Texas is the only smart state.
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?"
Safety steps stopped spread of outage.
Technicians in Valley Forge saw the sudden power surge. Circuit breakers tripped. And within four minutes, the electricity grid that serves Pennsylvania and New Jersey had clamped off the spike that blacked out much of the Northeast today, shielding Philadelphia and points south from the disruption
Well, yes there are. Hundreds of them in a grid that big.
The situation went on for too long and the grid destabilized. When that happens the power plant have to drop off to protect their generators. (They can be seriously damaged)
The generator has to have a stable frequency on the grid or they will fight it and destroy themselves, not to mention all the related equipment.
So when they report that the nuke plants did an auto shut down .. it wasn't really .. a tech would have to shut down it?
This is precicely what should have happened near the original fault, where ever that is.
Human error might be involved. I await the findings.
Blackout Shows Vulnerability of Nation
Larry Brown, one of the institute officials who advises the government on electric grid vulnerabilities, said there are three reasons that better facilities have not been built: the cost, environmental opposition and the unwillingness of communities to locate such facilities near homes.
Brown said the energy bill now before Congress would provide needed financial incentives. But that will not stop lawsuits by environmentalists or local opposition.
"Things like this can wake people up to the reality that society relies on electricity, and expects electricity to be reliable. But reliability depends on facilities," he said.
That is a lot of plants to go down
This is not really odd at all. It is the result of a destabilized grid.
Everyone connected to it would experience a variety of problems. As a generator picks up an overload it slows. Instruments detect it and adjust but the frequency begins to wobble or WOW(some call it)
If you add the fact that there are dozens of plant of all different sizes and loads on the grid, it really makes a mess of the voltage and frequency. This is destabilization and this is why the plants had to disconnect.
It should not happen over a wide area like this. The fault should have dropped of before this happened.
Maybe there is hope of saving Social Security for a few more years *L*
Not sure, but I think it was Erie that caught it forst.
Texas is the only smart state.
Yeah, it takes two days. I believe it takes two days for the coal-fired plants too. I understand your concern. Right now, I don't think this was terrorist related, though it'll no doubt give terrorists ideas.
Ok, thanks for clearing that up
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