Electricity

It was a control room like all the rest, an almost sterile cavern buried deep within a beige, nondescript building. It had no windows. A color-coded plot plan of the "system" stretched across three walls. A handful of men in slacks and shirt sleeves sat at consoles, pushing a button or two, watching data flash across video screens. At times they would speak laconically to one another over the somnolent whir of computer fans. It was a shorthand not easily deciphered by outsiders.

As some of the state's largest industries mount the year's most intense lobbying effort, the Assembly on Friday approved legislation that would transform how Californians buy electricity. A final vote in the Senate is expected to take place today. Working with many of the Capitol's highest-priced lobbyists and most-powerful interests, state Sen. Steve Peace (D-El Cajon) has put together a phone book-size bill.

Five months after they last got paid, the miners of the Russian Far East are beginning to starve. By Friday, all 10,000 of them had stopped work--not, they say, out of ill will but simply because they are just too weak to handle the tough conditions underground. No coal is being extracted. The region's power plant workers, themselves unpaid for months, also are refusing to operate the stations that supply electricity to the factories, homes and port of the local capital, Vladivostok.

Will the state's geothermal, solar and wind power companies survive electric power deregulation? The expected passage this weekend of the historic deregulation bill AB 1890 will do more than open the state's electricity markets to free competition and over time give consumers a choice who they buy power from.

New Energy Ventures, a Pasadena energy marketer, said Tuesday that it has purchased up to $500 million in electrical power from a federal agency for resale in California, the opening shot by independent power companies vying to position themselves in the state's soon-to-be-deregulated electric power industry.

With temperatures expected to push into the low 90s today, Southern California Edison officials concerned about overtaxing the system have recommended that from noon to 6 p.m., customers cut back use of large appliances such as washers, dryers and--perhaps most onerous--large fans and air conditioners. The utility's customers, including 1.

With temperatures expected to push into the low 90s today, Southern California Edison officials concerned about overtaxing the system have recommended that customers cut back from noon to 6 p.m. use of large appliances such as washers, dryers and--perhaps most onerous--large fans and air conditioners. The utility's customers, including 1.

The metallic box the size of a large dumpster once provided on-board power for spacecrafts on the way to the moon. So why shouldn't the fuel cell developed for NASA generate pollution-free heat and electricity for hospitals, hotels and factories? That's the question a team of engineers and scientists, who worked with the technology when it was still classified, is trying to answer. Refugees from a shrinking defense industry, the founders of Energy 2000 Inc.

Retired English teacher Anna Kerr looked lovingly at the tan and maize map of Malawi on the wall in her Hollywood church office, as one would a priceless treasure. "I can hardly wait to get to Embangweni," she said, pointing to the small town in Malawi, one of the world's poorest countries, where malnutrition and diseases kill a third of the children before age 5.

Tightening the knot on the Montana "freemen," the FBI cut off power Monday to the anti-government group's remote Montana ranch and swooped a helicopter low over the heart of the compound before easing back again to wait. In their most aggressive step yet to end the 71-day-old standoff in northeastern Montana, law enforcement officials switched off the electricity at 2 p.m.