Threats of rolling blackouts could come back next year if the state's well-known summer heat goes up several notches, says the California Energy Commission.
"It could happen if we have the kind of peak temperatures that happen only once every 10 years," Commissioner John Geesman said on Friday. "We're trying to plan for that."
Planning was a major theme of the Energy Commission's public hearing Friday on the state's energy assessment report. After 19 hearings around the state, the report will go to the commission for possible approval Oct. 20.
Gov. Schwarzenegger would then receive the report, which includes recommendations for home meters that show the hourly price of electricity and an improved transmission system.
In 2001, the state had several rolling blackouts. A shortage of power plants was among the big causes, but other possible reasons surfaced later. Some power producers were accused of withholding electricity at crucial times to drive up the price.
Several large power plants have come online recently. But the commission's assessment makes it clear that population growth, inadequacies in the transmission system and older power plants remain a concern.
The report identified 32 aging plants that may shut down over the next four years because they don't have new contracts to provide electricity. The units are inefficient and expensive to run compared to newer plants.
If many of those plants go off-line and summer temperatures spike, the state could have problems, officials said.
On the San Joaquin Valley's West Side, a project to eliminate an electricity bottleneck should be completed by December, officials said. That should help Central and Northern California.
The report also encourages the development of renewable energy sources, such as solarand wind-powered generation.
Commissioner Jim Boyd also said officials support using crop prunings and wastes as well as methane from dairies and other animal operations to create electricity. The prunings can be burned in biomass plants, and the methane can be used in a biogas digester to create electricity.
"We're on the outer edges of the economics to make those work," Boyd said. "But we need to use more of our wastes both to make electricity and to avoid the costs of disposal."