Oh Ya, Bill Richardson has a lot of room for talk! when he was the Energy Secretary under Clinton, His claim to fame was to sell our countries most guarded secrets to the Chinese, stolen(?) for money for the clintons...Why didn't he take care of business when he was in office? He helped Enron, but forgot the "aniquated" system in place.
Power Failure Reveals a Creaky System, Energy Experts Believe
By DAVID FIRESTONE and RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
WASHINGTON, Aug. 14 — While energy experts disagreed on the precise cause of today's power blackout, they were in agreement that the extensive failure betrayed the age of the region's transmission system and its failure to keep up with demand.
"We are a major superpower with a third-world electrical grid," said Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who served as energy secretary in the Clinton administration. "Our grid is antiquated. It needs serious modernization."
The power system in the Northeast has long been plagued by inadequate transmission capacity and bottlenecks nationwide, especially in the New York metropolitan area. Most of New York City's and Long Island's power at peak times must be generated in the city and on the Island, because it is physically impossible to transmit that much power into the area along the existing lines.
Bottlenecks limit how much power can be shipped east to west across upstate New York, north to south within New York, and across the Hudson from New Jersey, and attempts to put a major line from Connecticut to Long Island under Long Island Sound have been thwarted for years.
"We've got excess power in upstate New York, but there's no way to get it to New York City because of the bottlenecks," said Denise VanBuren, vice president of Central Hudson Gas & Electric, which supplies power to eight counties north of New York City. "It's very difficult in this economy to get financing for a major transmission line, and we've been concerned for a long time about the region's transmission capacity."
With only a limited number of high-voltage lines, a power failure can spread more quickly when generators try to send their power to areas that need it, overloading the lines that remain.
"If there had been more lines available at the time this event occurred, it's possible they could have absorbed the load and kept the failure from spreading," said Jack Hawks, vice president for planning of the Electric Power Supply Association, a trade association of generators.
The office of the Canadian prime minister, Jean Chrétien, initially said the failure originated in a fire in a Con Edison power plant near Niagara Falls on the American side, possibly caused by a lightning strike. Later, the office withdrew that statement. Con Edison has no plants in the area, and an official of the state's power grid said he believed that the event began with a lightning strike to a Canadian power line. "As of right now, we don't believe the problem originated in New York," said Matthew Melewski, spokesman for the New York Independent System Operator, the consortium of power companies and state officials who manage the grid.
The Canadian cabinet minister in charge of emergency preparedness, John MacCallum, said tonight that the power failure originated at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He did not explain his remarks.
The problem of preventing such power failures has been that, for the most part, no one has an incentive to invest billions of dollars in new wires, new towers and new transformers. The old utilities have sold off their power plants but still hold a highly regulated monopoly on the network of lines, and they would only invest in new transmission if state regulators would guarantee them rate increases to pay for it.
That is the last thing the regulators, who deregulated much of the industry in hopes of lowering rates, would be willing to do. The entrepreneurial power companies that have bought up power plants have decided against building new transmission lines that would compete with existing ones, possibly driving down transmission charges, and would, at most times, be nothing more than "excess capacity."
Analysts said additional disruptions are quite likely as the economy begins to strengthen and demand for electricity increases.
"If the economy grows at 3.5 percent a year for the next several years, I would not be surprised if we don't have interruptions on a scale that is not acceptable to most Americans," said Irwin Stelzer, director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute, a conservative research institute.
Continued..
nytimes.com |
