Southern California faces summer power challenge: NERC

By Bernard Woodall

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Southern California's electricity system will be challenged this summer, and power emergencies may result if an extended drought leads to massive wildfires, the main U.S. electricity reliability watchdog said on Wednesday.

Southern California is the area that most concerns analysts at the North American Electric Reliability Corp (NERC), which on Wednesday issued its summer 2008 outlook.

Of Southern California, NERC said, "capacity margins will remain tight. Significant amounts of imported power are required to fortify capacity margins and preserve reliability, resulting in heavily loaded transmission lines into this area during peak conditions.

"As a result, unplanned major transmission or generation outages, or extreme temperatures/demand may lead to resource constraints."

NERC, of Princeton, New Jersey, is responsible for monitoring the reliability of the power grid in the United States, Canada and parts of Mexico.

NERC said voluntary conservation and on-call interruptible loads will likely be necessary more often than usual this summer.

As always, the biggest factor in how much demand will strain the power grids in California and the United States is the weather.

NERC said nationwide, U.S. temperatures were 12 percent warmer than normal in 2007 and 10 percent warmer than normal in 2006.