He's trying to get a notification plan in place for the summer that would allow at least half an hour of notice. With at least half an hour, businesses could fire up standby generators or turn off computers, assembly lines and other equipment that could be damaged by sudden blackouts, Guardino said. That could lessen the enormous costs of the blackouts to businesses. Rolling blackouts, in which utilities cut power from one group of customers to the next for an hour or so, are ordered when power demand threatens to overwhelm available supplies and crash the whole system. It could take days to restore power after a systemwide failure.
Summer is critical because air conditioning is California's biggest power use.
Grid managers expect the state to be short some 3,700 megawatts, particularly in May and June, enough for more than 3 million homes. New power plants may lessen the shortage in late summer, but hydroelectric power could be more limited then. Desert residents object With rolling blackouts a virtual certainty, some lawmakers suggested planning the entire summer's outages months in advance. Under the current system, about half of all customers are exempt from rolling blackouts because they are essential services like police or hospitals or share a circuit with them. The rest are divided among outage groups or blocks spread throughout each utility's service area, a move intended to prevent blackouts from affecting any region disproportionately.