Report warned of flaws in power grid
Andrew C. Revkin, James Glanz, New York Times
Thursday, August 21, 2003
Three months before the biggest blackout in North American history, the agency charged with protecting the nation's electrical grid put industry officials on notice that the section of the grid covering Ohio and other parts of the Midwest was particularly vulnerable to the kind of cascading events that unfolded last Thursday.
Officials with the North American Electric Reliability Council, in a report that singled out the Midwest as the only part of the country at risk of such a devastating event, said they anticipated the region could face "large, unanticipated power flows" this summer and would have to be prepared to handle the challenges with care.
The NERC officials lacked the authority to order the utilities to take additional steps to prevent such a catastrophe, and they conceded that they did not even informally suggest anything more be done to protect that section of the nation's fragile grid. But the report makes clear that the industry had been notified of the threat in the region and the fine margin for error that existed.
That margin for error, many experts now believe, disappeared last Thursday afternoon, when -- after several power lines went down in Ohio -- a blackout that ultimately extended from Detroit to Toronto to New York was born.
While investigators say they have weeks of work to do before understanding the precise causes and chronology of the electrical collapse, the failures of Midwestern transmission lines, power plants and the warning system meant to limit the spread of trouble are considered pivotal.
Energy officials and other experts said the report makes it all the more critical for investigators to determine whether the region's utilities, having received such an explicit reminder about their obligations, followed the proper protocols and met those challenges on that day.
Officials with NERC confirmed that the mention of potential cascading outages in the region was a substantive, significant warning. "Our reliability assessments don't mention problems lightly," said Ellen Vancko, a spokeswoman for the group, an industry organization created after a 1965 blackout to prevent such calamities.
The section of the Midwest grid identified in the report, since the deregulation of the energy industry, has become one of the great crossroads in the transmission of power across the nation -- a kind of Times Square in the flow of electrical traffic. Power produced as far away as Denver flows through the Midwestern grid on its way to users in New York and elsewhere.
The assessment by the reliability council, issued in May, would have been seen by virtually all controllers of the grid nationwide, said Mary Lynn Webster, a spokeswoman for the Midwest Independent System Operator.
"Anyone in grid management in the United States would be looking at it," Webster said.
The Midwest Independent System Operator is charged with helping oversee the safe generation and transmission of power in the Ohio area, although responsibility for taking action in a crisis rests with individual utilities.
Webster said that, as the report suggests, this part of the grid is susceptible to "unanticipated flows because of something that is happening somewhere else on the system," like commercial transactions between companies outside the region that nevertheless pour electricity through its boundaries.
Those conditions can also be caused by unexpected outages or a generating unit that breaks down on the local grid, she said. But she cautioned against assuming that this is the only part of the national grid that is prone to those conditions. "There are areas in all parts of the country that are constrained," Webster said.
The NERC is run by the industry itself and has no power to order changes to practices or equipment or punish companies that fail to meet its reliability standards.
The May report, "2003 Summer Assessment: Reliability of the Bulk Electricity Supply in North America," assessed the potential for energy shortfalls, constrained transmission and other problems across the continent.
It mentioned various risks of shortages and other issues, noting, for instance, that New York City, southwestern Connecticut and Long Island are areas of concern because of a lack of power plants and choke points in transmission lines.
But nowhere did it describe conditions as being primed for a rapid-fire sequence of failures except in the Eastern Central Area Reliability Council, whose territory runs from Michigan through Ohio toward Maryland and includes the lines that failed.
"There is a continuing need for the reliability coordinators, transmission planners and operators to communicate and coordinate their actions to preserve the continued reliability of the ECAR system," the report said. |
