It will take weeks, if not months, to determine the cause of the widespread North American power outage, which plunged 50 million people from Michigan to Manhattan into darkness, officials said Monday.
The government dispatched teams of investigators to the Northeast and the Midwest to collect information from utilities and interview transmission system operators.
The Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. remains the focus of the probe; three of its transmission lines were first to trip out of service early Thursday. Shares of the troubled utility holding company, which has struggled to straighten its bookkeeping and fix its crippled Davis-Besse nuclear plant, fell 9.3 percent Monday, closing at $27.75 on the New York Stock Exchange.
Still, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said the outage’s origin remains an open question.
“Quite frankly, I’m not giving an answer because I don’t know what the answer is,” said Chairman Pat Wood, whose agency regulates interstate power transmission.
If the episode sheds light on anything, it is the absence of clear policy or strict accountability for the complex transmission system that binds the United States with Canada and Mexico.
“The problem is that responsibility for adequate transmission does not lie specifically with anybody,” said Richard Hunter, managing director of FitchRatings Inc., a credit rating agency.
“There’s not a desk with a little sign on it that says, `The buck stops here,'” Hunter said.
With possible changes coming in the energy bill pending in Congress, Hunter added: “You might have a better shot identifying at least a few people’s desks that would have such a sign. But you aren’t going to get one single person.”
Energy Security Analysis Inc., a consulting firm in Wakefield, Mass., issued a position paper saying the blackout had done “the impossible.”
“It has made electricity transmission a sexy topic,” the company said.
The blackout also has turned electricity deregulation into a political football again, with supporters of more regulation blaming the outage on the deregulated market and their opponents calling for an expansion of the electricity market to spur private investment in transmission.
Many experts think it likely that the blackout was a “one-in-10-year” event for which the transmission system had been engineered.
Said Hunter: “The idea of building a system to prevent three transmission lines from failing at once would be an unreasonably high standard. You cannot build a system that will never fail.”
Hunter said Fitch has taken no action to lower the investment-grade rating on bonds of FirstEnergy.
The Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator Inc., essentially the traffic cop for transmission lines in 15 states, said Monday that its system experienced voltage fluctuations in the hours before the blackout, a possible clue to the cause of North America’s largest blackout.
The Midwest system operator serves FirstEnergy, which has 4.3 million customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The utility, the nation’s fourth largest investor-owned electric company, has spent the last two years digesting its acquisition of New Jersey based GPU Inc.
While voltage fluctuations are common, the ones on Thursday are receiving scrutiny because they occurred immediately before the blackout, said Mary Lynn Webster, spokeswoman for the Midwest system operator.
“We’re conducting an exhaustive analysis of what was happening on our system Thursday prior to 4 p.m. EDT,” Webster said. “That requires reams of data, looking at what was happening across the entire region and looking at any blips.”
Webster said that about 200 of the operator’s 300 employees are working on the investigation. They have been joined by two investigators from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
George Gross (the name as published has been corrected here and in subsequent references in this text), a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said one factor making the investigation so complex is the incredible amount of data to be sifted through.
“The investigators will be looking at millions, perhaps even billions of pieces of data,” Gross said. “There are snapshots taken of the entire system every two seconds, every five seconds some of it even more frequently.”
The snapshots attempt to track the course of electrons moving through the electrical grid at the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second, he said.
“When we have all this data coming together, we’ll be able to reconstruct . . . the sequence of events,” he said. But he added that it may take many months before all the data provide compelling evidence.
Ralph Cavanagh, co-director of the National Resource Defense Council’s Energy Program, said he doubts there would be a simple answer.
“The system is designed to survive the loss of any single major component, so it is safe to predict that multiple failures will emerge as `the cause;’ no single power plant or transmission line outage could have yielded this result,” he said.
