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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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Posted on 10/02/2003 11:01:16 AM PDT by Robert357
What was by most measures the biggest electricity outage in history, surpassing the blackouts in the western United States in the summer of 1996, swept northeastern and Great Lakes states and the Canadian province of Ontario late Thursday afternoon, 14 August. Long before power had been restored to businesses and residences from New York City to Cleveland, Detroit, and Toronto, politicians and commentators on both sides of the border were pointing fingers. But, in fact, major difficulties in the electric power system had been predicted by three U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) studies going back to 1998, and had been duly reported in the press (including IEEE Spectrum), with plenty of blame for inaction to go all around.
At this writing, it appears that the 2003 blackout started in facilities owned and operated by FirstEnergy Corp., a large utility headquartered in Akron, Ohio. Early in the afternoon of 14 August, one of its coal-fired power plants began to behave oddly and had to be taken off-line, or "tripped" in the industry parlance [see Timeline]. An hour later and perhaps coincidentally, at 3:06 p.m., Eastern Daylight Time, one of the company's major transmission lines failed. Inexplicably, the alarm system meant to warn the utility of such problems did not operate properly, and so FirstEnergy did not give regional regulators and organizations in adjacent states any warning of the mishap.
Over the next 45 minutes, three more transmission lines failed—two owned by FirstEnergy, the other by American Electric Power (Columbus), the other big Ohio utility—at 3:32, 3:41, and 3:46 p.m. By 4:30 p.m., most people in Ohio, Michigan, Ontario, New York State, New Jersey, and Connecticut were without power.
In the coming weeks and months, as regulators and power engineers sift through thousands of event records, the focus initially will be on what exactly the initiating events were, why failures propagated so rapidly through the northeastern grid, and why the grid system operators established to prevent such disasters were unable to deliver. Initially, responsbility for the inquiry was taken by the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC, Princeton, N.J.), the self-regulating utility organization meant to improve the trustworthiness of the grid system, and it will continue to provide data and analysis. NERC’s leaders have let it be known that an objective will be to determine whether key players failed to follow rules properly or whether the rules themselves were defective.
Ultimately, however, the issues raised by the blackout go far beyond that, which may be why DOE took charge of the inquriy on 20 August. For more than five years, NERC has sought and failed to get legislative authority to make its rules mandatory. During the same period, its U.S. government counterpart, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC, Washington, D.C.), has been struggling to impose stronger regional oversight over grid operations—often encountering impassioned opposition from big utilities and their political allies. (FERC deals mainly with state and local governments, NERC with utilities.) Meanwhile, as growth in demand for electricity has outstripped additions to transmission capacity by a factor of two, the grid itself has come to be ever more thinly stretched.
The net result, as virtually all experts on the nation’s grid system came to agree, was a disaster waiting to happen. "We all knew something like this was coming along," a leader in a 1999 DOE study of the transmission grid told IEEE Spectrum, on condition of anonymity. "We were all just waiting for the big one."
"Look," agreed Karl Stahlkopf, an executive at Hawaii Electric Co. (Honolulu) who previously managed power system research at the Electric Power Research Institute (Palo Alto), "everybody in the business knew something like this was going to happen. It wasn’t a question of whether but when."
One rotten apple?
If all the experts knew a major outage was going to happen, why couldn’t anybody prevent it? The temptation, at first blush, may be to put the blame squarely on FirstEnergy, the Ohio utility whose operators and managers seem to have been sleeping at the switch. Could this be a mere case of one poorly run company bringing down an entire system—of one rotten apple corrupting the whole barrel?
As it happens, FirstEnergy owns and operates the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant east of Toledo. Barely more than a year ago, that plant was found to have suffered such severe corrosion in the cap where fuel and control rods enter the core that a catastrophic loss-of-coolant accident seemed possible. Perhaps because of that discovery, suspicions immediately centered after 14 August on the way FirstEnergy has been conducting its business generally. "Having come less than an inch from potential radiation leakage from Davis-Besse, they’ve now succeeded in blacking out eastern North America," a bond analyst with CreditSights (New York, N.Y.) commented in a report.
