Posted on 08/15/2003 10:31:25 AM PDT by Squawk 8888
(AP) - The largest power blackout in North American history prompted new calls Friday for overhauling the U.S. electricity system. Investigators said the power disruptions likely began in the Midwest but they have yet to pinpoint the cause.
They are now focusing on a massive electrical grid that encircles Lake Erie, moving power from New York to the Detroit area, into Canada and back to New York state. There had been problems with the transmission loop in the past, officials said.
The head of the North American Reliability Council, who earlier said northern Ohio may have been the flashpoint, later backed way from reaching any conclusion "until we're absolutely certain."
"We had some indication that the first transmission lines that were tripped were in the Midwest . . . We're not certain that is where it started," said Michehl Gent, president of NERC, an industry sponsored group that tracks power grids to assure their reliability.
At a news conference, Gent provided a picture of the enormity of the blackout that began Thursday at 4:11 p.m. and raced from New England to Michigan and southeastern Canada.
He said more than 100 power plants - including 22 nuclear reactors in the United States and Canada - were shut down, and the blackout affected 50 million people over a 24,000-square-kilometre area from New England to Michigan.
He said a preliminary determination of the cause of the cascading power disruption, which raced through the system in less than 10 seconds, may not be available until next week and more detailed investigations could last months.
"We never anticipated we would have a cascading outage" like this, said Gent, adding that he was "personally embarrassed" because his organization is supposed "to see that this doesn't happen."
While NERC closely watches grid reliability, it has no power to force transmission companies to comply with standards or correct violations.
Some in Congress have urged creation of an agency that would have industry police power. The issue is likely to be debated next month when legislators consider energy laws.
Gent said the investigation could find that someone violated industry standards or that the standards are not adequate. He ruled out completely reports of a lightning strike or a fire in a New York City facility and said weather appeared to have not been a factor in the blackout.
He said electricity capacity was adequate when the blackout hit.
The investigation is focusing on "the Lake Erie Loop," a massive transmission system that goes through New York state south of the Great Lakes to Detroit and then up through Canada, down by Niagara Falls, back to New York, said Gent.
"That's the centre of the focus. This has been a problem for years and there have been all sorts of plans to make it more reliable," he said.
At one point, 300 megawatts of power were travelling east on the loop and suddenly reversed direction, resulting in an estimated 500 megawatts suddenly moving west, he said. It was uncertain what caused the sudden shift.
The focus on Ohio earlier had been criticized by Ohio officials.
The chairman of the Ohio Public Utilities Commission, Alan Schriber, called it "speculation at best" and said industry experts he contacted Friday continued to focus attention on Canada and upstate New York.
And a private company that monitors the grid said its technology showed the problem started in Michigan. "That was the epicentre," insisted David Trungale, vice-president of SoftSwitching Technologies Inc., of Middleton, Wis.
One reason it may be so difficult to pinpoint the cause is the speed in which the cascading outages raced across the Northeast and Ohio Valley as well as southeastern Canada.
President George W. Bush promised a review of "why the cascade was so significant, why it was able to ripple so significantly throughout our system."
William Museler, president of the New York Independent System Operator, which manages the state's electric grid, said "huge" power fluctuations originating from a Midwest power plant started the downfall of the grid at 4:11 p.m. Thursday. He said the power swings became so large that the Ontario system could not sustain them, and the problem migrated to New York.
As the power fluctuated, generators in New York tripped off to protect themselves, an act of self-preservation that made it possible to restore power Friday morning, Museler said.
The Energy Department, meanwhile, ordered the activation of a special power cable linking Connecticut and Long Island to ease the movement of electricity in the New York City area as power was being restored.
Electricity was back on in virtually all of upstate New York on Friday, while the New York City metropolitan area was beginning to get its power restored after a massive blackout, Gov. George Pataki said.
"The power has been restored to the vast majority of the state geographically," Pataki said at a command centre in Albany, N.Y.
