Report: Ohio utility could have averted '03 blackout
chicagotribune.com
By Richard Perez-Pena
New York Times News Service
April 6, 2004
An Ohio power company should have prevented last summer's blackout across a wide swath of North America by intentionally cutting off electricity to most of the Cleveland area, U.S. and Canadian officials said Monday.
In their final report on the Aug. 14 blackout that darkened much of the Midwest, the Northeast and Ontario, a panel convened by the two national governments put much of the blame on FirstEnergy Corp., in whose eastern Ohio territory the collapse began.
The inquiry found that not only did FirstEnergy not "shed load," or shut off some customers as a preventive measure, the company apparently did not have a plan for doing so on short notice.
"We believe that if FirstEnergy had shed as much as 1,500 megawatts of load in the Cleveland-Akron area" then the blackout "would have been a local Ohio problem," said Alison Silverstein, senior energy policy adviser to the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which was one of the investigators.
FirstEnergy's problems became acute about an hour before the blackout, but Silverstein said the cascading failure could have been prevented until about three minutes before the blackout began.
Power companies cut off electricity fairly frequently to prevent an isolated problem from spreading, but they are loath to do so on a large scale. Federal officials say that without written rules for blacking out a wide area, doing it quickly would have been difficult and chaotic.
"Had we blacked out Cleveland, it may or may not have prevented the event," said Chuck Jones, senior vice president for energy delivery at FirstEnergy, one of the nation's largest utilities.
Jones said the international investigation had glossed over the problems created by a rise in long-distance power transmission in recent years.
He said power being shipped from southern Ohio to Ontario, across FirstEnergy's territory, was one cause of the company's problems the day of the blackout.
"We take exception to the idea that you should interrupt local customers in favor of long-distance transactions," he said.
Jones declined to respond point by point, saying FirstEnergy is "looking forward." He noted that most of the report's recommendations involve industry-wide practices that the company supports.
The report does not fully explain why the cascade spread from Ohio to Michigan to Ontario to New York, while other areas were spared.
The U.S.-Canadian panel offered 46 specific recommendations, starting with writing into federal law the rules that are supposed to ensure reliable power supplies, so that there are penalties for utilities that violate them.
Until now, the rules--governing everything from how closely utilities monitor their transmission lines to how much information they share with other regions--have been drafted by an industry group, the North American Electric Reliability Council, and no one has any power to enforce them.
Rules not explicit, report says
Some of those rules also need to become more explicit, the report says. For instance, there is no rule about trimming vegetation around power lines, and there should be. The blackout happened in part because several major power lines in Ohio sagged into trees, shutting them down.
Investigators found that FirstEnergy and the regional agency that oversees it, the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator, violated several of the reliability council's rules, including failure to warn their neighbors of a mounting crisis.
When asked if the conditions at FirstEnergy existed at many other utilities, Jimmy Glotfelty, director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Electric Transmission and Distribution, said, "I would hope that the answer is no," but conceded that he did not know.
Accountability issue softened
The panel dropped a recommendation it had included in its interim report, that the chief executives of energy companies be required personally to sign their reliability reports.
Most of the report goes over topics already covered in an interim report in November. The primary failing, both documents say, was that both FirstEnergy and the regional agency overseeing it had woefully inadequate computer systems for monitoring their equipment, so that they did not know how severe the problems were until it was too late.
But the conclusion that FirstEnergy should have blacked out the Cleveland area was a new element in Monday's report.
The panel also altered its view of a crucial technical issue, the role of reactive power--and, indirectly, energy deregulation--that has been the subject of heated debate. Reactive power (as opposed to what engineers call "real" power, which actually turns on light bulbs and toasters) is an essential component of electricity that helps electrical equipment keep working.
Alternate theory cited
Some academic energy analysts, and FirstEnergy, itself, have contended that a lack of reactive power was a central cause of the blackout. They speculated that it resulted from market conditions created by deregulation--increasing long-distance energy transactions, and the rise of independent power producers, power companies that run power plants in other utilities' service areas.
In its November report, the panel noted that problems with reactive power should have been entirely manageable. In contrast, Monday's report states plainly that "failure to maintain adequate reactive power support" was a major contributor to the crisis.
But the panel blamed those problems squarely on FirstEnergy, noting that FirstEnergy had even removed from service, for routine maintenance, some of the equipment it used to generate reactive power.
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