Power outages started automatically - not by human error, say utility executives
JIM KRANE
Associated Press
NEW YORK - The series of power line and power plant outages that led to last month's blackout were triggered automatically, not by human interaction with the electricity grid, a pair of utility executives said Tuesday.
Anthony Alexander, chief operating officer of FirstEnergy Corp., the Akron, Ohio-based utility at the center of the blackout investigation, said the company had received no information that pointed to operators at neighboring utilities deliberately shutting down lines to isolate themselves from instabilities on FirstEnergy's grid.
"No separation of systems took place that weren't automatic," Alexander told financial analysts at a conference in New York that was broadcast on the World Wide Web. "I'm not sure there was time to manually intervene in the system."
Alexander said that despite the automatic shutdown of connections between neighboring utilities and FirstEnergy's grid in northeastern Ohio - where the events that triggered the blackout appear to have originated - the company's wires remained open to several other neighboring utilities. One neighbor, Columbus, Ohio-based American Electric Power, automatically closed some but not all of its interconnecting lines, Alexander told analysts in the Lehman Brothers Energy/Power Conference.
The company repeated assertions that, in the minutes and hours preceding the Aug. 14 blackout, its monitoring equipment sensed "anomalies" on its own wires - power dips and oscillations among them. It said such events also occurred elsewhere within the Eastern Interconnect, the grid that delivers power within the eastern halves of the United States and Canada. The blackout snuffed power for 50 million utility customers in eight U.S. states and Ontario.
"There is probably no single straw that broke the camel's back," said FirstEnergy chief financial officer Richard Marsh. "We think what happened is a combination of events, not an isolated event on anybody's line or any one operator."
Marsh suggested that news organizations had unfairly portrayed FirstEnergy as chiefly responsible for the blackout, and once the actual causes become clear, the company's wilted stock price would rebound.
FirstEnergy chief executive Peter Burg is scheduled to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, chaired by Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., on Thursday.
The two-day hearing features dozens of scheduled witnesses, from utility and transmission company executives to federal Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, Ohio Gov. Bob Taft, Patrick Wood, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm.
FirstEnergy outlined several steps required to restart its Davis-Besse nuclear plant east of Toledo, Ohio, after the reactor was shuttered in February 2002 when workers found acid had eaten nearly through the 6-inch-thick steel cap covering the plant's reactor vessel.
The cost of the Davis-Besse outage is more than $500 million. It cost $642 million to build the plant in 1977.
Marsh said FirstEnergy had not yet released estimates of losses related to the blackout but that lost generation from its Perry nuclear plant east of Cleveland was the largest blackout-related expense.
The utility might upgrade in its transmission infrastructure as long as utility regulators permit the company to recoup the outlays through rate hikes or other schemes, Marsh said.
Many experts say the Aug. 14 blackout became so widespread because there are too many transmission bottlenecks on the regional grid.
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