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19. November 2008 by admin.
A blown fuse at a TVA substation caused a widespread power outage in Bradley, McMinn and Polk counties Tuesday evening.
According to Volunteer Energy Cooperative’s Area Manager Paul Selvidge, 15,000 VEC customers were affected during the 37-minute blackout.
Selvidge said VEC employees worked with TVA at the East Cleveland Substation to restore the power to customers in Riceville, Charleston, Tasso, Georgetown and Ocoee.
“The East Cleveland Substation feeds several local utility substations,” Selvidge said. “A capacitor bank had a fuse failure, causing the outage.”
TSSAA Hall of Fame Basketball games were in progress at Walker Valley High School when the power failed.
For 37 minutes, about 300 people sat in the dark, according to Mike Turner, athletic director at WVHS.
“The lights went out during the second quarter of the second game.
“We just waited for the power to come back on and we expected it to be off longer,” Turner said. “The power came back on quicker than we thought it would.”
Officials were able to complete the four games which had been scheduled.
Pat Ensley, manager of operations for Cleveland Utilities said Cleveland Utilities customers were not affected.
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15. November 2008 by admin.
Los Angeles – Rolling blackouts were snarling traffic and trapping people in elevators in three sections of Los Angeles today. as the city grappled with a major power shortage due to the Sylmar-area brushfire.
The Mid City, Crenshaw, Harbor Gateway and Sherman Oaks areas were cut out of the Department of Water and Power’s grid at midmorning.
Traffic began backing up on at least one San Fernando Valley freeway today, as a fire-related electrical blackout caused traffic signals to fail on surface streets.
The Los Angeles fire department reported numerous stuck elevators in the Sherman Oaks area, where a power outage has struck several neighborhoods.
Traffic on the Ventura (101) Freeway backed up at the Van Nuys Bouelvard interchange due to failed traffic signals on nearby surface streets.
This follows an announcement by the Department of Water and Power that it would institute rolling blackouts to reduce load on its system, as power lines in the Newhall Pass area have been taken out of service as the fire burns through the area.
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6. November 2008 by admin.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, in cooperation with the firm named below, today announced a voluntary recall of the following consumer product. Consumers should stop using recalled products immediately unless otherwise instructed.
Name of Product: Portable Generators
Units: About 13,000
Importer: General Power Products LLC, of Loveland, Ohio
Hazard: The generator’s fuel valve can be damaged by the cover plate during shipment and cause a fuel leak and fuel spillage during use, posing a fire hazard to consumers.
Incidents/Injuries: General Power Products has received 14 reports of damaged fuel valves. No injuries have been reported.
Description: This recall includes the General Power Products 6000 Watt portable generator and the Poulan Pro 6000 Watt portable generator with serial numbers 060400483 through 060600725. The serial number is stamped on the engine block which is located on the front of the engine below the generator’s control panel. General Power Products and 6000 Generator are printed on the side of the General Power Products generator. Poulan Pro and 6000 watts are printed on the side of the Poulan Pro generator.
Sold at: Hardware and home improvement stores primarily located in Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Texas from June 2008 through September 2008 for between $600 and $800.
Manufactured in: China
Remedy: Consumers should immediately stop using the generators and contact General Power Products to determine if the generators fuel valve is damaged and, if it is, to receive a free repair kit and instructions.
Consumer Contact: For additional information, contact General Power Products toll-free at (877) 428-3769 24 hours a day, seven days a week, or visit the firms Web site at www.generalpowerproducts.com
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30. October 2008 by admin.
A Laporte man was arrested Wednesday for his role in the operation of a “large” marijuana grow, the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office announced today in a press release.
Eloy Ignacio Garrido was arrested for his involvement in the marijuana operation at 6265 Kremers Lane in Laporte.
Authorities seized 47 pounds of finished product marijuana with a conservatively estimated street value of $1.15 million. A total of 1,307 marijuana plants were also seized.
