Why would SCE need to resort to rotating outages?
Controlled, rotating outages can become necessary when the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) declares a statewide Stage 3 Emergency. Cal-ISO makes that declaration when the state’s electricity reserves have fallen below 1.5% in real time or are unavoidable. Under this situation the Cal-ISO will typically order the state’s investor-owned utilities, including SCE, to reduce electrical load immediately by a specific number of megawatts. A megawatt is the basic unit for measuring power generation. One megawatt is enough power to serve 500-1,000 homes at any given time. To reduce its load, SCE will initiate a California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approved rotating outage plan in which controlled service interruptions (of about one hour) are rotated among groups of customers throughout SCE’s service territory.
