fact emergency notice. By 4 P.M., the peak had been reached about an hour prior and demand was dropping.

Monday's record usage yesterday of 4,636 MW at 2:30 p.m. was predictable and had been forecast by SDG&E.

Moreover, yesterday's power load was predictable, too. SDG&E has forecast numbers like this and has contracted for power (both local and imported) to cover that demand. There is adequate power to keep the lights on. The problem is that SDG&E's local distribution infrastructure can't handle the load (see next point).

3) SDG&E's power distribution woes are due to poor local infrastructure.

The outages being experienced throughout the region have nothing to do with SDG&E's import or generation limits, as much as the limits of its local distribution network (largely transformers). This is why for the past two years, UCAN has been pushing the utility to invest in upgrades to its local distribution system rather than spending money on importing more power.

So what is the basis of the energy "emergency" announced by SDG&E and blasted throughout the electronic media in the last two days?

So far the answer to that rather obvious question is that SDG&E tried to seize upon inadequacies in its local distribution maintenance to characterize the shortcomings as problems caused by inadequate transmission. And they might have gotten away with this clever misdirection strategy except that it couldn't pervert the ISO's alert system.

We caught it - but many in the local media didn't. Most local TV stations relied upon the SDG&E/Sempra PR department to get the word out about a highly questionable "Stage 3 emergency."

Now we get into motivations. Why did SDG&E mischaracterize the outages yesterday and today? We have to speculate here: SDG&E's PR department seems to have exploited a relatively benign episode of local failures to advance its specious argument for investing in a new and unnecessary transmission line (Sunrise). If so, this is unfortunate and disingenuous.  

Editor's Note: See also today's San Diego Union Tribune story Some suspect SDG&E cried wolf during heat wave  and Fox 6 News September 4 broadcast: UCAN calls SDG&E media event "Rubbish."