UC Davis has formally filed an appeal with Pacific Gas & Electric Co., citing potential damage to research, possible safety hazards and a high cost to taxpayers as the primary reasons the core campus should be exempted from power blackouts.
During the appeal pro-cess the UC Davis core campus is protected from rolling blackouts. However, it was not known how long it would take PG&E to consider the appeal, and the campus community continues to prepare for possible electricity blackouts.
"We expect to hear any day now whether or not PG&E will grant our appeal," Assistant Facilities Director Charles Kennedy, who is responsible for campus energy, said at Dateline's press time Wednesday.
An open community forum to provide information about the campus energy situation and answer questions has been scheduled for 9 a.m. Tuesday in the Main Theatre.
In a letter sent to PG&E's rotating outage representative last week, the campus outlined numerous issues under which UC Davis should be protected from outages. Concerns included threats to the lives of valuable research animals, the risk of lost research, and the potential for exposing faculty, staff or students to biohazards or toxic fumes in laboratories.
The letter, from Associate Vice Chancellor for Facilities Jill Blackwelder, noted that each emergency outage in the core campus area "would cost the taxpayers of California tens of thousands of dollars in lost time, materials and equipment."
"I recognize, and the entire institution recognizes, the need for a public university such as UC Davis to assist the state in this time of dire energy emergency," Blackwelder wrote.
"We are working to assure that we put our energy to the most efficient use, and are implementing programs to further conserve power - above and beyond our efforts over the past 10 years which have already reduced campus energy consumption by 15 percent."
"But it is prudent that we state for the record the serious consequences and public cost that could result if the campus is exposed to rotating outages and designated a Non-Essential Customer," Blackwelder concluded.
Also conveyed to PG&E were concerns raised by some faculty members that grants and other funds brought into the university for research would need to be returned if the research was compromised. And like other businesses in California, the letter spoke of a chilling effect - that the power situation could hamper recruitment and retention of faculty members who do not want to endanger their research.
The letter also noted that UC Davis operates essential services for a community of 35,000 students, faculty and staff. These services can be exempted from blackouts, and include fire and police departments, the Cowell Student Health Center, the campus airport, radio station KDVS, a domestic water system, and communication and data processing facilities.
While the campus has partial backup power for many of these services, none would be fully operational in a blackout, the letter noted.
PG&E, in considering the appeal, has asked the campus for more details about its backup generation capabilities.
Peak summertime energy usage on the core campus of UC Davis is 34 megawatts at a given time. The technical capacity of campus generators is only 9 megawatts, but due to circuit and design configurations, age and condition of equipment, the real and effective output of the campus emergency generation is only about 4 megawatts spread among 76 generators in 70 buildings.
"It is not sufficient to avoid the significant adverse impact of the loss of power on the research being conducted in those buildings, or to protect the health and safety of students, faculty, staff and animals using those buildings," Acting Facilities Director Julie McNeal responded to PG&E.
Should the formal appeal be rejected by PG&E, the campus's next step is to appeal directly to the California Public Utilities Commission in San Francisco, Kennedy said. Only after all appeals had been exhausted would the campus be assigned to one of the state's 14 designated rotating blocks. The campus currently has no block designation.
The campus is also looking aggressively at several generation options to provide more substantial backup power to the campus - perhaps even taking the place of lost off-site power during a blackout.
Conservation will also be a key emphasis throughout the summer months, with a more ambitious campuswide energy conservation program expected to get under way in a few weeks, Kennedy said.
However, even if UC Davis could secure more backup generation, or even if it were granted an exemption, emergency planners have stressed that such reprieve may only be temporary and subject to the severity of the state's power crisis.
"The entire campus community must still continue to plan for the possibility of blackouts, thinking through and having a plan for before, during and after an outage," said Ev Profita of the campus Emergency Planning and Preparedness Group. "The state is in an unpredictable situation, and we need to be ready for even the worst-cast scenario."
The building-by-building assessment being conducted by Facilities Services is ongoing to look for critical services that must remain functioning under backup generation. Already, many vital areas have been identified, and campus engineers are working to bring needed backup power to those sites
For more details about the energy situation on campus, see unplugged@ucdavis.edu.