This is what TAVA/Beck and the electric industry as a whole is up against:
Blackout - July 3, 1996
Excerpt from article found in www.pbs.org
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MR. SWANSON: The good news is that the system operated the way we designed it, the way that we wanted it to work. And what happens in a situation like this is all of a sudden because you have so much power being generated up in the Northwest, there's too much energy there to be absorbed by those users, and so you have to start shutting down power plants, and shutting down power plants, you unbalance the system and customers can be taken off of the system. They can loser their power.
MR. LEHRER: Now the worst case scenario would have been that all this energy was being generated, and these things didn't shut down, as they were supposed to.
MR. SWANSON: Yeah.
MR. LEHRER: What would have been--what would have been the consequences of that?
MR. SWANSON: You would have overloaded lots and lots of transmission lines, and they would have been damaged and the system would have collapsed because of overheated and failed transmission lines.
MR. LEHRER: And there's no evidence that that happened at all in this case?
MR. SWANSON: No. As a matter of fact, all of the safety equipment worked just the way you wanted it to.
MR. LEHRER: All right, now, what caused it to all come back on, sometimes in less than an hour, an hour and a half, three hours or whatever, is that also part of an automatic system?
MR. SWANSON: Yeah. Mm-hmm. The utility's plan for these kinds of events and what they have are various degrees of what they call load shutting down in the Southwestern part of the country, California. You had a lot more demand for energy than you had generation, and so you have to start what they call rotating blackouts in order to balance the demand with the generation capability. And so different substations were turned off, different customers got shut off. They got brought back on, others were dropped off, and you just rotate this around the system as much as you have to to balance it again.
MR. LEHRER: Now who's they? Is this seven people in a room saying, okay, let's shut down a little bit of Arizona, and let's do a little bit in Colorado, or is it all happening automatically by computer? How did all this happen yesterday?
MR. SWANSON: There are very sophisticated computers that monitor the operation of the whole western system. Each utility also has its own control area, and it has responsibilities for its customers and the generation that it controls. And so the load shutting takes place utility by utility to balance within its own service area, but under coordination through the entire western systems coordinating council.
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(source: pbs.org
steve |
