Blackout was no surprise to UAF professor
NED ROZELL
ALASKA SCIENCE
(Published: September 7, 2003)
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An Alaska college professor was not surprised when the lights went out over the northern tier of the United States and southeast Canada in mid-August.
David Newman studies the workings of complex, chaotic systems as part of his research at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He and three colleagues wrote a paper in December 2002 about "cascading" power blackouts similar to the largest ever, which affected 50 million people on Aug. 14, 2003. It took nine seconds.
Newman is a physics professor who uses a variety of computers to model gargantuan interconnected systems that fail catastrophically, including power transmission grids, intercity travel halted during traffic jams, and huge communications systems like the Web, which can be disrupted by a single computer worm.
"Events like (the blackout of 2003) happen for two reasons: We sit on the teetering edge of collapse with our power demands, plus we're interconnected," he said.
Most cities do not have power generators large enough to provide sufficient electricity during times of peak demand, such as a hot summer day in New York City.
"If we had to supply each city on its neighboring power plants in times of peak need, forget it," Newman said.
To satisfy the call for power at peak times, electrical utilities buy power from other plants. Though Alaska's electrical power systems are separate from the Lower 48's, a few large regions of the nation are connected. The intertwined nature of the system makes it possible to share electricity, but the connected lines also make the system prone to avalanching power outages.
In a possible scenario for the 2003 blackout reported in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a 600-megawatt coal-fed generator in Eastlake, Ohio, shut down. The shutdown tripped a transmission line, then a second line sagged into a tree in a nearby town and shorted out.
The damage to the second line shunted too much power to other lines in Ohio, many of which shut down. With so many customers then without electricity, power from generators working at full capacity surged through lines in central Michigan, causing protective relays to trip and shut off power there.
In seconds, the same scenario played out from Michigan to Toronto to New York.
Newman said a 2 percent increase of power demand each year and a lack of simultaneous upgrades to generators and transmission lines could mean more problems.
"Couple this to some hot summer days, and we have a system sitting on the edge waiting for something to push it over," Newman wrote in an editorial he recently submitted to The Washington Post.
He said that while it will be possible to prevent the specific problems that caused the 2003 blackout, other, unpredictable problems as small as a squirrel chewing through insulation at a power-transmission substation will continue to threaten the system. For the short term, people can manage the power problem by installing more power wires to spread out the load and by increasing the capacity of power plants.
Alaska's problems are similar to those of the Lower 48 but involve different solutions due to a smaller number of adjacent plants supplying extra power.
Additional power generation, called spinning reserve, is needed in case a main generator goes off line without warning. Golden Valley Electrical Association is currently testing a battery energy storage system, BESS, it has built in Fairbanks. Costing $35 million, BESS is "the world's most powerful storage battery," GVEA says, and will provide 27 megawatts of power for up to 15 minutes.
This is enough time to cover the starting of backup generators and will allow Railbelt utilities to lower spinning reserve, benefiting members and the environment by using less fuel.
Ned Rozell is a science writer at the Geophysical Institute at UAF. He can be reached by e-mail at nrozell@gi.alaska.edu.
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