Beleaguered FirstEnergy Corp. has taken a hit because at least four transmission lines in its region failed Aug. 14, apparently setting off a chain of events that plunged 50 million people into darkness.
But power lines falter on a daily basis. And unless the U.S. decides to turn the country into a spider web of steel-constructed high-voltage lines to ensure uninterruptible service, experts say that power lines will continue to crash.
FirstEnergy’s failure may prove to have been a sin of omission: It didn’t pick up the phone in time.
For a full hour, the utility reportedly wrestled with its own mounting grid problems.
“Something should have been done in Ohio to alert us and others to the lines going down,” said Bob Nelson, a member of the Michigan Public Service Commission, a three-person group that oversees the state’s utilities.
The U.S.-Canadian task force charged with the investigation will no doubt ask: What did FirstEnergy know and when did it know it?
The issue is of prime interest to the Canadians, who, after a 1965 blackout in roughly the same region, complained that U.S. utility operators failed to give a heads-up to their Canadian colleagues.
“That’s all part of the investigation that is ongoing,” said Mark Durbin, a FirstEnergy spokesman. “We are going to let the Department of Energy and the Canadian government proceed with their investigation. It would be premature to speculate on what happened.”
Akron-based FirstEnergy wouldn’t be the first utility to be criticized for failing to issue an alert about a massive problem on the power grid. In 1996, the federal Bonneville Power Administration, an Oregon utility, took the rap for a power outage affecting 6 million electric customers from west Texas to western Canada.
In the case of FirstEnergy, some analysts think company officials may not have realized what they were looking at until it was too late.
It had to be that “they didn’t recognize the significance of the transmission problem,” said Brian Theaker, director of regulatory affairs for the California Independent System Operator, which runs that state’s transmission grid. “They didn’t grasp that the system was getting line-by-line set up for some really big event to take it out.”
The ’96 outage on the Western grid spurred a slew of changes, including the creation of California’s independent transmission operator. A report on the episode said in part: “The traditionally high levels of electric supply reliability that have been achieved in past years will be difficult to sustain with today’s moderate levels of information sharing. …”
Now there are similar calls for beefing up coordination and communication among the grid players in the Midwest and Northeast.
Officials of the International Transmission Co., which operates the transmission system formerly owned by DTE Energy, parent of Detroit Edison, said an extra 2,200 megawatts of power, or a total of 4,800 megawatts, swept through its eastern Michigan transmission system after seven transmission lines in Ohio failed.
“That’s a massive amount of power,” said Linda Blair, the company’s vice president for policy and business development.
“There was no warning,” Blair said. “There was no communication. Nobody called. We don’t know if they tried to communicate.”
The company’s analysis, presented Wednesday to a Michigan state Senate committee, also indicated that overlapping industry organizations, with different protocols, practices and standards, could be part of the problem.
Canadians operate in one system, New York has its own system, and the Midwest has the Midwest Independent System Operator. The Middle Atlantic states have the PJM Interconnection, a competitive wholesale electricity market that Commonwealth Edison Co. plans to join.
“Coordination is good; more coordination is a good–a great goal,” said Steven Naumann, vice president of wholesale market development for Exelon Corp., ComEd’s parent. “But I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that lack of coordination had anything to do with [the Aug. 14 blackout]. We are six days after a major unacceptable incident. I haven’t seen the output of the black boxes.”
Procedures and equipment need to be designed to prevent the kind of large-scale cascading that occurred, Naumann said.
“FirstEnergy had a problem,” said Hoff Stauffer, a senior consultant with Cambridge Energy Research Associates. “But why didn’t the International Transmission Co. separate itself, the way others were able to?”
The investigation might reveal a need for better technology to ensure that during such events companies automatically isolate themselves, he said. “The big blackouts from Cleveland to New York happened in nine seconds–so a telephone call is not going to do it,” Stauffer said.
Theaker, the California power grid veteran, cautioned that technology often is only as good as its operators.
“Obviously, if anybody had foreseen that this thing was going to turn into a 50 million-people event, somebody would have taken some kind of action,” Theaker said. “That’s got to lead me to the conclusion that they just didn’t understand that the system was set up for this happen.”
