Black out

It seems that a good-size chunk of Los Angeles lost their power this afternoon. Bloomberg has the news:

Los Angeles Power Restored After Line Overload Causes Blackout
A power failure in Los Angeles, the second-largest U.S. city, darkened downtown and several nearby cities, trapping people in elevators, disrupting refineries and snarling traffic.

The blackout started around 12:35 p.m. local time, and almost all who lost power had it restored by 2 p.m., said Kim Hughes, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the nation's largest municipal utility.

Power was lost in an area with about 2 million people after a worker with the utility accidentally overloaded a transmission line, tripping circuit protectors, Hughes said. Overloading the line caused an automatic shutdown of other lines to prevent damage to equipment.

And a bit more about why the line was overloaded and one example of the impact:

The region does not have adequate power generation or transmission capabilities to maintain an adequate cushion during periods of peak demand, the California Energy Commission said earlier this year. Below normal temperatures kept demand well below peak levels today.

Investment in power plants has slowed on uncertainty about the direction of the state's electricity industry, four years after an energy crisis resulted in blackouts for millions of people, said Peter Navarro, a professor with the University of California at Irvine.

Refineries

"Capital investment in new power plants is not happening to the degree it should," Navarro said in a telephone interview. "Neither the governor nor the legislature nor the public utilities commission has created a long-term energy policy."

Today's blackout affected industrial facilities such as Valero Energy Corp.'s Wilmington oil refinery, which shut down after losing power, according to spokeswoman Mary Rose Brown. The refinery has a capacity of 77,000 barrels of oil a day out of California's total capacity of about 2.03 million barrels.

And of course, the refinery will start right back up once power is restored. BZZZTTT!!! It will probably take a day or two to get everything back online and that is with everyone working overtime. Our oil supply takes yet another hit. How about some more refineries people -- we have not had a new one built for about 20 years (thanks environmentalists...).