SACRAMENTO -- Traffic jams don't just occur on freeways as the California Independent System Operator announced Wednesday that they have mitigated the number of jams on a major state power grid.

Improvements and upgrades made to the power grid in June have started paying off big dividends, as power remained steady through the high-temperature month of July, Stephanie McCorkle, spokeswoman for the California ISO, said.

The bottlenecks on the grid, or jams, are caused when the demand for electricity in the state is greater then the grid can produce, according to McCorkle.

The demand in California is growing twice as fast here then anywhere else," McCorkle said. "So, like a freeway, we added more lanes to the grid to clear the congestion."

The seemingly basic act of adding more lanes to the grid, according to McCorkle, dropped the cost of bottlenecking expenditures by 58 percent, the California ISO reported.

In all the state went from spending $205 million during the first seven months of 2004, to $87 million for the same time period this year, the California ISO reported.

Because of bottlenecking on the grid energy flow is halted causing to California ISO to use backup generators in various areas to deliver energy to selected areas, the California ISO reported.

According to McCorkle, it was cheaper for the state to pay an up front fee to fix the grid then to have to constantly fall back on the other generators.

"By July we were really reaping the benefits, and the changes paid big dividends," McCorkle said.

Upgrades made to the grid include a series of three projects increased the number of megawatts the grid produced in Southern California by 1,000, the California ISO reported.

Two energy transmission lines and one grid were expanded, including the north-south transmission line, a line connecting the Miguel substation in Chula Vista to the Mission substation in Mission Valley, and the expansion of the Victorville/Norco/Ontario grid.

According to McCorkle the overall goal of these changes is to provide more reliability for customers while reducing the cost at the same time.