Investigators believe the cultivated product would sell for about $3.2 million every 90 days, based on a 60-day harvest cycle.
The press release said a large portion of the product was being sent to California, based on seized records.
The growing system was “highly complex,” the release said. Buried underground, a hydroponic growing system was powered by a 20,000 watt diesel generator. A retro-fitted van with a 250 gallon diesel tank fitted with a two-way pump was also seized during the search of the Laporte address.
Garrido was arrested Wednesday and booked on three counts of marijuana offense, a Class 4 felony, and one count of special offender, a Class 2 felony, for an overwhelming amount of marijuana and because the growth of the marijuana was his sole source of income.
His bond was set at $50,000.
The Larimer County Sheriff’s Office Criminal Impact Unit conducted the investigation into the operation and was assisted by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration during the search of the Laporte address.
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29. October 2008 by admin.
Power was restored to nearly 4,000 Rocky Mountain Power customers across the Salt Lake Valley after broad blackouts caused by equipment failure and a car accident Wednesday morning.
Power was cut to two different circuits around midnight because of underground equipment failures. That outage impacted about 3,800 users.
About 1,400 customers in the east part of the avenues had their power cut until 3:20 a.m., and about 2,200 customers - peppered through an area of the city spanning north and south from South Temple to 1800 South and east to west from 1400 East to 700 East - had their power restored around 2 a.m., according to Rocky Mountain Power spokesman Jeff Hymas.
“Hopefully most of the affected customers slept through it and didn’t realize until they woke up that it had even happened,” Hymas said. “Of course, it’s always an inconvenience, even if it occurs overnight. People have to reset clocks.”
But 153 customers - mostly in apartment complexes around 1100 East between 100 South and South Temple - dealt with the outage into Wednesday afternoon. Their power was restored at 1:20 p.m., Hymas said.
At about 7 a.m. Wednesday, about 87 customers in the 700 East and 1300 South area blacked out after a vehicle crashed into a power pole and downed lines.
Crews replaced the pole and repaired the damaged eqiupment, and power was restored just after 3 p.m.
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29. October 2008 by admin.
PORT JERVIS, N.Y. - The first big snowstorm of the season in the Northeast closed sections of major highways Tuesday and blacked out thousands of utility customers.
The National Weather Service posted a winter storm warning for parts of New York state, in effect until 8 a.m. Wednesday, and issued winter storm advisories for parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Vermont.
“It looked like a mini blizzard in October,” said Joe Orlando, spokesman for the New Jersey Turnpike Authority. “We’re salting the roads and we haven’t even gone trick-or-treating yet.”
Up to a foot of snow was possible in parts of upstate New York, with wind blowing at 25 mph and gusting to 40 mph, and as much as 9 inches of snow was forecast in Vermont’s mountains, the weather service said. Up to 13 inches of snow had fallen by Tuesday afternoon in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains.
Schools closed or delayed their openings in parts of Pennsylvania and New York state.
New York’s Thruway Authority said Interstate 84 was closed for part of the morning at the New York-Pennsylvania line in the Port Jervis area. It was reopened by late morning.
Stretches of Interstate 80 in northeastern Pennsylvania were closed intermittently because of multiple tractor-trailer wrecks, state agencies said.
PPL Corp. said about 39,000 of its customers in northeastern Pennsylvania lost power when the heavy, wet snow brought down trees and power lines. Utility companies in New Jersey said about 67,000 customers lost power, mostly in the northern part of the state.
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29. October 2008 by admin.
California is already leading the nation in solar efforts. It’s also seeking to revamp its power grid and go green with a number of other power sources including geothermal and clean fission.
Southern California Edison (SCE) is one of California’s largest power utilities. It has already committed to going green in big way, with 7.71B kWh of geothermal, 2.58B kWh of wind power, 667M kWh of solar, 580M kWh of biogas, 556M kWh of small hydro, and 336M kWh of biomass generated power generated for customers in 2007. This placed SCE as the nation’s largest supplier of alternative energy, with over 16 percent of its power from renewable sources.
