"Listen," Jaccard said, "first of all, one-third of humanity has no electricity.
"Secondly, another billion people -- and now we're up to half of humanity -- get a failure like this about two or three times a week. And the media doesn't even write about it."
Saturday » August 16 » 2003
Can it happen here?
William Boei and Greg Mercer
Vancouver Sun
(Power trip: How electricity gets to your house)
For British Columbians, it was mesmerizing TV: Within minutes of the first sign of Thursday's rolling, surging power blackout in Ontario and the northeastern U.S., the all-news networks were on the story.
We watched the great eastern cities blink off one by one, but the cameras kept running and we saw everything from the rescues of subway and elevator passengers to citizens cheerfully directing traffic at lightless intersections, to politicians misinforming the public about who was to blame.
But could it happen here? How secure is the power grid that connects us to Alberta and the U.S.? What happens as chunks of BC Hydro are hived off into separate companies? And who's in charge of making sure it doesn't happen here?
The Vancouver Sun's William Boei and Greg Mercer went looked for those and other answers on Friday.
Is B.C. at risk of a crisis like that seen in eastern North America?
Sure, but it's less likely here than down east, the experts say.
"In theory, it can happen to any system," said Prabha Kundur, president and chief executive of Powertech Labs, a BC Hydro subsidiary that analyzes and consults for power transmission systems around the world.
But the probability of it happening here is lower for several reasons, he added.
One is that B.C. and the Western Power Grid, which links power systems in B.C. with those in Alberta and 11 western U.S. states, rely largely on hydro-electric power, which uses simple and stable technology.
The nuclear and thermal power plants that produce much of the electricity in the eastern power grid, on the other hand, are notoriously complex and finicky.
More importantly, though, western power transmission networks are connected in ways that make rolling blackouts like Thursday's less likely.
The eastern grid is "highly meshed," Kundur said, which means there are so many interconnections that when something goes wrong, it's almost impossible to isolate the trouble spot and prevent it from bringing the rest of the network down.
British Columbia, on the other hand, hooks up to Alberta and to the U.S. with a single connection apiece. The 11 U.S. states in the grid also have fewer connections to each other (and to Mexico, which is also hooked up) than the eastern grid.
So in 1996, when California experienced power shortages that threw the entire western grid into convulsions, it didn't bring down the whole system.
Parts of B.C., Alberta, Oregon, California, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada were blacked out for periods of time. But power was restored within hours in most places, and the most troublesome spots were isolated from the rest of the grid.
"Rather than the whole interconnected system blacking out, it got separated into four islands," Kundur said. B.C. and Washington formed one of the islands, which kept functioning -- and feeding power to the other islands whenever they were able to receive it -- for most of the crisis.
A disturbance of the same magnitude on the eastern grid would bring the whole thing down. "It's one integrated system. It's like a domino effect. The entire system gets blacked out."
There's always a chance of "a strange combination of events" that the western grid can't cope with, Kundur said. But the chances of that happening are about as low here as anywhere in the world.
British Columbians should keep that in mind when something like Thursday's blackout occurs, said Mark Jaccard, a Simon Fraser University energy expert and former chairman of the B.C. Utilities Commission, the regulatory agency that oversees BC Hydro.
"Listen," Jaccard said, "first of all, one-third of humanity has no electricity.
"Secondly, another billion people -- and now we're up to half of humanity -- get a failure like this about two or three times a week. And the media doesn't even write about it."
Thursday's blackout may actually reduce the chances of something similar happening in the West, Jaccard said, because as soon as the cause is definitively nailed down, Hydro engineers will start putting preventive measures in place to make sure the same thing can't happen here.
Who is making sure
B.C. Hydro does its job properly?
The B.C. Utilities Commission oversees BC Hydro, and it reports in turn to the provincial government.
There's some controversy about how well the commission has been able to do that job in recent years, however.
The best opportunities for the commission to take a close look at Hydro, its assets and its operations come when Hydro asks for a rate increase and there's a public hearing.
The New Democrats imposed a rate freeze in 1993 that has not been lifted yet by Liberals, and so it has been more than a decade since Hydro came under that kind of scrutiny.
However, the Liberals are expected to lift the freeze next year, and Hydro has already indicated it will look for rate increases of 21 per cent or more.
Commission officials could not be reached Friday. Outgoing chairman Peter Ostergaard was away, and the man who takes over from him next week, Robert Hobbs, declined to be interviewed.
