San Diego

Power-hungry research laboratories in California face their first blackouts this summer, after the withdrawal of exemptions that protected their electricity supplies.

Laboratories operating for the Department of Energy and NASA have been told that their power may be shut off for up to two hours at a time. Most electricity users in the state have faced similar cuts this month as warmer weather has increased the use of air conditioning. The blackouts are expected to become more frequent over the summer.

California has faced growing electricity shortages after a botched attempt to deregulate the state's electricity industry.

The Lawrence Berkeley laboratory and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) have been told to expect notices from the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) saying they will no longer be exempt.

The power cuts are likely to play havoc with long-planned experimental schedules. Cuts without warning may damage expensive equipment and could even endanger staff, say officials, who are appealing to the state to restore their exempted status.

So far the PUC has not issued a decision. “It is a very chaotic situation,” says particle physicist Pier Oddone, deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley laboratory, where the equipment likely to be affected includes the Advanced Light Source.

Cutting edge: the power shortage is already affecting the DIII-D tokamak (top) and SLAC. Credit: GENERAL ATOMICS/SLAC

Officials at SLAC say that it has reduced its power use voluntarily, and that power cuts would wreck its main high-energy physics experiments because of the time they take to shut down and restart. “A blackout would be a total disaster,” says acting deputy director Gregory Loew. “We are trying to figure a way to mitigate this.”

The PUC has already sent warnings to NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, which operates energy-intensive wind tunnels, and to a test facility for high explosives operated by the Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory. The main Livermore laboratory — like Berkeley and SLAC, a US Department of Energy (DOE) facility — is expected to stay exempt because of its nuclear weapons work, says DOE official Mark Clark. But officials fear that Livermore may face energy restrictions in the months ahead.

At the General Atomics fusion facility in San Diego, which has not been exempt from the power cuts, the experimental schedule has already been disrupted. The normal January-to-September schedule for operating the DIII-D tokamak device has been shortened to complete the necessary work by mid-June, after which the crisis is likely to worsen. The facility's electricity bill has jumped from $1 million to $2.5 million a year, prompting staff cuts and delays in purchases, says physicist Ronald Stambaugh, director of the DIII-D programme.

The other laboratories avoided the blackouts that swept California last winter because they held electricity contracts with another division of the DOE. But the PUC issued an order last month to change the rules governing such contracts. The new rules grant exemption only to users such as hospitals, and water and sewage facilities.