DATELINE: 27 June 2009
CPS shutdown will be costly
By Robert Crowe
Express-News
A vital section of one of the coal-fueled power plants at Calaveras Lake was damaged by a small explosion Friday, forcing a shutdown for three weeks while CPS Energy repairs it, officials said.
The incident, about 9 a.m. in the 9500 block of Gardner Road, was the second in about a week. A natural gas-powered plant at Braunig Lake has been down since last week, when a turbine was damaged.
Although both plants contribute about 20 percent of CPS' production capacity, the utility doesn't expect the failures to disrupt service to San Antonio area customers, said Bob McCullough, a CPS spokesman.
To offset the losses, the utility is purchasing additional electricity through the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
“That will eventually translate to higher costs for consumers,” said Mike Kotara, executive vice president for energy development at CPS.
With a forecast that calls for a continued heat wave, with temperatures in the triple digits for the next several days, CPS will have to pay a premium of about $2,000 per megawatt hour during peak use times of noon to 6 p.m. That translates to about $2 per kilowatt hour for consumers, compared with an average price of 9 cents per kilowatt hour for off-peak times, he said.
Prices are especially high now, Kotara said, because demand is at near-record levels with consistent days of triple-digit temperatures. ERCOT recorded a demand Wednesday of 62,298 megawatts, just under the August 2006 record of 62,339 megawatts.
“It is very unusual to have this high a demand in June,” ERCOT spokeswoman Dottie Roark said.
Normal June demand is about 56,118 megawatts for the state, Roark said.
CPS broke its peak demand records two days in a row this week when demand reached 4,500 megawatts. The utility can produce about 5,000 megawatts when all plants are operating.
Outages are not uncommon during periods of heavy use, Roark said. The agency keeps a reserve of about 4,000 megawatts to offset plant failures.
CPS' McCullough said the Calaveras plant's “exciter” failed Friday, causing a generator to stop working. The related explosion shut off the plant's capacity to generate electricity.
No one was injured, but the explosion damaged the large exciter device while blowing the doors off a nearby room.
“The generator tripped off, so the good news is that our systems in place worked,” said Lisa Lewis, another CPS spokeswoman.
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