Hydro has acknowledged that much of its infrastructure, especially its transmission network, is nearing the end of its life and it has already accelerated capital spending to replace and upgrade power lines and other facilities.
"Certainly, it is an aging infrastructure," Kundur agreed. "It needs attention."
But Kundur and Jaccard both rejected suggestions that a decaying infrastructure can be blamed for the eastern blackout, or that it could cause similar trouble for B.C.
"I believe there is no evidence that the system back east is decaying or in need of repair," said Jaccard. "I think that's the language of pundits.
"What you need to look at is reliability statistics, and it's my understanding that they have been better than ever [in the east.] And the same goes out here."
David Austin, of the Independent Power Association of British Columbia, added that pouring buckets of money into infrastructure can never completely eliminate the risk of a disastrous event.
"Do you want to spend a trillion dollars to prevent one blackout every 30 years?" he asked.
"The reality is, it happens, we can't isolate ourselves from these things. There will always be a combination of events that you haven't taken into account that will have a negative impact."
Why is the provincial government splitting Hydro into separate companies, and what's happening with that?
Hydro quietly spun off the operation of its transmission network into a separate company on Aug. 1, and hardly anyone noticed.
About 280 former Hydro employees now work for the B.C. Transmission Company. Hydro continues to own the network, but BCTC now runs the 17,000-kilometre network.
"It's the same people in the same locations operating the same equipment," Hydro media relations manager Elisha Moreno said when asked why there had been no fanfare.
The transmission spinoff is often associated with a possible privatization of B.C. Hydro. But in fact, it's a step Hydro says it had to take in order to keep a hand in the often lucrative U.S. electricity market.
The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission wants power transmission companies to form a regional transmission authority, or RTO, that would oversee electricity transmission for all its participants.
The RTO is required to be independent of electricity generation and distribution companies -- like Hydro. So if B.C. electricity was to be a commodity in the U.S. power market, Hydro had to spin off its transmission network.
Not everyone is happy about that. B.C. Citizens for Public Power, a group opposed to privatization of Hydro, claimed Friday the move "will destabilize the province's transmission system and greatly increase the possibility of blackouts and catastrophic system failure."
The group said Hydro would be ceding control of B.C.'s power transmission system to a private consortium of American utilities -- the RTO -- and "British Columbians will lose the ability to plan the system to meet the needs of B.C. businesses and citizens as a first priority."
"By needlessly making our transmission system subservient to U.S. interests, the government is, once again, making an enormous public policy mistake as a result of blind ideology," Citizens for Public Power said in a statement.
"Just look at what happened yesterday throughout Ontario and ask yourself if it really makes sense to deliberately destroy a highly stable system in return for one that brings all of the risks of Ontario's disastrous approach to electricity restructuring," said B.C. Federation of Labour president Jim Sinclair, a director of the anti-privatization group.
However, Jaccard said a private transmission company won't be much different from a public transmission company, because the Utilities Commission won't let it take major risks.
"Those transmission systems are still natural monopolies," he said. "And whether they are privately owned or publicly owned, they are regulated by utility commission regulators, and those regulators are what I would call risk-averse."
Should we be worrying about a private company taking over part of Hydro's administration?
In April, 1,500 employees of B.C. Hydro became employees of Accenture Business Services of British Columbia (ABSBC), a new company created in a $1.45-billion deal with international management-consulting and technology-services firm Accenture. ABSBC, a private company, will run many of B.C. Hydro's back-office functions, including customer services, human resources and payroll, information technology, building maintenance and purchasing, for the next 10 years.
Austin said there's no indication that a private electrical system is more susceptible to power failures than those that are government-run.
He said electrical grids in the U.S. have been operated by private companies for years without the incidence of power failures going up.
Besides, Austin said, the equipment used in all of North America's power grids is supplied by private companies in any case.
"The grid in Ontario is publicly owned. Did that stop it [from blacking out]? There's nothing to say the public sector is going to be any better at investing money trying to prevent events that may or may occur than the private sector," he said.
Will Hydro rates be going up?
Count on it.
The provincial government has indicated the rate freeze will end next year, and Hydro's service plan for 2003-2006 anticipates rate increases of at least three to six per cent per year over the next three years.
The commission, however, will have the last word.
A GROWTH QUANDARY
Although growth rates in summertime peak demand are slowing down, transmission capacity of the U.S. system is growing even slower. The reason is underinvestment and without more transmission capacity the power industry has already warned of reliability problems.
Ran with fact box "A GROWTH QUANDARY", which has been appended to the end of the story.
