Posted on 08/15/2003 7:59:24 PM PDT by Mo1
A day after the still-mysterious record blackout that descended upon New York, Canada and the Midwest, about the only thing electricity experts could say for sure today was this:
It could happen again.
But what, exactly, happened?
It will take days or even weeks before engineers determine the cause - or more likely, series of causes, said Michehl R. Gent, president of the North American Electric Reliability Council.
An early sign of trouble Thursday was a wild swing in power in the loop surrounding Lake Erie, Gent said in a conference call from the Princeton headquarters of the nonprofit industry group that oversees the power system.
Shortly after 4 p.m. Thursday, instruments recorded 300 megawatts of power moving eastward toward New York. Then in a sudden change of direction, 500 megawatts surged westward, Gent said. Wild fluctuations continued for 9 seconds at various points in the Northeast.
Gent could not say where the initial trigger occurred - beyond a vague reference to "the Midwest" - or what it was. He ruled out lightning as a possible trigger, contrary to what some utility officials had said earlier, and reiterated that there was no evidence of a deliberate attack on the grid - physical or electronic.
He did, however, blame himself.
"My job is to see that this doesn't happen, and you can say that I failed in my job," Gent said. "That's why I'm upset."
Acceptance of blame aside, actually reconstructing the sequence of events will be more difficult. Over the coming weeks, the council's engineers will sift through hundreds of computer-generated reports from across the power grid, each one containing second-by-second data on voltage and electric current.
Separately, members of Congress vowed to investigate, and the United States and Canada also planned a joint task force to look into the matter. Others, including Gent, called for Congress to give the council authority to regulate its members. This could improve coordination among the nation's power companies, he said.
Whatever the triggering event, industry experts said, that alone would be insufficient to set off a massive blackout. The trigger likely coincided with some other factors, such as transmission lines operating at peak capacity, said engineer Kevin Stamber, who has studied past blackouts for the U.S. Department of Energy at Sandia National Laboratories.
Rapid swings like Thursday's wreak havoc, said David Whiteley, the past chairman of the council's planning committee.
"The power grid does not respond well to very rapid, sudden perturbations," said Whiteley, a senior vice president with Ameren Corp., a St. Louis-based energy company. "It's kind of like a really big animal. It likes to move rather slowly."
Gent said the Northeast had plenty of power when the blackout occurred, using just 75 percent of the available total. Industry experts speculated, however, that transmission lines might have been operating at capacity.
The council requires that power generators maintain adequate reserves. For the lines that carry the electricity to homes and businesses, however, there is no such provision.
"We don't really have the same kind of margin for error," said Elliot Roseman, a consultant in the wholesale power group of ICF Consulting, in Alexandria, Va.
When power lines operate at capacity, one side effect is that any additional power must take a roundabout, more expensive route elsewhere in the grid. In the portion of the grid serving Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland, for example, such congestion cost consumers $271 million in 2002, Roseman said.
In the deregulated energy market, in which different companies own and operate each piece of the electric system, there is less financial reward for building transmission lines than for new power plants.
As a result, there is less capacity to carry the electricity, said Bob Mitchell, executive vice president of Trans-Elect, a Virginia-based energy company. Some lines used to have 30 to 35 percent capacity in reserve, he said.
"Today it's not uncommon to have 10, 15, 20 percent reserves," said Mitchell, who heads a company subsidiary that builds new transmission lines. "In a season of prolonged heat, it stretches the limits of the system."
While President Bush and others advocated a drastic modernization of the power grid, one electrical engineering professor said money would be better spent on electronic monitors to help pinpoint problems more quickly.
Monitoring is so poor right now that it takes weeks to figure out what went wrong, said Mladen Kezunovic of Texas A&M University.
Rebuilding the power grid would cost billions; improved monitoring would cost millions, and would prevent blackouts of more than a few hours, he said.
"No one in his right mind is going to go in and kill something that is still reasonably well working," said Kezunovic, member of a national industry-university cooperative that researches the power system.
"We cannot design . . . so that these things don't happen," he said. "The discussion is more, can we somehow mitigate the impacts? Can I restore power in 10 minutes instead of two days?"
What would cause this???
My own is that the delivery mechanism is old.
The fault was definitely down line in the west. it could be as small as a 10$ part or timer that failed to disconnect a fault from the grid in time to keep the power plants from going into self protection mode.
Did I make sense?
Possible .. But another freeper on a different thread made a comment about wasn't all this equipment suppose to have been updated for Y2K
Weren't they are worried about a major blackout back then and what could happen?
*L* .. yes it did, Thanks
What puzzles me is that this safety stuff is redundant.
In other words a progressively larger section is dropped from the grid. I think this failure will send the engineers into four pot a day overdrive for quite a while.
Help me some more. There is a surge (or wasn't it?) eastward and then a surge westward. Was the initial 300 megawatts of power in response to a demand? Was there too little capacity to handle that? And why exactly would it then surge westward? Was this a reaction to the 300 megawatts. Sorry for what may be ridiculously simple questions.
Most grid systems have modern monitoring gear, but the working end (The Switches) are mechanical/electric vacuum breakers and transfer switches. The get a signal or lose a signal and they operate. They have built in delay timers and re-connects that are simple and uncomplicated for reliability and usually are 99% reliable. (that is why there is built in redundant for the 1%)
The modern stuff is just a shiny version of the old. Something weird happened and I cannot figure what. My guess is that a big power plant dropped off line to soon. A technician could have mis adjusted a trip or a timer failed perhaps.
But the area where the fault was that started the cascade should have dropped from the grid prior to the power plant having to disconnect.
Two years ago, President Bush wanted to upgrade the grid. Which resulted in that stupid Senate non-investigation of Cheny and his choice of energy exect to consult with. The Senate "investigation" died out when media furor turned to other things. Nothing came of it, and no energy policy has been passed.
I agree ..
I'm not an expert in this area .. but is it normal to have such a westward swing like what was mentioned?
It may be that most of the blackout happened in the first nine seconds with several systems on the edge struggling to maintain power for a minute or two.
Yes, but shouldn't there be more trigger/switches/whatever to have stopped this from being hit buy so many areas? .. They all seemed to have failed till it hit Valley Forge
Best thing is to forget the term cuz it is really meaningless.
As I understood the article, the data likely came from a monitoring station at a power tranfer station near NY.
The guy said they were importing power at a 300 million watt rate and the it reversed so they were exporting at 500 million.
All that says is that the problem was not in NY. That about it. The term surge in electric jargon only means someone opened the faucet real fast.
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