(snip) As a result of all those difficulties, FirstEnergy saw its bond rating cut to the lowest investment grade by Moody’s, just hours before the incidents that precipitated the Northeast blackout. Four days after the blackout, Standard & Poor’s followed suit, dropping FirstEnergy’s bond rating to near-junk status.(snip)
The system fails Even if the tripped lines and FirstEnergy’s failure to detect and report them prove to be the exclusive initiating cause of the 2003 blackout, it still will be necessary to account for the failure of local and neighboring control authorities to prevent the cascading outages that ensued. As events unfolded, observers were struck at how unevenly various regulating organizations performed. The neighboring PJM Interconnection (Valley Forge, Pa.), a regulatory body that first transmuted into a so-called independent system operator (ISO) and then regional transmission organization (RTO), was quick to detect problems on FirstEnergy’s lines and to protect itself from them—quicker than FirstEnergy itself, evidently. (PJM’s jurisdiction originally was Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland, but now also includes parts of Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, the District of Columbia, and Delaware,) The New England ISO (Holyoke, Mass.) also largely protected its region. The New York ISO (Schenectedy, N.Y.), with operating rules that PJM and New England reportedly consider too weak, was not successful. Least effective of all, it seems, was the performance of the Midwest ISO, based in Carmel, Ind. Lacking—in contrast to some of the other ISOs—the authority to impose rules on utilities in its area, the Midwest ISO was reduced to contacting them at times of trouble and advising them on what it thought they should do.(snip)
Asked why the United States remains so far behind, Roytelman said the principal problem is that Americans just don’t want to shed load—industry parlance for quickly killing power to some customers in order to lessen the chance of a regional blackout. But without shedding load promptly when the whole system is endangered, cascading blackouts cannot be prevented.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectrum.ieee.org ...
I am sure that when Congress gets going, folks on both sides will want to see if they can turn this into a partisan issue.
Back to work for me.
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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It is in the breaking news sidebar! |
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I am sure both "R's" and "D's" will be trying to hold hearings and propose legislation to correct problems caused by the "other party."
Back to work for me.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=68&ncid=68&e=5&u=/nyt/20030913/ts_nyt/overseersmissedbigpictureasfailuresledtoblackout
Overseers Missed Big Picture as Failures Led to Blackout
Sat Sep 13, 8:57 AM ET
Add Top Stories - The New York Times to My Yahoo!
By ERIC LIPTON, RICHARD PEREZ-PENA and MATTHEW L. WALD The New York Times
This article was reported and written by Eric Lipton, Richard Pérez-Peña and Matthew L. Wald.
Twenty-two minutes before North America's biggest blackout, officials at two agencies charged with ensuring the safe and steady flow of power across the Midwest conferred by telephone about what they thought were troubling but still routine electrical line problems in Ohio.
"It looks like they lost South Canton-Star 345 line," said Roger Cummings, a control room operator at PJM Interconnection, referring to a 345,000-volt line, a major artery in the system.
Don Hunter at the Midwest Independent System Operator, or Midwest I.S.O., monitoring another part of Ohio and a different utility company, absorbed that news and replied, "I know that FirstEnergy lost their Juniper line, too," another 345,000-volt conduit.
Now, weeks after the vast power failure, the significance of that exchange, at 3:48 p.m. on Aug. 14, has become clearer. While the two agencies charged with monitoring the grid and warding off huge problems were discussing the loss of two power lines, there were, in fact, eight lines down, and others headed for failure.
Neither agency, it turns out, could see most of the picture.
Indeed, nearly 10 minutes after the blackout had swept from Michigan to Connecticut, monitoring officials in the Midwest were just starting to grasp how far the crisis had spread. "We want to know if anybody else is experiencing any problems," an official asked innocently.