"From everything we saw last night and continue to see this morning, the restoration plan for the state is working very well," Museler said.
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.
Gent said he was fairly confident terrorism wasn't involved. Federal officials earlier said there is no evidence of terrorism.
"We don't have any indication of blown-up equipment," he said on ABC's Good Morning America. "So, we're almost certain it's not terrorism of any kind."
Actually that was kind of interesting, because what was often done was reserviors were a low points where extra water was not to be released, but saved to insure later minimum in-stream flows, and all of a sudden the rules were broken, water was released, power generated for use in California and BPA announced to the howls of fish-environmentalist that they were just borrowing the water and would cut back on useage later in the year to make up for it if necessary, even though there were strick rules against that.
Di-Fi and Boxer were real pushy about getting "cheap" power to California over anybody's dead body.
I really don't know. I know that folks have said no it didn't. But the day before, some hospital computers shut down in Oregon and some major computers in local governments shut down because they were constantly rebooting.
When I did some Y2K audits for utilities, one of the most "vulnerable" considered areas were new computer controlled relays and meters. Many of these were tied to internet systems that allowed them to be remotely monitored and re-programmed. They have firewalls and passwork protection, but I am wondering about cross contamination from legitimate users. I just don't know, but find the timing a bit odd.
I also suspect that the electric utility planners would not consider a common mode failure of many computer controlled relays to be a credible event. That, the Blaster virus event, and the fact that they NE failure cascaded past so many systems, makes me wonder if some of the relays that were to protect against this kind of thing, weren't working correctly.
Just a question I would like to see addressed in the investigations.
For which no environmental group will ever hold them accountable.
Thanks for your usual outstanding post on #77. It speaks volumes about how the whole country is on the hairy edge of electrical generating capacity. The RICOnuts have been more effective than even I had supposed.
Appears so. I would really like to know two things. The number of utility listed hot and cold standby reserves that weren't able to meet their projections during that hour. Second, what FERC's SMD rates for certain ancilary services, such as spinning reserves,load regulation, frequency regulation would have looked like during that hour.
I personally have a problem with SMD using the market mechanism to control supply and demand during near blackout conditions. I know that many dispatchers would have paid "anything" to keep their systems from going down. Several thousand dollars a MW-hr would have not slowed their purchase down for a second.
That fact and what happened in California during the energy crisis a few years back are interesting to reflect upon.
So much for design hazard reviews!
As long as management is beholden to lawyers, politicians, and mutual fund "investors," engineering reality will take a back seat to the personal interests of executives.
You have probably explained this before,.... but what is that?
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Apparently, FERC is trying to create the North East Regional Transmission Organization [NERTO] to solve this interface problem, but New York is dragging their feet. New York may have done this to themselves! From the link in post #76:
Karl Tammar reported on NERTO status. The New York Public Service Commission is strongly opposed to NERTO formation. The process will be delayed until January pending a FERC ruling. Karl presented some slides on the NERTO Basic Provisions.
Why does the terms "union thugs" and "political hacks" come to mind when I hear NYPSC?
Part of the Federal Energy Regulartory Commission (FERC)'s grand plan on deregulation is the implementation of Standard Market Design (SMD) rates.
I believe in de-regulation more than I am opposed to it, except in some special circumstances. One of those special circumstances is in the pricing of what are called by FERC transmission "ancillary services." Ancillary services include things like forced outage reserves, spinning reserves, frequency control, etc. FERC SMD policy assumes that there will be a rational market to provide and to use these services. That is that if you are utility A and you need 100 MW of spinning reserves you will either provide it for yourself or buy it from the market at a fair price not much lower than you can provide it yourself. The problem is that many of the ancillary services are extremely important in maintaining reliability of a grid. When utility A assumes that somebody else who has taken their money is going to move heaven and earth to provide spinning reserves during a problem, they are making a huge leap of faith in the commitment of that other company in keeping Utility A's customers in power.
