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Thousands without power in North San Luis Obispo County

September 6, 2020

By CCN STAFF

On a day of record heat, thousands of San Luis County residents lost power in multiple outages that spanned from rural Atascadero to Heritage Ranch late Sunday afternoon.

The largest outage is in Templeton, where approximately 2,570 customers lost power in nine separate outages. Power is expected to be restored to all Templeton residents from between 9 and 9:15 p.m.

Then at approximately 5:43 p.m., 308 customers lost power in an outage that stretched south from Creston Road to north of Niblick Road. A smaller outage at Heritage Ranch is impacting 14 customers.

In two separate outages, 259 customers are currently without electricity in Atascadero. South of Atascadero, 69 customers in Garden Farms are without power.

In each case, the cause of the outage is under investigation, and power is expected to be restored by no later than 9:30 p.m.


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This state won’t be able to make enough solar power 300 years to negate the carbon we have been creating with all the homeless, arsonist and other fires. Not to mention all the gas powered generators being bought and used because we can’t keep the power on.


1

Think it’s bad not….just wait until the Green New Deal happens and air conditioning units are banned to save on power and CO2 emissions. Think that sounds outlandish…ya…so did banning Natural Gas for cooking and heat before it happened in SLO.


37

So thousands of people without power on one of the hottest days of the year and you are going on about “Green New Deal” and you missed the mark. Perhaps asking about Kamala’s birth certificate or Bidens emails will make for a better troll for upvotes?


Also neither air conditioning or natural gas have been banned in the City, no one wants to cook on electric stoves (well a few).


-52

Actually gas stoves and gas heat are now banned in new houses in San Luis Obispo. It is only a matter of time before these idiots at city hall decide that a house must be all electric before it can be resold. Thanks Heidi Harmon et al.

And almost no one has AC in SLO because it usually doesn’t get that hot.


48

It usually, or used, to not get that hot. But it now does, and will, keep getting that hot. And the international scientific community attributes much of this to? Fossil Fuels and industrialization use of such. Let’s not keep using energy supplies that attribute to this, like natural gas, which is not natural in the scale we use it, process and transport it.


-44

How embarrassing that you’d say that. The Green New deal is positive. Why do people like to disparage things that help us? Did you read a single page? No one ever agrees on anything but Suddenly if something is proposed by a Dem it’s automatically bad. How immature and ridiculous.


-39

Unfortunately, you aren’t qualified to judge what is “immature and ridiculous” when it comes to the electric grid. But, I am. Without large mass spinning reserve gas generation CA can’t meet heat event evening peak and large mass generators allow survival during transient line faults (foreign object burns in the clear before the auto retest of breakers at 5 or 10 seconds). Wind and solar need complimenting batteries. Diablo is base loaded as dilution of boric acid to change power levels is not cost effective and it makes fuel depletion and power mapping of the core a nightmare. Control rods aren’t used to change power because flux popping could occur. Large batteries like Moss Landing once on-line are rated at 2hr & 4hr. No 8hr rated batteries will be online until 2025. The CCA’s are competing for Washington and Oregon hydro power and driving up the cost 400% since 2016 (see MBCP latest Powerpoint). Plus, those states have carbon initiatives where they’ll have less hydro to sell in the coming years. You can see the Day Ahead, the 15 minute ahead and spot/realtime electricity prices at the CAISO website, click on Prices. The last two nights the energy traders lost a bundle on the Day Ahead market, because the RealTime was a quarter of the cost compared to the Day Ahead commitments. The Green New Deal isn’t about supplying reliable power. It’s a facade to take power from oil industry and give it to the ne’er-do-wells that buy that CO2 is a bigger problem than water vapor when influencing climate change. The forest fuel is so large and growing in CA that fires will offset any CO2 savings by going to electric cars. In other words, 20 years from now the CA experiment will be looked back on as a worthless folly.


11

Appreciate the perspective Leroy. Would it then make it a better argument to kill an unstable large grid, vs, making structures self contained with easy to build reusable lithium grid packs and solar. Inverters are wonderful. Small solutions to big issues, like rain water collection on housing, composting toilets, gardens, etc etc. These ideologies date back to the 60s, where people thought of commune vs industrial. Berkeley 1960s. Take the power away from the establishment and supplement locally only, generally interconnected, with selective global commerce. At this moment, there is No More Need for fossil fuels, as solar self contained liquid cooled lithium Is here, not counting wind, and 1v is 1 dollar, a ten year lifespan, and can leave fossil fuels where it belongs relative to a stable biosphere, underground as it is ancient and only seeps into our Biom. The savings and profits are astronomic, and Carbon from natural gas etc could be dead in 10 years. To speak, I have built 48v lithium packs that can dump 3k + watts and up instantly cooled easily. In solar, its 1 dollar a watt, just like lithium batteries. Ironic huh? Cataclysm on earth has lead to the most significant atmospheric changes, and sadly, our use of fossil fuels scientifically is relative to cataclysm.