In the end, then, it was not just a circuit breaker tripping or a transmission line sagging into a tree that caused the system to fail. Documents and interviews make clear that the blackout may well have resulted, just as surely, from the fact that the people whose job it was to respond to those failures lacked much of the information about what was happening.
In the 65 minutes that a sequence of power line failures built up to a cascading blackout across the Midwest, the Northeast and parts of Canada, these two regional agencies took no active steps to stop the progression, largely because they were unable to see the full extent of it.
They were, that afternoon, like air traffic controllers trying to keep order in the sky without knowing where all the planes were.
That portrait emerges from a detailed examination of hundreds of pages of telephone transcripts, interviews with industry officials and experts, and a compilation of the numerous timelines of system failures that have been assembled by utilities and government officials in recent weeks.
That review offers a far deeper appreciation not only of what crucial elements went wrong that day, but also of the fundamental weaknesses in the way the nation's electricity grid is overseen and policed, especially in the Midwest. For example:
¶Unlike other regional grid managers, the Midwest I.S.O., a new, still-forming agency, operates with very limited real-time information about what is happening on the transmission lines it oversees.
¶That day, Midwest I.S.O. faced a computer malfunction at a big utility it monitors, FirstEnergy of Akron, Ohio, making it harder to track grid conditions, and computer problems at its own headquarters that were, at the least, an added distraction.
¶Oversight of the grid in the Midwest is far more balkanized than in other densely populated parts of the country, with some power companies answering to Midwest I.S.O. and some to PJM, so that no single entity has a comprehensive view of the region, nor, in this case, of an unfolding crisis.
¶On Aug. 14, the trouble-shooters at Midwest I.S.O.'s nerve center in Carmel, Ind., spent much of the day coping with an earlier crisis in Indiana, and there are ample signs that their attention was distracted from the problems in Ohio, and that they were stretched too thin to handle both problems at once.
¶Even if Midwest I.S.O. had been aware of all that was happening, any effort to avert a collapse might have been hindered by its lack of authority: Unlike other independent system operators, it cannot order power companies to act in an emergency.
In the weeks since the blackout, electricity experts, including some involved in the government investigation, have turned to PowerWorld, a sophisticated computer program that can simulate conditions on the entire North American grid. The program shows that if the people monitoring the grid had known all the problems unfolding around them, they would have seen the need for decisive action and they could have limited the catastrophe, or even prevented it.
"It is an unacceptable level of confusion," said Ian A. Hiskens, a former electric utility executive and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin, who ran PowerWorld simulations. "They should know what the state of their system was, that is fundamental to operating. And by 4:07 they are still not sure what has happened."
The Midwest I.S.O. declined to make any senior officials available for interview. A spokeswoman, Mary Lynn Webster, said, "We operated the system based on the information we had at the time."
The United States and Canadian governments are still in the preliminary stages of their joint investigation into the blackout. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham (news - web sites) issued the government's first timeline of the blackout yesterday, a four-hour chronology of line failures and power plant shutdowns.
But he said answers as to cause and blame were not near. "We are not going to compromise quality for speed," he said.
An Early Failure
"We've got a huge problem."
The first call for help to the Midwest I.S.O. on Aug. 14 came not from FirstEnergy of Ohio in the hour before the blackout. Telephone transcripts released by the I.S.O. show that Spencer House, a controller at another utility, Cinergy, in Plainfield, Ind., called earlier in the day.
The transcripts show that from 12:22 p.m. until at least 3:31 p.m., just 39 minutes before the blackout, the attention of Midwest I.S.O.'s monitors was consumed mostly by Cinergy's concerns.
Cinergy had lost the use of two major transmission lines south of Indianapolis. The solution, the company and the Midwest I.S.O. agreed, was to take the strain off the remaining lines by shifting power output from one part of the state to another.
This process was a textbook example of one function for grid monitors, intervening to prevent an isolated problem from becoming a major disruption. Many experts say it is also what should have happened later in the day, in eastern Ohio.