While I like certain aspects of SMD deregulation rates, the ancillary services part, scares the hell out of me because you can have a situation where nobody is committed to maintain reliability on a moment by moment basis. That may have contributed to the blackout.
I am particuraly insterested in the following statement from the article;
They are now focusing on a massive electrical grid that encircles Lake Erie, moving power from New York to the Detroit area, into Canada and back to New York state. There had been problems with the transmission loop in the past, officials said.
Week after next I am scheduled to perform the start-up of a Load Shed System at a plant that is installing a power distribution system that uses a "loop" or ring configuration for its 13.8 kV distribution system. My associates and I have some concerns that a "loop" configuration may induce eddy currents in the "loop" under certain upset situations. Some of our concerns include worrying about the eddy currents inducing an oscillation of current within the system that would eventually overload the circuit. Based on the reports that we have seen so far that would be a good description of what happened.
Currently no existing system models that we are aware of reflect that scenario. If anyone finds any articles that have data on the cause of the Blackout please let me know.
Good luck, just a couple weeks ago, I was involved in testing a 1.5 MW diesel generator we designed and served as owners engineer on.
OK, first off, let's talk about the circuit breakers in your home. They are not there to protect any equipment you might plug into the wall, they are there to protect the house wiring and keep it from catching fire in the event of an overload.
The primary function of the protective relays on the power grid is the same. They are designed to protect the generating equipment, transformers, and transmission lines themselves when things go really bad.
But as a secondary function, the system is designed (supposed to be designed) to be diverse, so that the loss of one line, transformer, power plant, etc. will not bring down the whole system. The circuit breakers for transmission lines have reclosers on them so they will automatically go back into service after a momentary upset like a lightning strike, or a squirrel electrocuting himself.
Now as for the grid itself, think of the human circulatory system, only imagine that instead of one heart and four extremities, you had one with 100 hearts and thousands of extremities and organs, each pumping and using blood from the same "grid" of arteries. This is similar to what the electricity grid looks like.
All these 100 beating hearts have to be synchronized so that they all beat to the same rhythm - just like the power plants are. When one part of the body is using more blood, the hearts in that area would normally sense the low blood pressure in that area and start to pump harder (not faster).
Knowing that in this new system, some hearts would occasionally shut down for a while, other hearts would be "on line" waiting to take up the slack if another heart should fail. These hearts are synchronized with the others, but not pumping into the grid.
When one heart does fail or become overloaded, the ones near it try to pump the blood that the failed heart was pumping. But there are certain extremities (like NYC) which use lots of blood, but have very few hearts near them. So they have large vessels leading to them which can easily be overloaded. (And of course, this imaginary body has Killer Envirocyte Cells who circulate around and try to attack the heart muscles and prevent the formation of new arteries, but I digress…)
Also, since there is a small time delay from when each heart beats until the blood reaches the point where it is needed, each heart must be able to slightly adjust its beat (phase angle) which has the effect of pushing more or less blood into the grid. This is where the problems really come in.
Sometimes, a heart senses that it’s beat is falling behind – the signal that it must pump harder, so it does. This allows the ones next to it to relax a little bit while the first one takes up the load. But if the system isn’t set up correctly, some minor perturbation can cause one or more hearts to follow false demand signals. This causes the circulatory system to oscillate very slowly – with blood first flowing via one path to the extremities, and then reversing and flowing via another path.
In the electrical transmission world, this is called “sub-synchronous oscillation”, and has been a problem with the Lake Erie Loop for a long time. First power flows clockwise around the Lake to get to its destination, then is slowly reverses direction and flows the other way. This can get out of control and cause transmission lines to become overloaded and trip out to protect themselves.
What we have here is like the old joke about the organs of the body arguing about which is the most important. In this case, NY thinks it is the a$$hole of the body, since it has refused to cooperate with the other states in the region to coordinate their efforts to prevent this sort of thing.
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