Village sees power outage

Morgan Smith was studying when her sorority house lost power a couple of weeks ago.

“I was OK, because I just had to read,” Smith, a third-year political science student, said.

She and other students were able read by crowding around the emergency lights in the hallway.

But other students that needed to use their computers or connect to the Internet were not so lucky.

The most recent outage occurred at about 4:30 p.m. on Feb. 8, when an underground circuit caused about 1,200 customers in the Westwood area to lose power, Brooks Baker of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said.

Though there have been outages in Westwood, none have occurred on campus.

Power was restored to affected areas within two hours.

“It’s highly unlikely that all 1,200 (customers) were out for the entire two hours,” Baker said.

The Daily Bruin has heard of three recent outages in the Westwood area, including the one on Feb. 8, but power company officials were unable to confirm or provide any additional information on these other outages.

Jan-Christian Hansen, a third-year economics exchange student from Germany was studying for midterms in his apartment on Landfair Avenue during this most recent power outage.

It did not affect him that much because he, like many other students, kept on studying until it got dark and then went out to get dinner, he said.

Electricity for UCLA’s campus, however, is more reliable than the power supplied to Westwood.

A cogeneration plant next to the hospital generates about 42 megawatts, or roughly 70 to 75 percent of the total power that the UCLA campus consumes. There are 1,000 kilowatts in each megawatt.

The remainder is supplied by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said David Johnson, director of Energy Services and Utilities.

About two kilowatts power a house at its full capacity, or with all appliances and lights switched on.

UCLA has a set of back-up plans that make it unlikely that buildings on campus will ever experience blackouts.

If a large-scale power outage were to hit the Westwood area, the cogenerator’s 42 megawatts would be directed toward essential campus buildings, like the hospital, while power to less important facilities, such as classrooms and housing, would be shut off.

This only happened after the Northridge Earthquake in 1994, Johnson said.

If the cogenerator were to stop for any reason, the power company would automatically take over and no one would notice, he said.

Surges, or sudden changes in voltage, are more common than outages, Johnson said.

A surge causes lights to flicker, but it can also interfere with equipment, stop elevators or trip fans.

After a surge in voltage, Facilities Management sends workers to check equipment throughout campus to make sure, for example, that nobody is stuck in an elevator, Johnson said.

The cogeneration plant also helps UCLA work toward its energy efficiency goals.

Before the cogeneration plant was constructed, about 60 percent of the energy consumed in generating power was lost as heat, Johnson said.

In the early 1990s, with the completion of the new plant, the campus nearly doubled its energy efficiency. Waste heat is now channeled to a heat recovery system that generates steam for use around the UCLA campus.

The plant runs on 93 percent natural gas.

The remaining 7 percent of the energy comes from gas from an old Los Angeles City dump.

The cogeneration system is much more efficient than the previous system, Johnson said.