Posted on 08/15/2003 8:05:03 AM PDT by syriacus
Yesterday's widespread blackouts stretching from New York to the Great Lakes and parts of Canada originated in a power system owned by Westborough-based National Grid USA.
Niagara Mohawk Power Corp., based in Syracuse, N.Y., was one of several energy providers knocked out of service yesterday after a massive power surge crippled power grids around New York City, Detroit, Cleveland, Toronto and Ottawa and parts of Massachusetts. Preliminary reports from affected areas tied the blackout's origins to the Mohawk-Niagara line.
In January 2002, National Grid USA acquired Niagara Mohawk, which provides electricity to nearly 1.5 million customers in upstate New York, for around $3 billion.
A National Grid USA spokeswoman said the company was investigating the matter and was not prepared to issue a comment.
National Grid USA, a subsidiary of London-based National Grid Transco, has the largest power-supply network -- 12,000 miles of transmission lines and 72,000 miles of distribution lines -- in the New England and New York region.
National Grid, which also owns Massachusetts Electric covering the central and western parts of the state, serves about 1.7 million customers in New England alone.
The blackouts conjured memories of the "Great Northeast Blackout" of 1965, when the failure of a backup power grid in Ontario turned the lights out on nearly 30 million people in eight U.S. states, including Massachusetts, and northeastern Canada. Many people, mostly in New York City, went without power for nearly 13 hours.
National Grid conducted a press conference in Syracuse NY regarding the power outages that affected service on Thursday, August 14, 2003.
A digital replay is available until 11:00 p.m. Friday, August 15, 2002 by calling:
U.S. 877-519-4471, Pin Number: 4124370
Outside U.S. 001-973-341-3080
http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=NW_1-T&oldflok=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20030815%2F094506487.htm&sc=1110&photoid=20030814OHMD105
I think it will be weeks if not months prior to our learning all the real details of what really caused the problem.
When the first east coast blackout hit, the real hero turned out to be a dispatcher who watched the frequency go down and rather than riding down with the system, disconnected from the grid and let it go down, while keeping his own load control center up and going. That move helped provide a small amount of power that allowed other areas to come back much more quickly.
My feeling for quite a while has been that people haven't been really paying attention to "load control areas" and being prepared to "island" their electrical systems from the grid. I think that when the dust settles, those who have been leaning on the grid will be much more at risk to future blackouts, as dispatchers will be more willing to "pull the plug" and allow a system to go down rather than risk having a neighboring electric system pull themselves down into a possible regional blackout.
I guess every 30 years or so we need to relearn the leasons of the past.
Ultimately, this is going to be very bad news for the way the California ISO has been operating in the WestCoast Market. The Cal ISO is going to have to quickly clean up its act on maintaining proper reserve requirements as neighboring utilities after yesterday are going to be much less likely to keep supporting them and risk loosing the west coast.
You wrote: dispatchers will be more willing to "pull the plug" and allow a system to go down rather than risk having a neighboring electric system pull themselves down into a possible regional blackout.
It looks like Pataki agrees with you (though he is a little late in discussing this idea)
Power Outage May Have Started in Ohio
Still, Pataki has said the systematic failure should never have happened and said operators of the sprawling grid owe the public answers. He said the cascading problem should have been isolated by safeguards in the system. ``That just did not happen,'' he said.
It is not so easy to disconnect. The main reason for interconnecting vast geographic areas together is so that power from areas where it is inexpensive can be transmitted to areas where it is more expensive to generate.
So when an incident occurs, if you simply disconnect the sub-networks, the balance of generation versus consumption in any given subnetwork can be vastly out of balance. In the subnets where generation it too high, you run the risk of generators over-speeding and tripping their emergency shutdown. In the subnets where consumption is too high, you get possible brown out or collapse before additonal generators can be brought on line.
Ultimately, this is going to be very bad news for the way the California ISO has been operating in the WestCoast Market. The Cal ISO is going to have to quickly clean up its act on maintaining proper reserve requirements as neighboring utilities after yesterday are going to be much less likely to keep supporting them and risk loosing the west coast.
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