Yet a look at the Cinergy incident also illustrates the inherent weakness of the Midwest I.S.O., which, unlike other I.S.O.'s, can only urge companies to act responsibly. It cannot order them to do so.
To take the strain off Cinergy's lines, the Midwest I.S.O. turned to another power company, Allegheny Energy, asking it to help by adjusting the electricity it was pumping out. But at 2:24 p.m., an Allegheny controller told the I.S.O. that the company's marketing staff wanted to do the opposite of what the I.S.O. was asking, so they could make money selling more power.
Concerned that they might lose another 345,000-volt line, Mr. House told Midwest I.S.O., "I think we're a trip away from, 345 trip away from setting a little history."
Nine minutes later, Doug Kiskaden of Cinergy warned Midwest I.S.O. officials that if one more piece of the company's grid were to fail, it would "be in imminent danger of collapsing."
Coordinating the response to Cinergy's troubles involved at least six officials at Midwest I.S.O. They were hindered, too, by the failure of an I.S.O. computer program that left them unsure about what to do.
The program, called a state estimator, helps to monitor grid conditions and tries to predict what would happen if breakdowns were to occur.
"The state estimator has been down for an hour and a half," said Ron Benbow, lead monitor with the I.S.O. said at 2:36.
Ultimately, despite such obstacles, Cinergy was able to fix the problem by reducing power output at two of its own plants.
Both Cinergy and the Midwest I.S.O. insist that there was no causal connection between these events in Indiana and the later collapse that began in Ohio. But government officials and independent experts say it is probably too soon to rule out that prospect, or the possibility that the two crises were initiated by a common, still-unidentified cause.
What is beyond dispute is that the Cinergy problem taxed the monitors.
The Crunch Begins
The first overt sign of trouble in eastern Ohio came at 1:31 p.m., when a 597-megawatt unit at FirstEnergy's Eastlake power plant, in the northeast corner of the state, shut down for reasons that are still not known. Officials at the Midwest I.S.O. did not know about the failure until FirstEnergy called to let them know, more than 40 minutes later.
A number of plants in northern Ohio were already down that day, mostly for maintenance. A major line in the southwest part of the state owned by another utility, DPL, had already failed because of a brushfire. Vast amounts of power were coursing across the remaining lines to keep cities like Cleveland and Akron powered.
At 3:05 p.m., FirstEnergy's 345,000-volt Chamberlin-Harding line near Cleveland went out, straining other lines further. Once again, the I.S.O. learned of the failure well after the fact, through a phone call.
This pattern would be repeated several times in the next hour, as Midwest I.S.O. officials saw snippets of what was happening voltage irregularities, high loads on some lines but no more.
The Midwest I.S.O. receives, day in and day out, a flow of information from the utilities under its monitoring, like data on the performance of power lines. But there are crucial limits in that information that sets Midwest I.S.O. apart from other monitoring groups in the country.
The grid monitors who control New York and vast parts of the Mid-Atlantic region, for instance, constantly review computer screens that tell them the condition of every major transmission line and even some smaller lines. A problem on any line sets off visual and audible alarms in their control rooms.
But computers at the Midwest I.S.O., which has been in operation for less than two years, are not set up to sift the mountain of information and display most of it in the control room. Instead, its main monitoring computer system takes information from only selected "flow gates" places where problems are thought likely to occur, and the data is updated much less often than at other control rooms.
On Aug. 14, Midwest I.S.O. officials say, their system was monitoring just one of seven 345,000-volt and 138,000-volt FirstEnergy lines that failed, though they were told of two others. As a result, the transcripts show, I.S.O. controllers were perplexed by the disturbances they were seeing on the system.
"I wonder what is going on here," Mr. Hunter said at 3:36 p.m. "Something strange is happening."
Ordinarily, there would be ways for the Midwest I.S.O. to fill in the gaps in its knowledge. One is the state estimator program, which operated only intermittently that day.