Now SCE is tackling wind power on a large scale, signing contracts for 909 MW of new capacity. The new contract is with DCE, an affiliate of Caithness Energy and will be one of the world’s largest fully permitted wind farms. With it, California moves closer to surpassing Texas as wind power capital of the U.S.
The new installation will actually be installed outside California in Gilliam and Morrow Counties in North-Central Oregon between 2011 and 2012. The installation will consist of 303 3-MW turbines in a 30 mile radius. Shepherd’s Flat will generate around 2B kWh of wind power for SCE, about 10 percent of its total alternative energy portfolio. The wind-rich region is one of the nation’s “bread baskets” of wind power.
Stuart Hemphill, SCE vice president, Renewable and Alternative Power, lauded the latest contract, stating, “This contract is a crown jewel in our renewable energy portfolio. The project is attractive to SCE because of its size, near-term delivery and its competitive price.”
One key to the project’s potential is that no new power transmission lines need to be built. This will allow it to come online much more quickly and starting making returns on the investment sooner. Wind power is also cheaper per kWh than solar or many other alternative energy sources.
Les Gelber, president and chief operating officer of Caithness Energy sums up the new effort, stating, “Caithness has been successfully partnering with Southern California Edison since the 1980s to bring renewable energy to the region. The Shepherd’s Flat project is particularly exciting and will bring a significant new renewable energy supply to the western United States.”
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13. October 2008 by admin.
A new study warns crippling blackouts could hit the U.S. next summer, and the senior policy advisor to the nonprofit group that did the study warns California is most likely to be “ground zero” for a blackout that could take out most of the Western United States.
The study – from NextGen Energy Council, titled “Lights Out in 2009?” – adds up to what could be a knockout punch to an economy that will still be reeling next summer from the combined impacts of the credit crunch, rising unemployment and reduced consumer spending. America’s power markets are in crisis the way its credit markets are, the advisor, Jim Sims, former director of communication for President Bush’s National Energy Policy Task Force, told EnergyTechStocks.com. “We’re flirting with disaster,” he said.
While Sims said that inadequate generation and transmission have combined to leave California most exposed, he quickly added that, for the same reasons, people and businesses in Florida and throughout the Southeast are also at great risk. He further said that, notwithstanding greater industry efforts to stabilize the U.S.’s region-wide high-voltage power grids, once a blackout begins it could easily “cascade” for hundreds, even thousands of miles.
A blackout starting in California, he said, could reach all the way to the Rocky Mountains, while a blackout that started in Georgia might go as far north as Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
As startling as NextGen’s warning may be for many Americans, the fact is many other countries are already gripped by power crises, according to information compiled by the website EnergyShortage.org. As a number of experts have noted, the core problem is a decades-long failure by governments to adequately spend on new generation and transmission.
Just as it has taken many years for the U.S. and other countries to get into this fix, it’s going to take many more to get out of it, the NextGen study indicates. But with time running short, and with Congress having already dipped deep into the national treasury, Sims has real questions about whether the U.S. economy could fall victim to a long power crisis, as we’ll explore tomorrow in the second part of this newsmaker series.
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2. October 2008 by admin.
Trust you! You’ve got to be kidding
“Without trust, words become the hollow sound of a wooden gong. With trust, words become life itself.”
That is quote I like from John Harold.
It came to mind this morning as a I opened my e-mail and found an e-mail threatening dire consequences for the U.S.
It came from The NextGen Energy Council, a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization comprised of a wide variety of energy and technology leaders and companies that work collaboratively with governors, federal and state officials, academic institutions and others to promote the rapid development and commercialization of cutting-edge energy technologies.
Well, I can’t imagine why anyone shouldn’t trust every word uttered by a group of electric and natural gas execs. Hasn’t the electric and natural gas industry around here earned our undying trust?
But, judge for yourself.
“The U.S. Faces Serious Risks of Brownouts or Blackouts in 2009, Study Warns,” the e-mail began.