© Copyright 2003 Vancouver Sun
Saturday » August 16 » 2003
Can it happen here?
William Boei and Greg Mercer
Vancouver Sun
Saturday, August 16, 2003
CREDIT: Bonny Makarewicz, Vancouver Sun Files
Rene Long, plant operator of the Soo River Hydro Project north of Whistler, checks daily output levels.
(Power trip: How electricity gets to your house)
For British Columbians, it was mesmerizing TV: Within minutes of the first sign of Thursday's rolling, surging power blackout in Ontario and the northeastern U.S., the all-news networks were on the story.
We watched the great eastern cities blink off one by one, but the cameras kept running and we saw everything from the rescues of subway and elevator passengers to citizens cheerfully directing traffic at lightless intersections, to politicians misinforming the public about who was to blame.
But could it happen here? How secure is the power grid that connects us to Alberta and the U.S.? What happens as chunks of BC Hydro are hived off into separate companies? And who's in charge of making sure it doesn't happen here?
The Vancouver Sun's William Boei and Greg Mercer went looked for those and other answers on Friday.
Is B.C. at risk of a crisis like that seen in eastern North America?
Sure, but it's less likely here than down east, the experts say.
"In theory, it can happen to any system," said Prabha Kundur, president and chief executive of Powertech Labs, a BC Hydro subsidiary that analyzes and consults for power transmission systems around the world.
But the probability of it happening here is lower for several reasons, he added.
One is that B.C. and the Western Power Grid, which links power systems in B.C. with those in Alberta and 11 western U.S. states, rely largely on hydro-electric power, which uses simple and stable technology.
The nuclear and thermal power plants that produce much of the electricity in the eastern power grid, on the other hand, are notoriously complex and finicky.
More importantly, though, western power transmission networks are connected in ways that make rolling blackouts like Thursday's less likely.
The eastern grid is "highly meshed," Kundur said, which means there are so many interconnections that when something goes wrong, it's almost impossible to isolate the trouble spot and prevent it from bringing the rest of the network down.
British Columbia, on the other hand, hooks up to Alberta and to the U.S. with a single connection apiece. The 11 U.S. states in the grid also have fewer connections to each other (and to Mexico, which is also hooked up) than the eastern grid.
So in 1996, when California experienced power shortages that threw the entire western grid into convulsions, it didn't bring down the whole system.
Parts of B.C., Alberta, Oregon, California, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada were blacked out for periods of time. But power was restored within hours in most places, and the most troublesome spots were isolated from the rest of the grid.
"Rather than the whole interconnected system blacking out, it got separated into four islands," Kundur said. B.C. and Washington formed one of the islands, which kept functioning -- and feeding power to the other islands whenever they were able to receive it -- for most of the crisis.
A disturbance of the same magnitude on the eastern grid would bring the whole thing down. "It's one integrated system. It's like a domino effect. The entire system gets blacked out."
There's always a chance of "a strange combination of events" that the western grid can't cope with, Kundur said. But the chances of that happening are about as low here as anywhere in the world.
British Columbians should keep that in mind when something like Thursday's blackout occurs, said Mark Jaccard, a Simon Fraser University energy expert and former chairman of the B.C. Utilities Commission, the regulatory agency that oversees BC Hydro.
"Listen," Jaccard said, "first of all, one-third of humanity has no electricity.
"Secondly, another billion people -- and now we're up to half of humanity -- get a failure like this about two or three times a week. And the media doesn't even write about it."
Thursday's blackout may actually reduce the chances of something similar happening in the West, Jaccard said, because as soon as the cause is definitively nailed down, Hydro engineers will start putting preventive measures in place to make sure the same thing can't happen here.
Who is making sure
B.C. Hydro does its job properly?
The B.C. Utilities Commission oversees BC Hydro, and it reports in turn to the provincial government.
There's some controversy about how well the commission has been able to do that job in recent years, however.
The best opportunities for the commission to take a close look at Hydro, its assets and its operations come when Hydro asks for a rate increase and there's a public hearing.
The New Democrats imposed a rate freeze in 1993 that has not been lifted yet by Liberals, and so it has been more than a decade since Hydro came under that kind of scrutiny.
However, the Liberals are expected to lift the freeze next year, and Hydro has already indicated it will look for rate increases of 21 per cent or more.
Commission officials could not be reached Friday. Outgoing chairman Peter Ostergaard was away, and the man who takes over from him next week, Robert Hobbs, declined to be interviewed.
