Weintraub: Long Term Solutions Unavailable for Now

The Sacramento Bee's Dan Weintraub examines just how close Southern California may be to an energy crisis this summer and laments that the real solutions are not quick enough to fix what ails us:

The area in Southern California outside the communities served by public utilities will need 27,000 megawatts at peak to handle a prolonged heat wave this June, and as much as 29,000 megawatts for a similar scenario in September. But projections show that supplies will provide only a 7 percent reserve margin if that weather occurs in June, the bare minimum that managers say is necessary to safely run the grid. By September, if a similar scenario unfolds, even that reserve margin would be gone.

The one thing that can fix this problem in the long-term - building more power plants to serve the growing demand - is not available as a solution in the short term, because it takes too long to get a plant sited, financed, permitted and built.

About 1,400 megawatts of new or restored generation are already in the pipeline and have been counted on for the summer's projections, but even that new juice is balanced by the expected retirement of nearly 800 megawatts that the state used to get from two aging and obsolete plants.

Another possible solution - charging customers based on the actual cost of the electricity they use - would help by ending the inefficient practice of letting people and businesses who use power when it is most in demand pay the same as those who shift their use to times when the resource is in relative abundance. But that change would require the installation of modern "smart meters" and a new, dynamic rate structure that politicians and regulators have been slow to embrace.