The I.S.O.'s main backstop is the utilities, which call to pass on information about their systems. But on Aug. 14, FirstEnergy's computer problems prevented it from recognizing its own line failures. Transcripts show a reversal of the usual exchange, with FirstEnergy repeatedly asking the I.S.O. for information about its own equipment.
At 3:57, Jerry Snickey, in a FirstEnergy control room in Akron, told Mr. Hunter at the Midwest I.S.O. that the voltage on a major line was dangerously low. "Do you have any idea on what is going on?" he asked.
Mr. Hunter replied that the Hanna-Juniper line was out, adding, "I am wondering if it is still out."
"We have no clue," Mr. Snickey said. "Our computer is giving us fits too. We don't even know the status of some of the stuff around us."
One Region, Two Monitors
Contributing to the lack of information was the odd division of the Midwest region between two intertwined authorities, PJM and the Midwest I.S.O. The region had no I.S.O. until 2001, when some utilities formed the Midwest I.S.O., while others signed with PJM, which historically had overseen Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, West Virginia and the District of Columbia.
Among those which joined PJM were American Electric Power and DPL, utilities to the south of FirstEnergy. After the FirstEnergy lines began to shut down, so did several of American Electric's.
But electronic signals about American Electric and DPL lines go to PJM's two command centers in Pennsylvania, not to the Midwest I.S.O., whose terrain was being indirectly affected.
In interviews, PJM officials said they knew of the line failures in their region, but not most of FirstEnergy's troubles. The Midwest I.S.O. has said that it, in turn, did not know of most of the failures in PJM territory.
"It is fairly clear from the transcript nobody was aware of the exact nature of the problem or the extent," said Michael J. Kormos, vice president for operations at PJM.
PJM and the Midwest I.S.O. have long acknowledged needing to share more information. Even before the blackout, they developed a plan to begin doing so.
Had the I.S.O. a full appreciation of what was going on, and the authority to order power companies to make quick adjustments, it might have been able to take corrective action, according to some experts who have studied the blackout.
"It appears that the system was slowly slipping into the oblivion during the two hours before the blackout," said Mani V. Venkatasubramanian an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Washington State University. "It may be that they were blinded by the lack of available data."
Executives at the International Transmission Company, a Michigan-based distributor of electricity overseen by the Midwest I.S.O., said they were prepared to take steps to stabilize the grid but had no inkling of the unfolding trouble.
Richard Schultz, vice president for engineering and planning at International Transmission, said that even with limited information, the I.S.O.'s are responsible for reacting to problems. "The buck stops with the security coordinator and there are two security coordinators at issue here on that day," he said.
A System Overwhelmed
The transcripts show how handicapped those coordinators were.
At 3:57, some 13 minutes before the blackout, FirstEnergy officials told the Midwest I.S.O. that they feared the situation was about to become critical. Problems were such that the Perry nuclear plant near Cleveland might automatically shut down, depriving the region of an enormous power supply.
"Perry 1 is claiming that they may be coming off," said Jerry Snickey of FirstEnergy. "They can't hold it."
Even then, the I.S.O., hunting fruitlessly for data, took no action. "I can't get a big picture of what's going on," Mr. Hunter said. "Strange things are happening all at the same time."
By 4:05, two more 138,000-volt lines had failed, but the Midwest I.S.O. says that its controllers did not know.
At 4:06, yet another 345,000-volt FirstEnergy line tripped, and Akron and surrounding areas lost power, opening the first stage of the blackout. But Midwest I.S.O. and FirstEnergy officials were conferring by phone about failures from more than half an hour earlier, unaware that the collapse had begun.
At 4:08:58 and 4:09:06, the last two 345,000-volt lines carrying power from American Electric to FirstEnergy failed, effectively cutting off northern Ohio from power supplies to the south.
When that happened, northern Ohio made a sudden, massive pull on power supplies in Michigan, raising demand by more than 2,000 megawatts in 10 seconds, far more than Michigan could supply on short notice.
Michigan pulled hard on Ontario. Ontario pulled hard on New York.
