Heat weighs on power grid

• By RICHARD BURGESS
• Advocate Acadiana bureau
• Published: Jun 26, 2009 - Page: 1BA

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LAFAYETTE — Lafayette Utilities System and SLEMCO are urging customers to raise their thermostats and take other energy conserving measures to prevent rolling blackouts while the soaring summer heat strains the area’s power grid.

Rolling blackouts — temporarily turning off electricity in some areas to keep the power grid from overloading — would be a last resort, LUS Director Terry Huval said.

He said the main culprit is air conditioning systems, which are chugging away to combat abnormally high temperatures for June that are ranging upward of 100 degrees daily.

The ambient air temperature reached 102 degrees Wednesday in Lafayette.

Heat index readings — or how hot it feels — have regularly risen to near the 110 degree mark this week.

The most critical time is from noon to 8 p.m., and “each day you can watch the electrical demand go higher,” Huval said.

He said the threat should lessen when businesses close for the weekend and, hopefully, when temperatures droop as predicted next week.

The problem is not insufficient power generation or the local electric distribution systems, Huval explained, but rather the transmission lines that carry the electricity from power plants in other areas to the local systems.

“There is plenty of power. The problem is transmission,” SLEMCO spokeswoman Mary Laurent said.

SLEMCO, which serves 94,000 customers in the Acadiana area, buys electricity from the coal-fired Big Cajun II power plant in New Roads.

LUS, which serves Lafayette, owns natural gas-powered generators in the city but gets much of its electricity from the coal-fired Rodemacher power plant in central Louisiana.

The transmission lines that carry electricity from those power plants to the LUS and SLEMCO distribution systems are owned mainly by Entergy and Cleco, which are required to share the lines with other utility companies but charge a fee.

“We’ve been operating pretty much on the edge down there for the last couple of days,” said Lanny Nickell, vice president of operations for Southwest Power Pool, a regulatory group that monitors the reliability of the  transmission grid for a nine-state region that includes Louisiana.