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System crash was predicted { August 15 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61117-2003Aug15.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61117-2003Aug15.html
System's Crash Was Predicted
By Peter Behr
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 15, 2003; Page A01
The warning from David Cook, general counsel for the nation's electric reliability organization, was stark: "The question is not whether, but when, the next major failure of the grid will occur."
Cook was speaking to Congress two years ago, and yesterday his prediction came crashingly true in what may have been the largest power blackout in history, a catastrophe for the industry that experts said has exposed the steadily growing vulnerability of the nation's nearly 200,000-mile network of high-voltage transmission lines.
The country's halting moves toward electricity deregulation over the past decade have dramatically increased the volume of power flowing on the grids.
But the transmission towers themselves remain the stepchildren of the nation's energy infrastructure. People don't want them in their back yards or on their farms. Energy companies aren't interested in building them. And while the system is linked together with advanced computer systems, much of the equipment that opens and closes connections around the nation's three major grids is 1950s vintage, officials said.
"We're a superpower with a Third World grid," New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a former energy secretary, said yesterday.
Cook's organization, the North American Electric Reliability Council warned last year, "The nation is at . . . a crisis stage with respect to reliability of transmission grids." It calculated that $56 billion was needed to upgrade the nation's grids, but only $35 billion was likely to be invested.
For two years, the Bush administration and leaders of congressional energy committee have called for new legislation to help expand the transmission system, but a major energy bill has yet to get through Congress.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency that oversees transmission, has been trying for years to prod power companies into forming new, multi-state regional grids with authority over planning and system reliability measures. But utilities in the Southeast and Northwest fear that a more wide-open system would allow their cheaper power to be siphoned away from their customers. They have made war on FERC's plans and some members of Congress are trying to block the commission's transmission initiative from going forward until 2005 or 2007.
The Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, Calif., estimated that while power demand has shot up 30 percent in the past 10 years, transmission capacity has increased by just 15 percent. That wouldn't have mattered much as recently as the 1970s, when most electricity was distributed within states or small regions. Today, when heat waves strike New York, power often courses southward from Canada, or eastward from the Dakotas. When weather is cool in Chicago and hot in New Orleans, electricity from the Windy City may help feed the Big Easy.
But throughout the country, bottlenecks in transmission line capacity often overload the system, forcing power in different and unplanned directions and compelling operators to increase output from some generators while ordering others to power down.
The most famous of the bottlenecks, called Path 15 in central California, prevented surplus electricity in the southern part of the state from reaching San Francisco and northern cities early in 2001, aggravating blackouts that on the worst day cut off power to 1 million people.
Robert Mitchell, who heads a Reston company, Trans-Elect Inc., that has raised $250 million for a joint venture with federal and California partners to expand Path 15's capacity, said, "Transmission deserves to be treated as an enormous infrastructure problem, but it gets little attention." If the interstate highway system were as jammed as the grid often is now, "we would have a parking lot from coast to coast," he said.
The nation's major utility companies, which own the bulk of the transmission lines, often balk are sharing them with competing independent merchant power providers that have been building generating stations along the lines, hoping to take customers away.
As deregulation flourished, investment dwindled in transmission lines, whose profits are limited by regulation.
The 1965 Northeast power blackout led to the creation of the reliability council, an advisory and watchdog group over the transmission system, said Peter Fox-Penner, a principal with the Brattle Group, a consulting firm advising utilities.
But the move toward deregulation has also exposed NERC's limitations, particularly its lack of enforcement powers to detect and stop generators from abusing the grid with unscheduled power deliveries. Yesterday's blackout will force attention back to the grid, Fox-Penner predicted.
"This will undoubtedly focus attention on the infrastructure, the need for investment in power grid and the best ways to attract investment in the grid," said Merribel Ayres, president of the Lighthouse Energy Group, a power industry consulting firm.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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