Following is the entire text of the press release.
A new study released this week highlights what experts have been saying for years: the U.S. faces significant risk of power brownouts and blackouts as early as next summer that may cost tens of billions of dollars and threaten lives.The study, “Lights Out In 2009?” warns that the U.S. “faces potentially crippling electricity brownouts and blackouts beginning in the summer of 2009, which may cost tens of billions of dollars and threaten lives.”
“If particularly vulnerable regions, like the Western U.S., experience unusually hot temperatures for prolonged periods of time in 2009, the potential for local brownouts or blackouts is high, with significant risk that local disruptions could cascade into regional outages that could cost the economy tens of billions of dollars,” the report warned.
U.S. baseload generation capacity reserve margins “have declined precipitously to 17 percent in 2007, from 30-40 percent in the early 1990s,” according to the study. A 12-15 percent capacity reserve margin is the minimum required to ensure reliability and stability of the nation’s electricity system. Compounding this capacity deficiency, the projected U.S. demand in the next ten years is forecast to grow by 18 percent, far exceeding the projected eight percent growth in baseload generation capacity between now and 2016.
The study estimated that the U.S. will require about 120 gigawatts (GW) of new generation just to maintain a 15 percent reserve margin. That will require at least $300 billion in generation and transmission facility investments by 2016.
“The facts presented in this study should stimulate a call for action by policymakers everywhere. Our nation’s electricity system is clearly in trouble and we need to take rapid steps as soon as possible to remedy the situation,” said Bob Hanfling, Chairman of the non-profit NextGen Energy Council, which conducted the study.
“This isn’t the first study to come to these conclusions, and it won’t be the last. We hope it illuminates current policy debates, from those on climate change to resource development to infrastructure build-out to national security. We also hope it will sound the alarm for every elected official, policymaker, business leader and citizen concerned about the future prosperity and security of our nation.”
The study also identified the primary barriers to getting new power plants and transmission lines built. Chief among these is the “opposition of well-funded environmental groups that oppose and file lawsuits against virtually every new infrastructure project proposed.”
Other obstacles include opposition to natural gas production, which is needed to fuel the growing reliance on natural-gas fired power plants; challenges associated with putting more intermittent renewable power sources on the grid; regulatory uncertainty associated with climate change policy development; reluctance by state regulators to approve rate increases related to the imposition of new environmental or climate-related regulation; and the relatively shorter-term approach to resource planning and acquisition that industry has been forced to adopt because of all of the above factors.
Among its other findings were these:
The U.S. will require more than 14,500 miles of new electricity transmission lines by 2016.
Regions represented by the Florida Reliability Coordination Council (FRCC) and the Northeast Power Coordinating Council (NPCC) may require less than 400 miles of new transmission lines, while the Southeast Reliability Council (SERC) may require nearly 2,300 miles. The Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) may require nearly 7,000 miles.
Substantial increases in wind turbine orders, and new wind capacity, has been slowed by a worldwide turbine shortage and local opposition to wind projects. Since wind generation is expected to grow substantially throughout the U.S., the integration of intermittent resources into the bulk power system is becoming increasingly complex and difficult.
While renewable energy proponents, and some elected officials, are saying that the U.S. needs to only add renewable power facilities such as wind farms, the annual capacity factor of wind generators is typically about 25 - 35 percent. However, the probability that wind generators are available at their rated value during annual peak periods is only between 5 - 20 percent and varies greatly from year to year and region to region. Wind cannot be considered a reliable baseload capacity resources.
Rapidly increasing demand for steel and copper has caused spot scarcity of the resources required to manufacture key electrical components, and this commodity demand has increased the theft of critical system components. Manufacturers have attempted to eliminate excess inventories and capacity to increase productivity of their assets, but they are reluctant to add more capacity until they can be certain about future industry investments.