Within two minutes, the power was out from Montauk to Lansing, Mich.
I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that this is the problem and everything else is just symptoms.
Also, the article completely failed to mention the stunning loss in district court (a few days prior to the blackout) on the "New Source Review" issue. FirstEnergy is either going to have to shut down many of their older coal-fired plants, spend billions on upgrading them, pay huge fines, or all of the above.
This could well have been the reason for the bond downgrade, but wasn't even mentioned.
The only purpose of this self-serving article was to say "We told you so". But in the minds of many, poor research and inuendo seem to be adequate substitutes for facts and insight these days.
FERC has been herding everyone into these ISOs, but it is obvious that they made no provision for spending any money on any kind of overall monitoring system.
I have a suggestion. Put all the soon-to-be-laid-off NASA engineers on the problem. Oh, nevermind...
It was a pretty bad article. Jim's article was a bit more recent and carries more accuracy. It should be noted that the scuttlebut around the industry is that MISO was a little chincy on pay and thus didn't get a lot of seasoned transmission dispatchers/operators on their staff. So, even if they had the authority, they probably wouldn't have reacted to the problem. Plus, they might not have been informed enough to recognize the impending problems that losing lines into Cleveland represented. From my experience, even Firstenergy didn't seem to recognize that.
There's going to be a good number of parties implicated in the investigation, I suspect. Hopefully, the solution will be short on politics and long on engineering.
Also, the article completely failed to mention the stunning loss in district court (a few days prior to the blackout) on the "New Source Review" issue. FirstEnergy is either going to have to shut down many of their older coal-fired plants, spend billions on upgrading them, pay huge fines, or all of the above.
This could well have been the reason for the bond downgrade, but wasn't even mentioned.
Yes, FE did lose in a major court decision on the "new source review". What's interesting about that case, besides the fact that the Clinton administration's EPA had a sudden change of heart about the rules, was that a similar case involving a large power company in the south brought about the exact opposite decision.
The only purpose of this self-serving article was to say "We told you so". But in the minds of many, poor research and inuendo seem to be adequate substitutes for facts and insight these days.
Well, there is some truth to "we told you so" - Being ex-FirstEnergy myself, I am enjoying a little bit of vindication after seeing how the events unfolded. Many of us had expected Cleveland to go dark some day, but I doubt that many expected the blackout to spread all the way around the lake and into NYC.
Still, as I have noted before, there's plenty of contributing factors that made this event possible.
In the 65 minutes that a sequence of power line failures built up to a cascading blackout across the Midwest, the Northeast and parts of Canada, these two regional agencies took no active steps to stop the progression, largely because they were unable to see the full extent of it.
This is partly true, though I'm not certain that MISO would have reacted if they could see. They are considered pretty inexperienced.
On Aug. 14, the trouble-shooters at Midwest I.S.O.'s nerve center in Carmel, Ind., spent much of the day coping with an earlier crisis in Indiana, and there are ample signs that their attention was distracted from the problems in Ohio, and that they were stretched too thin to handle both problems at once.
This is very likely - its normal to staff for normal workflows, but when things get wild, it becomes difficult if not impossible to keep up.
"It is an unacceptable level of confusion," said Ian A. Hiskens, a former electric utility executive and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin, who ran PowerWorld simulations. "They should know what the state of their system was, that is fundamental to operating. And by 4:07 they are still not sure what has happened."
I agree here - there was confusion about what was happening, and there was probably confusion as to who had authority to do something about it, assuming anyone really knew that something needed to be done.
Coordinating the response to Cinergy's troubles involved at least six officials at Midwest I.S.O. They were hindered, too, by the failure of an I.S.O. computer program that left them unsure about what to do.
The program, called a state estimator, helps to monitor grid conditions and tries to predict what would happen if breakdowns were to occur.
"The state estimator has been down for an hour and a half," said Ron Benbow, lead monitor with the I.S.O. said at 2:36.
