SoCal Edison CEO sees tech cutting power outages

LOS ANGELES, Oct 16 (Reuters) - Southern California Edison Co (SCE_pe.A: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) is seeking to spark a technological make-over of the creaky U.S. electric system as it rolls out an automatic system to isolate outages, the utility's chief executive said.

The subsidiary of Edison International (EIX.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) on Tuesday will unveil a test neighborhood power station, in a suburb east of Los Angeles, which can identify and and respond to some of the problems that cause most blackouts in the United States.

Power crises such as the one in 2003 which spread to 11 states, primarily across the northeastern United States, often happen when operators cannot find the source of an outage fast enough and respond.

"Some of the technology is some decades old all over the country," Southern California Edison Chief Executive and Chairman John Bryson said in a telephone interview before unveiling the new technology on Tuesday.

The circuit being tested operates between local substations and the roughly 1,500 customers it serves, acting without human intervention at times, using digital technology and high-speed communications.

"We're talking nanoseconds," he said. "This is the kind of small scale stuff that affects millions and millions of people."

Edison, California's largest electric utility, aims to roll out the technology over the next decade.

Bryson stopped short of saying every one of its 4,200 substations would be updated at that time or of forecasting that California utilities would be able to avoid the kind of crunches that have led to outages during heavy summer use in the most populous U.S. state.

Potentially the system could help solve or circumvent problems from lightning to terrorism, he said.