Blackout Blowback
Following the August 2003 blackout, which left 50 million people from the Midwest to the East Coast in the dark, multiple Congressional hearings and a Federal investigation were conducted to examine the problem and propose solutions. The Department of Energy was tasked with identifying the cause. Its final report blamed everything possible—including operators and fallen trees—except deregulation.
But the Congress mandated that the Department produce a report, the National Electric Transmission Congestion Study, which it released in August 2006. The report duly noted what everyone already knew—that areas of Critical Congestion included the New York City and Connecticut service areas, with Congestion Areas of Concern all the way from New York through Northern Virginia. The Los Angeles area was noted as a Critical Congestion area, with parts of the West Coast, from Seattle to San Diego, in the Areas of Concern category. But it is not in these regions that profit-conscious, and even foreign-owned companies, are proposing to build new power lines, or the new local generating plants that would obviate the need for long-distance transmission lines. Why?
Thanks to 30 years of irrational "environmentalist" brainwashing of sections of the U.S. population, particularly in "liberal" large urban regions such as New York and California, it is almost impossible to build new generating capacity—much less nuclear power plants—where the greatest needs are. Therefore, these regions, which do not generate enough power locally, are forced to import power from other utilities. Thanks to the efforts of the same so-called environmentalists, these cities have not even been able to build enough power lines to bring in the electricity from elsewhere.
Under the no-holds-barred market of deregulation, this "elsewhere" has moved further and further away from the large cities, with their large power requirements, to areas of the country where power can be produced more cheaply, and new plants can be built with the minimum amount of local political opposition and legal interference.
For example, PJM is a regional transmission interconnection, which coordinates the operation of the transmission grid that now includes Delaware, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. It oversees 56,070 miles of transmission lines, and plans regional transmission expansion to maintain grid reliability and relieve congestion.
In March, PJM identified transmission constraints in its region, which were standing in the way of "bringing resources to a broader market." PJM identified two transmission paths requiring significant investment: a high-voltage line from the coal fields of West Virginia to Baltimore and Washington, D.C. and another, extending from West Virginia to Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Delaware. However, these lines, hundreds of miles long, would not be necessary, if the mandate existed to build new nuclear plants where the capacity would be near the load centers.
While Virginia and Maryland utilities are considering such new builds, most of the nuclear power plants that are under consideration by utilities are in the semi-rural Southeast, where there is political support for new plants, and building more high-voltage transmission lines to carry the power is unlikely to be held up for 15 years by "environmental" court challenges. Some of that new nuclear-generated power from the Southeast will be used locally, for growing demand, and some will be wheeled to the energy-short regions of the mid-Atlantic and Northeast, which refuse to build their own capacity. Companies that have been buying up transmission capacity will make a bundle, in the process.
Investment in new transmission capacity overall has left the grid system vulnerable to even small instabilities. The industry estimates that $100 billion is needed in new transmission capacity and upgrades, as quickly as possible. The 2003 blackout did spur some increase in investment industry-wide, from $3.5 billion per year to $6 billion in 2006. But profit-minded companies are only willing to invest funds where there is a profit to be made, namely to carry their "economy transfers," regardless of how that destabilizes the grid system overall.
In a July 2006 article, three former electric utility executives, who formed the organization, Power Engineers Supporting Truth (PEST), out of disgust with the refusal of the government to pinpoint deregulation as the cause of the massive grid failure, after the 2003 New York blackout, stated that the "core issue is an almost fundamentalist reliance on markets to solve even the most scientifically complex problems... [P]olicy makers continue to act as if some adjustment in market protocols is all that is required, and steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the accumulating mass of evidence that deregulation ... is itself the problem. Social scientists call this kind of denial, cognitive dissonance."
The engineers, who have among them, more than five decades of experience in the electrical utility industry, insist that "new transmission lines will not by themselves improve reliability. They may increase transfer capacities, and hence improve commercial use of the grid," but will not necessarily improve performance of the system. "Reliability standards have already been reduced to accomodate greater use of the grid for commercial transactions," they warned (Table II).
There has been a huge penalty for this disruption of the functioning of the electric grid. PEST estimates that the 2003 blackout incurred economic losses in excess of $5 billion. The California blackouts cost in excess of $1 billion each. The national impact of declining reliability and quality, they estimate, is in excess of $50 billion.
larouchepub.com
* * * |
