Good article on what may have caused the blackout:
Experts Point to Strains on Electric Grid's Specialists
By ANDREW C. REVKIN NY TIMES September 2, 2003
Since the vast blackout of Aug. 14, much of the focus of elected officials and the public has been on how to fix the country's straining matrix of power lines and plants.
But many of the industry workers responsible for keeping the grid humming, as well as independent experts, say the human side of the system is just as overloaded and vulnerable to breakdowns.
They put much of the blame on the growth of long-distance transmissions of electricity since the dawn of power deregulation a decade ago. Despite extensive efforts to plan transmissions and so keep things in balance, those sales of power often send unpredicted surges of electrons through the grid.
The workers, called system operators, say they take pride in keeping the power flowing on an inadequate system. Their reflexes resemble those of "a good combat pilot managing an aircraft that has been badly damaged," said Dr. S. Massoud Amin, an electrical and computer engineer at the University of Minnesota.
Still, Dr. Amin and other experts say, such skill is no longer enough to prevent further extensive shutdowns. "The trend we're observing," he said, "is toward increasing stress and strain on the system, and on the human operators perhaps."
In interviews and e-mail exchanges, several system operators from the East and the Midwest said there was no "perhaps."
The far-flung trades in electricity since deregulation "have complicated our job tenfold," said a system operator for PJM Interconnection, which manages power flows in a region of 25 million people from Ohio to New Jersey and has largely averted blackouts in its territory. Like his counterparts at other such industry-created companies, this operator spoke on the condition that he not be identified, because he is supposed to refer reporters' calls to management.
The North American Electric Reliability Council, or NERC, the industry group charged with preventing blackouts, says frequent drills and occasional tests for all 5,000 certified system operators keep performance at a high level. Donald M. Benjamin, a NERC vice president, said that system operators took a certification test every five years and that the council was also offering an alternative to the exam: continuing-education classes with which operators earn points toward recertification.
But some system operators say the changes in the behavior of power in the grid, particularly those brought by the enormous rise of wholesale commerce among regions, are outpacing the skills of even the best operators.
Ten years ago, it was common for almost all the electricity consumed in an area to have been produced by local power plants or, less usually, by others within the state. Now those old barriers are gone, and power increasingly flows hundreds of miles.
This result of deregulation has complicated an already dizzyingly interwoven system in which a physical grid evolved from individual utilities' linking their wire networks. Today communications involving more than 6,000 power plants, run by 3,000 utilities, are funneled through 142 windowless control rooms, one for each "control area." These control areas in turn operate under 10 "reliability councils," established by the utilities in the wake of the 1965 blackout in the Northeast.
System operators work to balance electricity flowing from power plants into the grid against that pulled out by homes and businesses. The challenge comes because power cannot be stored. As a heat wave pulses from one part of the country to the next, for example, demand similarly shifts and the output of plants must be adjusted.
Every moment, system operators watch light-studded maps for signs of overloaded lines or other trouble. A drop in voltage in one spot can suck electricity from adjoining areas. A slight drift from the standard 60-cycles-a-second pulse of alternating current can endanger plants' finely balanced turbines.
On Aug. 14, all this happened in spades, sending an electrical tidal wave through 34,000 miles of wires and darkening parts of eight states and eastern Canada. But some federal investigators, industry officials and other experts have concluded that human errors played a significant role.
One big problem is complexity. The goal is seamless communication of grid conditions and of schedules for wholesale transactions, so that no manager is surprised by a sudden load or burst of generation in an adjacent area.
But missteps are common, experts say. And nowhere is the confusion greater, they say, than in the Midwest, where the latest blackout had its roots.
Most parts of the country have a single industry entity, an "independent system operator" like PJM Interconnection, that is responsible both for tracking potential trouble on its part of the grid and for adjusting power demand and flows. But in the heart of the Midwest, the independent system operator only monitors conditions; the actual button-pushing to control loads and power generation is done by individual operators for the region's 23 utilities.
Another problem, system operators say, is that many veteran operators have moved to other jobs within utilities or retired early under programs aimed at cutting costs.
Utility officials dispute this. At the FirstEnergy Corporation and American Electric Power, two Ohio-based utilities whose systems were involved in the early stages of the problems on Aug. 14, officials say control-room staffs have an average age of 50 or more. (NERC tracks the rate of errors in balancing power generation and demand, but not the performance or experience of individual operators, said Mr. Benjamin, the executive there.)
Perhaps the biggest pressure facing system operators, many say, is an intensifying clash between their own efforts to keep the system in balance and the industry's efforts to maximize sales. The PJM system operator who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the wall between the commercial side of the business and the entities responsible for running the grid was inadequate.
"Things have gotten extremely intense compared to the way it was, say, 10 years ago," he said. "We're facing people out there who are strictly power marketers. They really don't care too much about the reliability. They get their bonuses based on the size of the deals they make."
Industry officials deny that the profit motive is exerting pressure on the control rooms, saying electricity traders are segregated from the operators who schedule and initiate transmissions. FirstEnergy officials, for instance, insist that safety and operation of the grid come first; deals are canceled, they say, if conditions are judged inadequate to handle them.
"For our control-area operators, the only responsibility is safe and reliable operation of the system," said Ralph DiNicola, a FirstEnergy spokesman.
Still, many experts, people in the industry among them, say that such strains are present and, without significant changes, are likely to keep rising. In every area, the industry is looking to push more power on lines that cannot keep up with the flows, utility workers and independent experts say.
Cold, windy days are seen as opportunities for extra profit, for example, because frigid and blustery weather allows more power to flow through lines than their technical rating allows, said James L. Dushaw, the utility-division director of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
Mr. Dushaw, whose union has been fighting to represent system operators — the utilities argue that they are management employees and so should not be unionized — says that perhaps most significant is a shift in the utility culture from the days 20 years ago when he still worked as a lineman.
"The culture used to be `Keep the lights on,' " Mr. Dushaw said. "There was a duty, a responsibility, a pride that existed. That is very hard to maintain under the pressures that are here now."
nytimes.com |
