Gov't: N.Y. Power Outages Not Terrorism-Related

Reuters ^ | Reuters

[mdittmar]

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Thursday said that a massive power outage that hit New York City and other East Coast cities was not caused by a terror attack.

Power outages were reported in the New York metropolitan area and Detroit, as well as in Toronto and Ottawa, witnesses said.

The outage was caused by an outage at a Manhattan power plant which destabilized the power grid as far as Canada, FERC spokesman Bryan Lee said.

"We have no indication that there is any terrorism involved," Lee said.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

***I also heard the other way around, that the Niagara-Mohawk powergrid overloaded, and that
caused the plant in NY to shut down automatically, and this shut down caused the plant to
release smoke.****

Actually, when a plant trips off line the fires are automaticly extinguished so no smoke is produced (and their electrostatic precipitators should stop any "smoke"), The boiler pressure increases and due to the residual heat will cause the pop valves to lift allowing excess steam to vent to atmosphere. This is often mistaken for smoke. Example, in one tv movie (CENTENNIAL) a common cooling tower producing steam is passed off as smoke pollution.

[TheSpottedOwl]

Thanks, also keep emergency supplies in the trunk...even if your area never gets snow.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

I remember the evacuation problem. Years ago, I heard a speech by the retired chairman of Long Island Lighting. He said the state of New York did every thing they could to prevent the plant from be built.

[TheSpottedOwl]

I don't know what you call major roads back there, but I live in SoCal and we call them freeways. There are so many bridges that I don't know which one they're showing now, but thousands of people are walking across it. Looks like at least a half million people have gathered to catch a ferry. Don't doubt that terrorists aren't watching this with interest : (

[mdittmar]

Tesla did ac,I thought he had some other "perpetual motion","zero point energy" thing.

Always associated Tesla with "free energy",man I really have to read more.

[BohDaThone]

"outage" is indeed the general term that is used for anything that takes a power plant off line. A planned outage means refueling, maintenance, replacement, etc. An "unplanned" outage could be anything from a breakage somewhere in a turbine, a lightning strike, a big accident, a terrorist attack, whatever.

There are contingency plans to keep a simple accident from taking down the whole system, and virutally all the time they work. Sometimes they don't.

After the 1965 and 1977 massive East Coast blackouts, there were extensive investigations, just like after a plane crash, (And, yes, there are voice recordings of the various control rooms -- the tapes of the 1977 blackout, largely caused by an operator not following the plan, are hilarious, if not somewhat tragic).

Electrical grids are very complex systems, and, in a sense, it is a "miracle" -- caused by human ingenuity every day, that it hangs together 99.99% of the time. We'll see what the after action investigation shows this time.

SAMPLE CONVERSATION from 1977: Operator 1: (Not in NYC) -- Yep, he's down the dumper.

Operator 2: I told him to shed load -- my needles are all flat (no power going in to NYC).

Operator 3: I agree -- he's down the dumper.

[The operators were people on the grid operating team, in Maryland, Canada, or whereever, who were trying to feed more power to make up for the loss when lighting took out a connection point north of NYC. The plan called for NYC to blackout some parts of the city, to help out -- However, the big boss was home in Queens, and the on the spot operator was too timid to either take action or call the boss at home -- result -- no load was cut, and NYC dragged the whole system down, as the lost power couldn't be replaced fast enough -- the other suppliers finally had to cut off NYC to keep their own systems from going down, too.]

[Iscool]

Well explain to us Gigawatt Guru; how is it that when the guy (or lady) at the power station sees the amp meter rising and it's time to pick up some extra power off the grid, or, kick in the stand-by turbine(s) (there are always stand-bys) that he failed to flip the switch...

The failed plant should have isolated itself...The fact that one third of the United States can lose all it's electricity by losing one plant is ridiculous...There's more to this than meets the eye...I'm not suggesting terrorism but something is seriously wrong...

[Grassontop]

Blame Hildebeast Clinton for the power outage! She blew her nose to hard!

[sheik yerbouty]

No, it is SERIES!

[Political Junkie Too]

Does this make it harder for Gov. Davis to blame his woes on Enron? Enron wasn't responsible for the NYC overload but the power went out there. Perhaps similar conditions were responsible for outages in California, too. I recall Davis asking why other locales weren't experiencing the problems that California was, and using that as proof to blame the energy companies for manipulation.

Just a thought...

-PJ

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

*****Well explain to us Gigawatt Guru; how is it that when the guy (or lady) at the power station
sees the amp meter rising and it's time to pick up some extra power off the grid, or, kick in
the stand-by turbine(s) (there are always stand-bys) that he failed to flip the switch... ****

Your head is up your A$$. We produce the power, the DISPATCHER sends it to where it needs to go (unless we are on load control then the dispatcher raises and lowers the load on the plant remotly). If he needs more power he calls us to increase or decrease load. We have no standby generators here.
If there is a fault on the line protective circuitry will open connections to try to isolate the fault. often this fails.

As for one third of the us loosing power at one time, look at what happened a few years ago in the western section of the US. A power plant in Las Vegas tripped off. This caused a series cascading trips that caused most of the western part of the US to loose power.
And NO, we can not send power to other areas out of our power pool as the SYNCRONIZATION may be different( unless you have a HVDC rectifier system for interconnections.)

[Iscool]

We produce the power, the DISPATCHER sends it to where it needs to go (unless we are on load control then the dispatcher raises and lowers the load on the plant remotly). If he needs more power he calls us to increase or decrease load.

And if you can't pump out enough juice for the dispatcher, he then will make the connection to get what he needs off the grid...This is correct, isn't it??? And assuming that is correct, there should have been plenty of time to make the switch and avoid the power outage... I've never seen a power plant with only one generator...And I've never seen a power plant with all generators running at the same time (except at companies that had their own small powerplants)...

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

**And if you can't pump out enough juice for the dispatcher, he then will make the connection
to get what he needs off the grid...This is correct, isn't it?***

Wrong again! When we have everything running at full load and there is a need for more power the dispatcher must BUY the power from other companies that are interconnected with us on the SPOT power market and it is NOT cheap! If no power is available then get prepared for rolling blackouts in which areas are disconnected for a short period to make the available power go around. There is not a limitless supply of power out there!

[spookycc]

I know nothing about electricity, but it sounds like you know yer stuff. If so, thanks for shedding light (no blackout pun intended) on the subject! :-)

[BureaucratusMaximus]

The government cannot prevent a loss of power.

While most of what you said has alot of merit to it...I must somewhat disagree here. Government cannot prevent a loss of power, but government can (and has) create unfavorable conditions for the energy industry which result in less profitability, capacity, and maintainability. This is a result of your Clintonista leftovers at the DOE, NRC, and EPA; as well as the ongoing appeasement of environmental groups, and acceptance of your usual strand of government sponsored (and funded) junk science (i.e. global warming and nuclear "fill in the blank" is bad so lets not build or use coal burning power plants, build new nuke plants etc.) In an indirect way, he has a valid complaint; I just can't figure out what the Patriot Act has to do with it.