I had an interesting talk this week with John Sobota, CEO of Eleven Engineering in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Next week's column will cover a new and very exciting wireless technology Eleven is about to introduce, but this week's column is about the California electric power crisis. What that has to do with Sobota, a Canadian, is that he worked for many years for Alberta's electric utility, managing the transfer and sale of power throughout western Canada. There is a lot California could learn from Alberta.

Alberta has plenty of power, as does British Columbia, its neighbor province to the west. But Alberta's power is generated by burning coal while the electricity for BC comes from its many hydroelectric dams. Both provinces are net sellers of power, but the actual transfer occurs in a way that is different than one might expect. Alberta sells power to British Columbia, which sells power to the United States.

They do this double transfer not because of any structural requirement of the Canadian electrical grid, but because it maximizes their revenue. Like any other state or province, electrical demand in Alberta and British Columbia peaks during the day and is low at night. So most nights, according to Sobota, those coal-fired plants in Alberta provide all the electricity for both provinces. This allows water to back up behind the dams in British Columbia overnight. And when power demand is low enough, Alberta electricity is even used to turn some of those BC generators into pumps at night, running them backward to store even more water in reservoirs above the dams. All this stored water is then available the next day to run the same generators in overdrive, making power that is sold to U.S. western states. By using Alberta power to pump water at night, there is about double the available capacity the next day, right when we need it. Those clever Canadians.

I don't want to say too much about the genesis of this California energy crisis except that it is stupid. As I write these words, a rolling blackout is imminent at my house and, I believe, unnecessary. The utilities say they are bankrupt and beleaguered, but the only thing I know for sure is that I wish their accountants worked for me. So the state — which is to say 39 million other Californians and me — is paying about $25 million per day just to keep the lights on. Suddenly, we are going to build a mess of power plants after a decade of not building any, and electric bills have just jumped by almost 50 percent.

Only power plants can't really be built suddenly, so instead we face possibly years of rolling blackouts and lots of lost business. In Silicon Valley alone, the amount of business lost by this power crisis is supposed to be $21 billion this year alone. Add to that the $15 billion that the state has so far loaned the power companies and we are talking about a LOT of money that doesn't even fix the problem. It only treats the symptom and gets us through to next year when, presumably, the problem will be just as bad or worse.

This is no way to run an energy crisis. Adding $21 billion and $15 billion gives us $36 billion, which I feel ought to be more than enough to cure the whole problem, not just get us through to 2002. And of course I have a solution, which I am about to propose. Alas, the utilities won't like it.

Utilities like building power plants, big ones. The simple idea is that they own the source of power and we pay them as God and Edison intended. The Bush administration likes power plants, too, and hates conservation. On the other side of the argument are folks who say we can conserve enough power to not require any additional plants, but I hate reading by dim lightbulbs. Alternately, I suppose we could put $36 billion worth of photovoltaic cells on our roofs, but I just don't think people would go for that.

My idea is far simpler. I say we adopt a policy similar to the way Alberta and British Columbia manage their power sales by caching power at night and using it during the day. Only I think we should cache the power at peoples' houses.

Looking at the power consumption figures for May 9th, the state had about 35 gigawatts of power available at any moment, and power consumption that varied from a low of 21 gigawatts late at night to the full 35 gigawatts in mid-afternoon. This doesn't include approximately 15 gigawatts of generating capacity that was unavailable due to scheduled maintenance or problems with the plants. Measuring the area over the demand curve shows that, for May 9th, there was a total of about 128 gigawatt-hours of California generating capacity unused during nighttime hours and presumably available for caching.

California already has a program that pays a tax credit for 30 percent of the cost for home power systems that intertie with the utility. These systems generally use solar, wind, or small hydropower and no batteries, since they store their energy on the grid itself. But what if we left off the generators and PV arrays and just used the utilities' own power at night to charge batteries, which could then be discharged during the day? It would be like having a whole house uninterruptible power supply. Many manufacturers like Trace Engineering and Solectrogen sell such setups which presently cost around $5,000 for a 2,500 watt system. For those who calculate these things, that is a capital cost of about $2 per watt, which is less than it costs to build any traditional generating plant of any type or size.

The advantage of putting these little battery and inverter boxes at people's houses is that it requires no environmental impact assessment, no long construction cycle, and not even very much financing compared to what is already going on. If the state of California put two million such boxes to work, it would not only find economies of scale driving down the cost below the expected $10 billion, it would also find itself without an energy crisis. Two million boxes would be like taking four million homes off the grid, which is 10 times the size of any rolling blackout to date. It would eliminate the need for buying extra power at exorbitant spot market rates, and even the need to build extra power plants. It isn't conservation — just more efficient use of the current infrastructure.

But it probably won't ever happen. That's because it wouldn't be politically acceptable. So much hogwash has gone into first deregulating the California power industry, then creating a crisis to take back benefits promised to consumers under law, that a little bit of common sense like this ought to be easy to bury.

Just wait until it happens in your state, then you'll know what I mean.