Vacation Home Buying; The Perfect Pet; Power Supply.

(From CNN News)

Byline: Gerri Willis

GERRI WILLIS, CNN HOST: Power to the people or not. Why your power supply might be at risk right now. And you'll learn how to buy that dream vacation home for the right price. How to pick the perfect pet for your family and your house. Good morning, everybody. I'm Gerri Willis and this is "OPEN HOUSE." All right. It may not be 100 degrees anymore but power problems continue to heat up across the country. Folks in New York, Missouri, and California had to live without electricity for some time this week. And it's not even august. This has many of us asking just how reliable is the nation's power supply?

Power out for days on end, sweltering temperatures with no air conditioning, food rotting in refrigerators, thrown out in the trash. That's the situation this week in parts of the country. A heat wave and summer storms created electrical chaos. In St. Louis, 600,000 people lost power. And a week after the first storm more than 100,000 people were still suffering. They threw out more than 60 tons of spoiled food.

In New York, power company officials haven't said what caused 100,000 queens residents to lose electricity. But nine days later some residents were just getting the lights back on.

In Los Angeles, officials say high temperatures fueled high demand. And transformers couldn't handle it. More than 1.5 million folks were left in the dark and the heat.

PAUL MORENO, PACIFIC GAS AND ELECTRIC: The issue hasn't been with power supply. Back in the energy crisis, people remember the rotating outages. That was done because there wasn't simply enough electricity available. The issue we had recently is locally the infrastructure has been taxed with very heavy usage of electricity in very hot weather.

WILLIS: It raises questions why can't the grid handle the heat? How long will we have to worry about losing electricity? And what would it take to shape up our nation's power supply?

Joseph Kellaher is one of the people responsible for making sure you get power. He's the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Welcome, chairman. JOSEPH KELLAHER, DIRECTOR, FEDERAL ENERGY REGULATORY COMMISSION: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

WILLIS: We're glad to have you here today. And we've got lots of questions. The biggest one is why can't we get this right? I mean we can put people on the moon I can't use my dishwasher right now.

KELLAHER: Well, I think it's important to recognize what happened over the past two weeks. The past two weeks we've seen record levels of electricity demand in six parts of the country occurring simultaneously. And in California, we have seen California set three records for electricity demand all in the space of a week. So demand is sky high. And it really is the biggest test of the reliability of our electricity system since the August 2003 black-outs.

WILLIS: But is it really just an issue of increased demand? Or is increased demand showing us that there are problems with the system?

KELLAHER: I think we have to plan for increased demand. We have to build enough electricity power plants to provide the supply that consumers need. We also need a strong interstate grid to move the power to where it is needed. Those are two areas where we need to improve.

…