Hydro has acknowledged that much of its infrastructure, especially its transmission network, is nearing the end of its life and it has already accelerated capital spending to replace and upgrade power lines and other facilities.
"Certainly, it is an aging infrastructure," Kundur agreed. "It needs attention."
But Kundur and Jaccard both rejected suggestions that a decaying infrastructure can be blamed for the eastern blackout, or that it could cause similar trouble for B.C.
"I believe there is no evidence that the system back east is decaying or in need of repair," said Jaccard. "I think that's the language of pundits.
"What you need to look at is reliability statistics, and it's my understanding that they have been better than ever [in the east.] And the same goes out here."
David Austin, of the Independent Power Association of British Columbia, added that pouring buckets of money into infrastructure can never completely eliminate the risk of a disastrous event.
"Do you want to spend a trillion dollars to prevent one blackout every 30 years?" he asked.
"The reality is, it happens, we can't isolate ourselves from these things. There will always be a combination of events that you haven't taken into account that will have a negative impact."
Why is the provincial government splitting Hydro into separate companies, and what's happening with that?
Hydro quietly spun off the operation of its transmission network into a separate company on Aug. 1, and hardly anyone noticed.
About 280 former Hydro employees now work for the B.C. Transmission Company. Hydro continues to own the network, but BCTC now runs the 17,000-kilometre network.
"It's the same people in the same locations operating the same equipment," Hydro media relations manager Elisha Moreno said when asked why there had been no fanfare.
The transmission spinoff is often associated with a possible privatization of B.C. Hydro. But in fact, it's a step Hydro says it had to take in order to keep a hand in the often lucrative U.S. electricity market.
The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission wants power transmission companies to form a regional transmission authority, or RTO, that would oversee electricity transmission for all its participants.
The RTO is required to be independent of electricity generation and distribution companies -- like Hydro. So if B.C. electricity was to be a commodity in the U.S. power market, Hydro had to spin off its transmission network.
Not everyone is happy about that. B.C. Citizens for Public Power, a group opposed to privatization of Hydro, claimed Friday the move "will destabilize the province's transmission system and greatly increase the possibility of blackouts and catastrophic system failure."
The group said Hydro would be ceding control of B.C.'s power transmission system to a private consortium of American utilities -- the RTO -- and "British Columbians will lose the ability to plan the system to meet the needs of B.C. businesses and citizens as a first priority."
"By needlessly making our transmission system subservient to U.S. interests, the government is, once again, making an enormous public policy mistake as a result of blind ideology," Citizens for Public Power said in a statement.
"Just look at what happened yesterday throughout Ontario and ask yourself if it really makes sense to deliberately destroy a highly stable system in return for one that brings all of the risks of Ontario's disastrous approach to electricity restructuring," said B.C. Federation of Labour president Jim Sinclair, a director of the anti-privatization group.
However, Jaccard said a private transmission company won't be much different from a public transmission company, because the Utilities Commission won't let it take major risks.
"Those transmission systems are still natural monopolies," he said. "And whether they are privately owned or publicly owned, they are regulated by utility commission regulators, and those regulators are what I would call risk-averse."
Should we be worrying about a private company taking over part of Hydro's administration?
In April, 1,500 employees of B.C. Hydro became employees of Accenture Business Services of British Columbia (ABSBC), a new company created in a $1.45-billion deal with international management-consulting and technology-services firm Accenture. ABSBC, a private company, will run many of B.C. Hydro's back-office functions, including customer services, human resources and payroll, information technology, building maintenance and purchasing, for the next 10 years.
Austin said there's no indication that a private electrical system is more susceptible to power failures than those that are government-run.
He said electrical grids in the U.S. have been operated by private companies for years without the incidence of power failures going up.
Besides, Austin said, the equipment used in all of North America's power grids is supplied by private companies in any case.
"The grid in Ontario is publicly owned. Did that stop it [from blacking out]? There's nothing to say the public sector is going to be any better at investing money trying to prevent events that may or may occur than the private sector," he said.
Will Hydro rates be going up?
Count on it.
The provincial government has indicated the rate freeze will end next year, and Hydro's service plan for 2003-2006 anticipates rate increases of at least three to six per cent per year over the next three years.
The commission, however, will have the last word.
A GROWTH QUANDARY
Although growth rates in summertime peak demand are slowing down, transmission capacity of the U.S. system is growing even slower. The reason is underinvestment and without more transmission capacity the power industry has already warned of reliability problems.
Ran with fact box "A GROWTH QUANDARY", which has been appended to the end of the story.
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