After enduring a scolding from federal regulators for a string of automatic shutdowns at Commonwealth Edison’s nuclear power plants, the company’s top executive warned Tuesday that northern Illinois may have to suffer through more power shortages this summer.
“We cannot write guarantees that there will be no more days like last Thursday,” ComEd CEO John Rowe said after a meeting with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission outside Washington.
“Last Thursday, as the mayor of Chicago said, was only June–July and August tend to be hotter,” Rowe said. “It was a bad combination of events, but it is not the only combination that can be tough.”
Rowe’s comments followed a meeting at which the company heard a mixed, but now familiar message from the NRC: Evidence suggests that ComEd has at last discovered what its problems are, but the troubled utility still has a long way to go to fix them.
“I am not issuing any threats, but it’s not clear sailing,” said NRC chairman Shirley Jackson.
Much of the meeting, scheduled long ago to discuss the company’s attempts at self-improvement, was spent on “scrams,” the automatic shutdowns that occur when safety systems recognize some problem inside the nuclear plant.
Although the company has implemented “strategic initiatives” and “action plans” to fix the problems coursing through its corporate culture, it still can’t depend on its plants to run. In the span of two weekends, three of the utility’s eight working nuclear reactors went off line for several days because of automatic scrams.
“I tend to view scrams seriously,” Jackson told the ComEd executives. “And there are a lot of them.”
As they have been time and again in such meetings, the utility’s officers were penitent.
“We are in the electricity business, so we expect these plants to operate,” said Oliver Kingsley, the head of the company’s Nuclear Generation Group. “I am not satisfied with these scrams, nor am I satisfied with the sense of urgency about it.”
Meanwhile, in Chicago, the Illinois Commerce Commission scheduled a hearing July 8 at which commissioners plan to grill ComEd officials on the recent problems with power reliability.
Back at Tuesday’s NRC meeting, at one point commissioner Edward McGaffigan Jr. asked if the scrams posed any danger.
“So there is not a public health and safety issue, except to the extent that if you go down, the whole Midwest (electricity grid) might go down, and then there is a public health and safety issue?” McGaffigan asked.
Kingsley replied that the plants shut themselves down just as they were designed to do, but he added: “It does challenge safety systems; it is not something we want.”
Utilities and regulators rely on a number of disparate indicators to tell them how well plants are running. The number of scrams at a plant is especially telling, because the events occur only when something goes wrong.
This summer, because of ComEd’s narrow reserve margins, a scram at the wrong time could also mean the difference between getting by or running short of power.
Though many of the other indicators show some improvement at ComEd, the number of scrams has climbed since the company began overhauling its management team late last year.
In 1997, which included two months of operation by the now-shuttered Zion plant, ComEd had two scrams across its entire fleet.
There have already been seven in 1998, including the two last weekend at the Quad Cities plant. (Both reactors there were in the early stages of being restarted Tuesday and were expected to be at full power later in the week.)
Though most of the nuclear industry implemented “scram reduction initiatives” in the 1980s, ComEd’s new management crew only recently realized the utility they inherited had neglected to make the improvements.
“We are just now putting them in place,” David Helwig, a ComEd senior vice president, told the commission.
All the technical chatter about scrams ultimately comes to bear on the pressing question of reliability.
Last week’s hot weather, which followed violent storms that knocked down transmission lines in Ohio and Minnesota, nearly forced ComEd on Thursday to begin randomly pulling the plug on customers in a series of “rolling blackouts.”
The company did, however, cut off power to 300 big businesses and pleaded with everyone to turn off air conditioners on Thursday.
For many, the long, hot afternoon brought home the very real possibility that the next blackout might not be voluntary.
“People were nervous because we were nervous,” Rowe said in comments to reporters after the meeting.
Rowe was both concerned and candid when asked if a repeat were possible.
“We hope not, but it may happen, and we are looking for more and more contingency solutions in case it does,” Rowe said.
“We’ll hold it together, but we are closer to more disruptions than we like to have it. There is nothing but probabilities and the imagination and diligence of a whole lot of people in scratching things together.”
There is more behind the summer power shortage than hot and stormy weather. Economic factors play a role too.
Illinois, along with the rest of the country, is moving toward a deregulated electricity market. When that market is in full bloom sometime in the next decade, ComEd will no longer be required to supply all the electricity to northern Illinois. So in the meantime, the utility is trying to keep costs in line.
“That transition period is inherently a tough time for a utility,” Rowe said.
“As we seek more economy across the Midwest, the system is stretched tighter and tighter, and one has to be more and more creative about finding the depths of (power) reserves.”
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