Disregard for Standards Marked Run-Up to Blackout; Task Force Calls for New Rules

AP via TBO ^ | April 5, 2004 | H. Josef Hebert

[John W]

WASHINGTON (AP) - Disregard for voluntary rules intended to ensure the flow of electricity opened the way for last summer's blackout in eight states and Canada, investigators said Monday in their final report. They urged government standards with teeth to ward off future outages. There was a clear understanding long before the blackout last August that the Ohio region where the problems began was highly vulnerable to grid instability, said the report from a joint U.S.-Canada task force.

Had the situation been properly addressed, the cascading blackout that sped across states from Michigan to New York and into Canada probably would have been averted, the report concluded. Something as simple as shutting off 200 megawatts of power an hour before the blackout might have kept the problem from spreading, investigators said.

But FirstEnergy Corp., the Ohio utility whose lines initially failed, had little understanding of its own power transmission system because it had not carried out the recommended long-term planning and safeguards - and backup monitoring system - that it needed, the report said.

Many of those safeguards and procedures aimed at detecting and responding to potentially devastating system problems, were outlined - but also ignored - under voluntary industry standards that were in place, said the report.

Investigators said they found at least seven violations of industry-sponsored North America Electric Reliability Council (NERC) reliability rules linked to the blackout.

The task force, created by the U.S. and Canadian governments to examine the nation's worst blackout, urged creation of mandatory government reliability standards with penalties for those who violate them. NERC, which issues the voluntary standards, has no enforcement authority.

It's been eight months since the blackout, and Congress has yet to act on any measures that might improve grid reliability. Provisions to establish mandatory rules on the electricity industry have been caught up in a partisan fight over broader energy legislation.

In a statement responding to the task force conclusions, Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., who has struggled for 15 months to push an energy bill through Congress, said the report "clearly says this blackout could have been avoided." He said provisions in his energy bill address many of the shortcomings cited by the task force.

But some Democrats said Congress should not wait for agreement on broad energy legislation and address the electricity reliability issue immediately.

There's no reason to "let this ... get stuck in a political quagmire" of the energy bill, said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who is a co-sponsor of a stand-along electricity reliability measure.

In its 228-page report, the U.S-Canadian task force - as it did in an interim report released in November - leveled much of the blame for the Aug. 14 power outage on FirstEnergy Corp., whose line failures south of Cleveland triggered a voltage imbalance that sent the system out of control, according to investigators.

FirstEnergy has argued that there were other problems in the region, too, but the task force has examined those claims and largely rejected them.

Long before the blackout, "there was clear experience and evidence that the Cleveland-Akron areas was highly vulnerable to voltage instability problems," said the task force. While the system could operate, neither FirstEnergy nor the regional monitoring organization overseeing the grid were prepared to assess or address unforeseen emergencies.

FirstEnergy had "not conducted the long-term and operational planning studies needed to understand those vulnerabilities and their operational implications," said the task force. The report cited at least seven violations by FirstEnergy and the regional system monitor of industry standards that investigators linked to events leading up to the blackout.

An hour before the blackout began its rapid cascade, FirstEnergy still could have saved the day if it had known what was going on, the seven-month investigation found.

Had FirstEnergy reduced its power demand by cutting off juice to some customers in the hour before the outage, "the blackout probably would have been averted or remained local," said Alison Silverstein, one of the lead investigators and an official at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

[Cboldt]

Final Report re: Aug 2003 Blackout <-- Link

Caution - it's 7 megabytes

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[hoot2]

what a bunch of b.s.
the government knows less about energy than 'first energy'.
frequency relays automatically separate degrading systems from stable ones.
a good system operator would notice when the freq went to 59.9; he'd grab his big red book; n be prepared for whatever happened next...
n none of it has anything to do with government or long-term and operational planning studies...