Here's where experience would play a key role - the state estimator is great for getting hardcopy to back up a decision, but an experienced operator should know the limitations of his system. That's assuming, of course, that real-time data is available. For Firstenergy, it was not. However, from what I saw in the transcript, MISO did have load data, and thus could have at least informed FE of what lines were carrying what loads.
This is assuming, of course, that there was a good perception that a major problem existed. I don't think the human side of this equation recognized the urgency - they relied too heavily on the computer's estimation model, which was not working.
- a new tool named for "Area Control Error (ACE) Frequency Real-Time Monitoring System" released this last year "designed to ensure the reliable supply of electricity" (so they say on their website) -
- on the MISO transcripts.
Judging from the MISO transcripts this tool too was not usable - there are several references to 'ACE' in the transcripts that I've yet to see mentioned in news/wire stories ... it's my contention, again, that due to network congestion that day data was not able to make it from point A to point B either at all or in a timely manner in order for these network stability and 'security' (not physical security in the usual sense but rather 'reliability and stability of the grid') tools/programs to function correctly and in a timely manner.
ACE, it appears, is centrally hosted and operators access info as needed - references on the transcript indicate trouble 'getting in'.
I need to go back into the transcripts and note where, what time, what context and exactly wheat the complaints were in accessing ACE ...
Actually, ACE isn't really new - its essentially an equation that measures power flows into and out of a control area, balances them against area load, and applies a frequency component (60 cycles per second) and a mathematical constant that adjusts for the response rate of that individual control area's internal generation. It is a tool for each control area that allows them to maintain their generation to load balance.
Judging from the MISO transcripts this tool too was not usable - there are several references to 'ACE' in the transcripts that I've yet to see mentioned in news/wire stories ... it's my contention, again, that due to network congestion that day data was not able to make it from point A to point B either at all or in a timely manner in order for these network stability and 'security' (not physical security in the usual sense but rather 'reliability and stability of the grid') tools/programs to function correctly and in a timely manner.
Long before MISO, each utility took care of its own ACE. Today, it is still done that way, though MISO was possibly able to monitor the ACE of each utility control area within its region. I'll have to read some of the transcripts - while it isn't essential for MISO to view the ACE of each entity within, there still needs to be an ACE for each separate control area, and a record of how each utility maintained their ACE. Ours was once a mechanical chart recorder, but that has since been replaced by computer. There's supposed to be a backup scheme supplying all the necessary data to maintain control area integrity.
ACE, it appears, is centrally hosted and operators access info as needed - references on the transcript indicate trouble 'getting in'.
ACE is hosted centrally to each control area. I suspect that MISO wasn't able to read the ACE of one or more of the utilities in its area, probably due to computer problems. For example, if FirstEnergy's EMS computer was locked up, it was probably unable to supply ACE indication to its own operation center, let alone that of MISO.
BTW, I'm going out on a limb here by saying that MISO can or is even entitled to look at ACE for each utility - I'd probably better read some more transcript before I get too far down that road. Rules are different up there now.
I need to go back into the transcripts and note where, what time, what context and exactly wheat the complaints were in accessing ACE ...
Me too! Context can tell a pretty good story. Thanks.
BTW, thanks for the freepmail the other day. It is appreciated.
I might should have linked to this: "a new real-time monitoring tool developed by CERTS". Their words describe this particular tool as 'new' - it looks like it's the aggregation of *all* the 'ACE data' from all 143 control areas in North America. There is also this +900 KB pdf file that goes into more detail.
This automated utility/program is, according to this diagram, hosted at NERC's Princeton, New Jersey headquarters and would, indeed give every utility/operator access to their neighbor's (and the entire grid's) 'performance'. Fan out to using entities followed this time frame:ACE Completion and Delivery to 22 Reliability Authorities ? June, 2002 o ACE Users Training - July, 2002 o AIE Trial Test Starts - June, 2002 o AIE Final Delivery - September, 2002(Sorry for the large image!)
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