-14

Anyone can go off-grid without penalty. Electric service is not like garbage and sewer where you are mandated by city ordinance to have service on improved property. Alas, there is a need for natural gas to meet evening load demand today and for a few years until batteries proliferate and a variant of Helms type pumped storage is built (environmental hurdles). I follow the website Microgrid Knowledge and it’s fine to have microgrids, but extremely unsafe for the utility to give up temporary operating jurisdiction to an island or operate someone elses island without preparation. Especially during partial outages within the island where the line crew needs certainty and guidance. Plus, over-stressing the utilities equipment during an island becomes the utilities maintenance (expense or capital) and an inspection problem. We would equate electricity with plumbing systems for visualization. Do you want to be on a little piping system on an island with a little head-tank? Or, do you want your water plant, sewer plant, comm facilities, sports arena, Tesla factory, steel foundry, large facilities and medical facilities on a big robust grid with a huge surge tank able to withstand more contingencies. It certainly isn’t prudent to go on back-up generation more than once or twice a year because you’ve used up your plan B in case a second contingency arises while your remedying the first.


7

I see what your saying Leroy, but as the Catholic church held back Astronomers, as is today with energy. The solutions and mapping for oversight is there via the Gov, the Federal Gov apparently can take over private sector in “crisis” for any electrical grid, so there is a huge point of conflict of interest. Out east, a sports stadium is powered by a waste management steam generator burner, where they “here is the point, CONTAIN the offgasing emissions and turn it into Lubricant for industrial equipment”. They are burning trash with fire and 0 emissions. It is initially an electric incinerating steam generator. It is a self contained grid on a large scale. As I said with oversight, there is No factual need for Nuclear, Gas or Oil anymore, especially Coal, but the propoganda machine keeps chugging, lobbying. Hell, we can EASILY keep all fossil fuels alive if we could just capture damn emissions at a profit and repurpose, but PROFIT and Capitalism has no time for ethics, love or compassion without quantifiable gain. And the sad part is, Exxon could have done this and new about this in the 1960s, so did any other pollutant emitting international corporations. We do not need a plan B, or C, as we are technologically so advanced with such tragic and greedy logistics of the application of such.


0

NOX scrubbers (electrostatic collector plates) were retrofitted on Morro Bay Powerplant units 3 & 4 smokestacks since 1996 and they are on the newer (1990’s vintage) low profile Moss Landing Units 1 & 2. Duke then Dynergy used the Morro Bay emission credits to offset running older Moss Landing Units 6 & 7. Any newer gas plant has NOX scrubbers on their stacks. You need backup plans. All line outage and powerplant outage scenarios go through a rigorous “N minus one” assessment. Meaning if I take out a plant and I lose one more is there sufficient resources for the system frequency and voltage to survive. As for burning trash, those type of biomass plants in CA have been notorious money losers and most went bankrupt and were mothballed or disassembled. Even Calpine with 50MW gas peakers in multiple bay area locations went bankrupt in the past. As for separating into islands, there is huge equipment risk when trying to re-parallel an island back to the grid. The old days an operator would watch the sync-scope and close the breaker at 12 o’clock. Today Schweitzer, GE or ABB relays have sync check relays that delay breaker closing until permissions are met. In any case, if an island wants to parallel back to the grid there is the risk of a bad parallel and the utility’s breaker could be damaged. If any line work was done on the island during its stand alone, then a phase location/rotation might be off and phasing testing with hotsticks must occur across and open breaker.

Most utilities will require a small island to drop all load before the utility picks up the island (drop and pickup) with a breaker with sufficient fault duty and ground grid within the substation for the relays to work properly.


2

Ben, whats ridiculous is to ban people from using affordable gas in their homes, while Fracking has been allowed to release heavy amounts for many MANY years now!


1

We should just keep burning fossil fuels until the atmosphere is at a point of no return. The privileged will be able to afford clean air and a/c.


Gods plan.


-9