Lessons in power from the big blackout

By Arthur J. O'Donnell

O'Donnell is an independent journalist and energy observer based in San Francisco. His current book is "Soul of the Grid: A Cultural Biography of the California Independent System Operator." His e-mail address is calnrg@aol.com.

August 24, 2003

The cardinal rule for operators of the North American electric transmission grid is to maintain system voltage at 60 cycles per second, also known as 60 hertz. Power supply and electric demand must be kept in balance, even though both sides of the equation are in constant flux.

If something happens to change that equilibrium-a power plant tripping off line, a grounded transmission wire, or even an unexpected increase in electricity consumption-adverse consequences can roll throughout the system in seconds. The results, as we've just been reminded by the Big Blackout of 2003, can be catastrophic: Power lost to as many as 50 million people in seven states and provinces, an economic damage report of more than $5 billion and a price tag for remedial action estimated by Department of Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham at $50 billion.

That's not even the worst that can happen. This time, we were spared from severe physical damage to the power infrastructure and from the social unrest and looting that accompanied some previous blackouts.

Californians are no strangers to the economic impacts of electric service interruptions as a result of the state's debilitating energy crisis of two years ago. But there is a huge difference between the outage of August 2003 and the multiple Stage Three curtailments of 2001. The recent cascading blackout involved a rapid and unmitigated system collapse. The power cuts experienced in San Diego and the rest of the state during the crisis were controlled events, enacted by the California Independent System Operator and local utilities to prevent such widespread system disturbances.

As cross-border investigators sift through computer logs and documents to determine the exact cause of the August 14th outage, they will undoubtedly discover that a complex set of circumstance conspired to turn a relatively common event, such as loss of a transmission line in Ohio, into the trigger for a regional disaster.

Their findings will underscore the primary lesson of the modern era: We are all interconnected to a greater or lesser degree. While the threat of a blackout from New York to the West Coast is a physical improbability, there always remains a chance of an outage extending across the West-or as we've seen, throughout the Eastern seaboard.

There are other important lessons to be learned from the Blackout of 2003.

Don't think it can't happen here; in fact, it already has. On August 10, 1996, an otherwise quiet Saturday morning became the single worst event in the history of the Western utility business, when an outage that began in Oregon got out of control. As temperatures in the area increased and more power was scheduled for delivery, heavily loaded power lines sagged into a filbert tree-sending the electricity directly into the ground and initiating voltage fluctuations that soon spread throughout the system. In a matter of minutes, power plants from Wyoming to San Diego tripped and service was lost to more than four million people in eleven states, British Columbia and Mexico.
Identifying the "triggering event" is important, but casting blame is counter-productive. Before any evidence at all was uncovered, the cause of the latest blackout was the subject of speculation and finger pointing. New York City's mayor blamed the problem on Canada; media reports said it was a power plant outage in New York; local critics pointed to smoke at a nuclear plant. When transmission line failures in Ohio were identified as a possible triggering event, the financial community ganged up on utility FirstEnergy, sending its stock price down by 10 percent. Litigation vultures immediately filed class action suits against FirstEnergy for engaging in "reckless actions." Now there are indications of system instability well before the Ohio transmission outages occurred. It may be weeks before we fully understand how the complex interplay of events and unique circumstances came together. One thing we will likely learn is that most of the subsequent power plant outages and line relays were part of the system's automatic response to a voltage event. Computer programs automatically and instantaneously shut down equipment in order to prevent more severe damage.
Miscommunication can be the critical failure in an emergency situation. One area of investigation now underway concerns the communication between FirstEnergy staff and the Midwest Independent System Operator in the hour between initial line outages and the major blackout events, and whether others were adequately notified of the situation. After the August 1996 outage, system operators at the Northwest's Bonneville Power Administration were roundly criticized for failure to notify controllers in California about their transmission line losses. It turned out that the failed lines were sending power on an east-west route, not the major north-to-south pathways of the Pacific Intertie. Bonneville staff did not completely recognize how their local outage might affect the rest of the system, until it was too late. Since then, Western operators have instituted a much more sophisticated network for monitoring system reliability on a real-time basis and for automated notification of potential problems.
It's time to rethink and reinvent our electric grid. Former DOE secretary Bill Richardson claims the United States is a first-world power with a third-world electric grid. That's overstating the problem: We are a 21st-century economy saddled with a mid-20th-century grid. In the decades since this transmission system was configured, we have introduced many new technologies on both sides of the meter, and we have completely changed how we use electricity in our homes and businesses. But don't just throw $50 billion into Lake Erie or into traditional types of fixes. Our transmission system is now largely controlled by adjusting generation, but the technology exists to employ changes in consumer demand to enhance reliability. Distributed generation and direct use of solar panels reduce the need for extended transmission lines and will simplify the network in the long run. We need to create a new system that is reliable, secure and flexible.
Align market rules and infrastructure to match the modern needs. Critics of electric deregulation are already using the Big Blackout to argue for a halt to federal policies to systematize power market rules. That is a mistake. We already have a mismatch between how the transmission system was built and how it is used. The century-old configurations in which power lines simply connect distant generators with local consumers have long since evolved into a complex network of wholesale transactions and beneficial interregional exchanges. Both the rules and the networks need to be aligned to recognize the physical realities of the interconnected system and the benefits of open access to it. We also need to make sure our "solutions" fit the problem. After California's power crisis, the emphasis was all about building new generation, without the needed addition of transmission. We now have dozens of new power plants in Nevada and Arizona that cannot send their power into California. Two newly-built power stations in the San Diego area, at Otay Mesa and in Baja California, cannot operate at full capacity at the same time because there is only enough room for one on the system.

As long as we remain part of an interconnected system, we remain vulnerable to widespread outages. But the Big Blackout of 2003, and its 1996 Western counterpart, serves to focus our attention on what we need to do to minimize the damages and prevent the worst that can happen.