Grid Lock
The Great Blackout illuminated one thing: a system in chaos
As a federal task force tries to pinpoint precisely what caused the largest power blackout in North American history in mid-August, one fact has become glaringly clear. No one was able to wrest enough control of the tightly interwoven, antiquated electrical grid to stop the chain of events that halted business and disrupted life for 50 million people in eight states and Canada.
The shadow of blame has fallen on one financially troubled firm, FirstEnergy of Akron, Ohio, which owned the power plant and transmission lines where the troubles first surfaced. But that company insists--and authorities so far agree--that responsibility for the fast-moving outage could actually lie with any of the other 22 entities that share management of the myriad power lines that crisscross the Midwest. And if policymakers hope to avoid future blackouts, they will need to address long-deferred questions about the adequacy of the nation's electrical "grid," who commands this interstate power highway, and who pays for its improvement.
The Electric Power Research Institute, an industry consortium that focuses on utilities' technical issues, will release a report this week detailing how capital spending on electricity in the past decade has dropped to levels not seen since the Great Depression. The study, underway long before the blackout, says the strain of underfunding is most severe on power lines, where the nation is "trying to squeeze more and more out of an aging infrastructure that was not designed or built for" a market where electricity is traded over long distances among deregulated companies. But the money needed to build new power lines and to retrofit the old ones with up-to-date technology is not likely to materialize until a fierce political debate over who is obligated to make it work is resolved.
Not me. Christine Tezak, an energy analyst at Schwab Washington Research Group, notes that many new power plants have been built in recent years to serve a high-tech economy. "But once we have plugged all this stuff in, who has responsibility to make sure that we don't fry each other's wires?" she asks. "Because now, no one is responsible."
That became evident shortly after 4 p.m. on August 14, when the electric grid went dark from Detroit to New York. The North American Electric Reliability Council, an industry group formed after the 1965 blackout in the Northeast, soon traced the origins of the problem to Ohio. FirstEnergy's coal-fired plant in Eastlake, Ohio, stopped generating electricity about 2 p.m. Such a sudden loss of supply certainly could have made the system unstable; even on a moderate summer day, the air conditioners that dominate the electrical load at this time of year tend to demand more current when voltage drops. Soon after 3 p.m., excess current surging through three of FirstEnergy's power lines caused them to overheat, sag (in at least one case, falling into a tree), and go out of service. Each line that failed shifted power to other lines, causing them, in turn, to overheat. The stress spread to neighboring Michigan, to Ontario, and to New York.
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