Power company asks regulators to re-write the rules.

As New York City recovers from a triple-digit heat emergency and braces for the next, Consumer-Powerline, which helps companies manage their energy use more efficiently, said that a recently released Con-Ed report to the Mayor on the crisis provides confirmation showing that Emergency Demand Response programs helped save the city from an expansion of the blackout that crippled western Queens for more than a week, while also affecting Westchester County and other parts of the Tri-State area and could hold the key to averting blackouts in the future.

The company, which is asking Governor Pataki to increase strategically placed emergency demand response participation--where, currently, large energy consumers agree to reduce their consumption in an emergency to help avert a power failure--said these programs led to a three percent reduction in critical energy use throughout the region, saving 411 megawatts, or enough to power more than 400,000 homes, and helping to stave off more widespread failures.

Citing a just-released report from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) recommending that states implement Demand Response 'solutions', the firm wants state and local rules rewritten so both large and smaller energy users, including single-family homes, restaurants and mid-sized apartment buildings, can be reliably called upon and economically targeted to the precise areas that are in danger of losing power during a heat emergency. The company says such changes could have spared Astoria its suffering in the dark, and would spare future Astorias from similar suffering.

Con-Ed recently submitted a report to the Mayor on the power outage, including the role of Demand Response, in helping to prevent a wider blackout to customers in Queens, New York.

"Our examination of the report and chronology of events, convinces us that a Demand Response program that included smaller energy users, and one that could be better targeted to the trouble spots, would have certainly helped to prevent the outages that left 25,000 Queens residents without power for more than a week," said Mike Gordon, president and founder of ConsumerPowerline.

"In the first critical hours, when damage to Con-Ed's secondary system knocked out power to those customers, there were clear opportunities for localized demand response that would have made the critical difference."

According to Gordon, "While the Governor wisely encouraged all state agencies to intensify energy saving measures during the heat emergency, we not only need a louder call for demand response participation throughout the city and state, we need rules that will permit the 'the little guy'--small merchants and building owners, for example--to be a greater part of a targeted emergency demand response solution.

"If we had had 500 small-sized buildings in Astoria, for example, cutting back on electricity just a bit during the crisis, the data shows we would have provided the power to stave off the failures that left them and their neighbors in the stifling darkness, for days," he said.

Gordon says that increasing strategic demand response participation from the current two percent to about 10 percent, would give the city much better tools to avert selective power failures, and full-scale blackouts.

Two federal agencies have recommended that demand response become an integral component of the nation's energy policy: