Posted on 08/17/2003 7:33:34 AM PDT by Brian S
On September 1, 2000, ATSI became the first electric transmission subsidiary of an investor-owned utility in the United States. FirstEnergy Corp. transferred ownership and control of its electric utility operating companies' transmission system assets to ATSI, a wholly owned subsidiary of FirstEnergy.
See also: Alliance RTO
The Alliance Regional Transmission Organization (AllianceRTO) is a for-profit organization proposed by FirstEnergy, Amercan Electric Power, Consumers Energy, Detroit Edison and Virginia Power, that will own and/or operate the transmission systems of several companies.
And BTW, if the NYT is so concerned about reliability of their power system, why don't they interview the NY Public Service Commission, which has prevented the State of NY from joining a Regional Transmission Organization designed to prevent these sorts of things?
I BLAME ALGORE!
2 p.m. FirstEnergy Corp.'s Eastlake Unit 5, a 680-megawatt coal generation plant in Eastlake, Ohio, trips off. This is just east of Cleveland on lake Eire.
Beginning at 3:06 four 345 KV transmission lines in the Cleveland area fail, the last at 3:46. First Energy appears to be disconnected from American Electric Power to the South in Ohio.
At 4:06 p.m. FirstEnergy's Sammis-Star 345-kilovolt line, also in northeast Ohio, trips, then reconnects.
4:08 p.m. Utilities in Canada and the eastern United States see wild power swings. One wonders whether the trip and reconnect wasn't the real problem. If this occurs with the right timing, it may deliver much more of a shock to the rest of the network than simply disconnecting.
4:10 p.m. The Campbell No. 3 coal-fired power plant near Grand Haven, Mich., trips off. This plant is far to the west on the shores of Lake Michigan west of Grand Rapids. The loss of 800 MW may have been what made the incident unrecoverable, and it will be interesting to know why this plant tripped. Was there a first westward surge of power that had nowhere to go when it reached Lake Michigan?
4:11 p.m. Orion Avon Lake Unit 9, a coal-fired power plant in Avon Lake, Ohio, trips. This plant is in west suburban Cleveland.
4:11 p.m. The Perry Unit 1 nuclear reactor in Perry, Ohio, shuts down automatically after losing power. This is just east of Cleveland.
4:11 p.m. The FitzPatrick nuclear reactor in Oswego, N.Y., shuts down automatically after losing power. Oswego is at the Southeastern corner of Lake Ontario. This is a very long way from Grand Haven MI, but there seems to have been a surge of power eastward across Michigan, Ontario, and New York.
It appears that the nuclear plants are very "nervous", and are now programmed to trip off immediately upon sensing "disturbances" on the grid. Although Eastlake, Grand Haven, and Avon Lake, the first three to trip, were all coal-fired, what followed is a cascade of nuclear plants going off-line whether they really needed to or not. This sensistivity appears to be what led to the widespread blackout.
4:12 p.m. The Bruce Nuclear station in Ontario, Canada; Rochester Gas & Electric's Ginna nuclear plant near Rochester, N.Y.; and Nine Mile Point nuclear reactor near Oswego, N.Y., all shut down automatically after losing power.
4:15 p.m. FirstEnergy's Sammis-Star 345-kilovolt line, in northeast Ohio, trips and reconnects a second time.
4:16 p.m. Oyster Creek nuclear plant in Forked River, N.J., shuts down automatically because of power fluctuations on the grid. This is 10 minutes after the first trip-reset of the Sammis-Star and the blackout is now at its full geographic extent.
It looks to me like:
- the lack of alarm displays at First Energy resulted in the operators letting the problems caused by Eastlake tripping get out of hand.
- the Midwest system operator, which had the backup alarm display, may not have been notified that they were now responsible.
- the trip-reset twice of the Sammis-Star line is a bad thing and may indicate a malfunctioning relay.
- the grid is not simply a bunch of DC batteries and light bulbs hooked together; it is a giant oscillator (albeit a low-frequency one), and it obeys Maxwell's equations whether politicians like it or not.
- the emergency actions by the nuclear plants are guaranteed to turn any medium sized problem into a total collapse of the system.
FirstEnergy is part of the Midwest ISO, a Regional Transmission organization. It didn't help.
Once 3 major sources from the south into the Cleveland area were tripped out of service, there was more than a medium-sized problem. Whether it was the MISO's responsibility or not, steps should have been taken when the second line tripped. I'm having a little trouble with the assertion that the alarming didn't work, but that the EMS was still in operation. Something stinks there. I guess it could happen, but that's quite odd. The alarms are brought through the same paths that bring all other substation and plant data, and are displayed by the same energy management computer.
- the trip-reset twice of the Sammis-Star line is a bad thing and may indicate a malfunctioning relay.
Since most line faults are transient in nature, the normal design is to reclose the breaker. If the fault still exists, the line will retrip immediately and lock open. I'm suspecting line sag here as well, with a momentary flashover tripping the line, then it recloses automatically. Normally, this kind of operation is not a problem.
In this particular case, since the system was already weakened significantly, this operation may have started the oscillations around the "lake Erie loop". The Sammis - Star line, in light of the Star-south Canton line already being out, represents the only direct path from Cleveland to the generation-rich Ohio valley. I'm certain that it was loaded very high, given the shortage of generation along lake Erie, even before the event began.
Good post, by the way. I would wait for more information before making the final assertion that the nukes came off line before the grid split - I have the frequency chart from that day and it indicates a greater loss of load than the amount of generation lost. I suspect that when more data comes in from other sources, we'll see that a ton of circuits opened up just after the power oscillations began.
FERC is trying to create a "super ISO" - the NERTO, but New York State refuses to join.
They're supposed to do that. Have you never experienced the power going off...then a 5 second time delay and it flickers on again...then another 5 second time delay and one more flicker before it goes off completely?
This is how the automatic reclosers work. They try to restore service three times before giving up.
I have issues with the way the grid is run nowdays - the responsibility, risks, and rewards are all misaligned. Marketers are financially rewarded for overselling the transmission grid, ISO's are supposed to be responsible, but the buck stops at the system dispatcher/operator who assumes all the risk when things go awry. Notice how the the ISO isn't even mentioned in most articles.
I used to work for FirstEnergy as a system dispatcher/operator. I left 2 1/2 years ago. I saw a problem coming down the pipe, though I didn't think it would affect half the stinkin' grid. Spent a little too much time micromanaging electricians and substation operators, and too little time watching the grid.
I used to work for PG&E out west, and they had a vertically-integrated system which worked really well. They were in charge of generation, transmission, and distribution, and it worked really well until the politicians got involved.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.