The study also presented a survey of political developments and trends that amount to “structural political barriers being erected to system reliability.” It pointed to the fact that “environmental activist groups” are now:
Suing to block the construction of virtually every single baseload coal-fired power plant, in spite of advanced environmental technologies these plants would deploy.
Gearing up to block construction of any baseload nuclear power plants across the West.
Suing or protesting virtually every proposed lease on public lands in the Rocky Mountains for natural gas drilling.
Working to slow or stop the completion of the two main multi-year, stakeholder-based transmission corridor processes that both Democrats and Republicans in Congress approved as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
Pushing for additional endangered species designations, which will make siting and construction of both power plants and transmission lines difficult.
Pressuring government leaders to limit access by larger, baseload technologies to the region’s high-voltage transmission grid and, instead proposing to artificially favor non-baseload, intermittent power facilities that will (at some point) further stress the reliability of the entire Western grid.
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20. September 2008 by admin.
Hank Dorman and the rest of Utica’s residents are still without power six days after the wind storm that caused the biggest and longest blackout in Duke Energy Corp.’s history.
And the prospects for power to come back Saturday, as Duke previously said, are slim.
“We’re a mess up here,” Dorman said. “I haven’t seen a Duke truck in sight — I guess we’re sort of on the back burner. We’ve got about 600 people without power — they’re on edge.”
The town of Utica has taken it upon itself to clean up brush and trees, but residents and officials can’t fix the electricity, so they have to rely on Duke.
The Michael L. Becher Adult Corrections Complex work crew also is working to clear limbs in Utica.
According to Dorman, about 90 percent of Utica residents were still without power as of Friday afternoon, though Duke said that only a handful of residents there are without power.
Duke also said Friday that power will not be restored to everyone in its Clarksville District — which serves Clark and Floyd counties — until late Sunday or Monday. About 26,000 customers around the state are still without power, about 14,000 of those in the two counties as of Friday evening.
The Clarksville District had three times the number of individual cases — poles down or branches on wires — than in any of its other service areas in the state, said Angeline Protogere, a Duke spokeswoman.
“You may have a crew work an hour and only help a handful of people,” she said. “At this phase we’re tackling problems that bring on a smaller amount of customers. Power restoration in the final stretch is often more tedious because you’re working on a lot more individual problems.”
Statewide, there are 2,500 “cases” that need to be resolved to turn power back on to 26,000 customers — 1,600 of those cases are in the Clarksville District.
Protogere said that 1,100 of those cases only involve between one and five customers, 300 of the cases affect between six and 50, and 72 of those cases affect between 50 and 500 people.
“Power restoration is going to take longer than expected for some of our customers,” said Duke Energy Indiana President Jim Stanley. “Some of the North and South Carolina crews that we were fortunate to have assisting us are now moving to Ohio and Kentucky to help address the more than 130,000 outages we still have on our system there.
And in the past four days, 1,800 new cases have developed in the Clarksville District caused by fallen limbs that were weakened by Sunday’s winds. Though Duke is sending its North Carolina crews to Ohio and Kentucky, it is pulling other crews from around the state to come to Clark and Floyd counties.
Rumors of copper theft from downed lines as a cause for the delay in restoring power were denied by Duke. Protogere said that is an issue, but not particularly during the aftermath of the storm.
Harrison REMC, which serves parts of Floyd county, has about 4,700 customers without power, but has said some might be in the dark until Wednesday.
Clark County REMC has been able to more quickly reduce the number of outages since the storm. With 9,000 customers out of power Sunday, now only 1,000 remain to be fixed.
“I’ve been here 31 years and I don’t recall us ever having an outage this widespread,” said Denise Adams, with Clark REMC. “I’ve never seen this many outages for this long of a time period.”
Adams said Clark REMC is hoping to have restored all of its customers’ power by Sunday.
“Certainly customers are frustrated,” she said. “There are people that this is the straw that broke the camel’s back and for some it’s just an inconvenience.
“For a lot of people, their just enduring it and finding creative ways to spend time with their families.”
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