Posted on 08/15/2003 2:03:18 AM PDT by swilhelm73
Hours after the blackout hit, officials were still puzzled late Thursday about what caused the system to fail, with investigators concentrating on areas in neighboring Canada and upstate New York.
American officials were skeptical about a Canadian claim that lightning triggered the cascade of events when it hit a power plant on the U.S. side of Niagara Falls. Some industry officials and meteorologists also discounted lightning.
“ It’s completely false,” said WOKR-TV (Channel 13) meteorologist Glenn Johnson. Johnson said his computers and those at the National Weather Service determined the closest lightning strike in the last 24 hours was in Illinois or Maryland.
The White House said there was no indication that terrorism was involved. President Bush said Thursday night, “ We’ll find out why (it happened) and we’ll deal with the problem.”
Whatever happened, the power disruption, which caused havoc from New England to Michigan, is certain to revive the debate over the reliability of an aging electricity transmission system.
“ More lines clearly need to be built,” said Jim Owen, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, which represents the investor-owned electric utilities.
Former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said the nation’s power grid is antiquated.
“ We’re the world’s greatest superpower, but we have a Third World electricity grid,” said Richardson, governor of New Mexico.
An energy bill before Congress would allow federal regulators to step in and direct transmission siting if states or regions were unable to do so. But that provision has been opposed by many lawmakers.
Power was returning slowly in the affected areas, but industry officials said that more than 20 power plants — including nine nuclear reactors — were forced to shut down and that it could take from a few hours, in the case of gas-fired plants, to more than 12 hours, in case of the nuclear plants, to get them back into operation. If power is restored too quickly after an outage, it could cause a surge in demand and trigger another system failure, energy experts said.
While high temperatures and humidity across the Northeast caused electricity use to surge Thursday, the increased demand was not putting extreme strain on the system, some officials said.
Matthew Melewski, a spokesman for the New York Independent System Operator, the organization that manages the state’s electricity grid, said demand across the state was about 29,000 megawatts, several thousand megawatts below the system’s capacity, when the blackout hit at 4:11 p.m.
The Canadian claim, by a spokesman for Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, was that the blackout probably began with a lightning strike on part of a power plant in the Niagara region of upstate New York.
But New York Gov. George Pataki called the claim untrue and said the Niagara Falls power plant has worked perfectly. “ That’s how we kept power on in western New York,” he said on CNN’s Larry King Live.
Brian Warner of the New York Power Authority also said the plant never stopped working. “ We also have not experienced a lightning strike at that facility,” he said.
Michehl Gent, president of the industry-sponsored North American Electric Reliability Council, said it was “ virtually impossible” for a lighting strike to cause such a widespread power failure.
“ It happened in about 9 seconds,” said Gent on CNN. “ The system is supposed to be designed so that doesn’t happen.” He said it is essential to find out why the grid collapse occurred so rapidly and was so widespread, with a loss of 10 percent of the electricity flowing east of the Rocky Mountains.
The Energy Department issued a statement saying it was working with a variety of federal, state, regional and industry groups “ to assess the situation” and determine a cause.
Steven Whitley, chief operating officer of ISO-New England, which manages that region’s grid, said the disturbance appeared to be triggered by an event somewhere on the transmission line between New York and Ontario but that the exact failure had not been determined.
“ Preliminarily we’re looking at this as a possible transmission problem from Canada to the U.S.,” said Pataki’s spokeswoman, Lisa Dewald Stoll. She said the problem appeared to be in Canada, but she had no details.
Phillip Harris, president of the PJM power grid system, which serves seven states in the mid-Atlantic region, said the grid “ experienced a frequency shift” at 4:11 p.m., causing “ a flow of power northward out of New York.”
Harris said it was too early to determine what trigged the sequence of events but that automatic safeguards prevented the problem from spreading farther south and west, although some parts of his system — in New Jersey and northeastern Pennsylvania — were affected.
“ For some reason there was a power failure in northern New York or southern Canada. That cascaded down through the system,” said New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Officials said it was important to find a cause and rectify any shortcomings that may have led to the failure.
“ We don’t want this ever to happen, but it did and we have to find out why,” said Whitney, the New England grid management group spokesman.
Those are my exact thoughts. First it was a lightning strike in the Niagra Falls area, then a fire in a Nuclear Power Plant in another state. And who put this info out. Our lying neighbors to the north. Something happened in Canada and they're hiding it.
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