Recent Blackout Highlights Nation’s Rickety Power Grid

Friday, September 16, 2011 by ProPublica

by Ariel Wittenberg, ProPublica 

 

Experts say the cascading blackout that put millions of Westerners in the dark last week was no surprise: Major power outages have more than doubled in the last decade.

"This is just evidence that we need a smarter, better, more secure system," said Massoud Amin, director of the Technological Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota, who has analyzed federal data on the reliability of the nation's electric grid.

Blackouts disrupt power to at least a third of U.S. homes each year, and studies show the number of outages is rising.


The grid's shortcomings have been well-documented, but efforts to modernize it haven't kept up with demand. Many electrical transmission lines are outdated, and parts of the grid date back to the time of Thomas Edison.

The chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the nation's grid, acknowledged increasing problems with the system.

In a July interview with ProPublica, FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff said that while the electric grid is reliable, it is degrading. "It's not getting better," he said. "It's getting worse."

Many experts say smart-grid technology would help. Such a system would be able to intelligently respond to sudden peaks or drops in demand and energy supply.

Last week, for example, a mishap involving a single worker doing repairs on a power station near Yuma, Ariz., led to rolling blackouts over parts of Arizona, Southern California and Northern Mexico. The short circuit caused San Diego County's power-supply system to completely shut down after it was required to take on the demand of those affected in Arizona and buckled under the extra load.

Had a smart grid been in place, it might have helped isolate the outage and prevent it from spreading. By monitoring activity on transmission lines in real time, a smart grid also can help pinpoint a problem and redirect power accordingly.

The Obama administration has allocated $11 billion in stimulus funding toward the electric grid. Of that, $4.4 billion was dedicated directly to building a smart grid. But the money will take years working its way through the bureaucratic pipeline; so far, only $1.4 billion has been spent.

Experts also say smart grids are only part of the solution, and that transmission lines also have to be built.

"These are essential facilities. They are like highways, they are like airports — everyone relies on them," former FERC Chairman Jim Hoecker said.

But transmission lines cost money, and utilities say investing too much more in infrastructure will cost consumers. According to David Owens, executive vice president for business operations at Edison Electric Institute, transmission costs make up 35 percent to 40 percent of a typical homeowner's energy bill. Shareholder-owned utilities will invest $11.2 billion in 2011 -- almost twice as much as in 2004. The increase pushes the envelope on what customers are willing to pay, Owens said.

Wellinghoff, FERC's current chairman, said the commission also needs broader authority to oversee transmission lines. That would require congressional approval.

One project that might benefit from broader FERC power is the Susquehanna-Roseland power line. The line, which would run from Pennsylvania to Northern New Jersey, has been delayed for two years because a four-mile stretch passes through a national park. Although the line would follow the same path as a pre-existing line, the National Park Service has blocked construction to analyze the effect of the line on the environment. Wellinghoff said FERC's engineers had already done an environmental review.

Absent new transmission lines and a smart grid, large blackouts could become more common.

Last week's massive outage echoed a blackout eight years ago. In 2003, a power surge on a transmission line that circles Lake Erie left dozens of cities in the East and Canada without power, shutting down 21 power plants in just three minutes.

After the power came back on, politicians, regulators and industry officials all pledged to push for a more reliable, modern grid.

But the promises did not translate into action.

"We have overharvested the infrastructure," Amin said. "We aren't milking the cow dry; we already have milked the cow dry. It has gotten to the point where there are many choke points. We cannot just sit and watch the load increase."

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Friday, September 16, 2011 by RT America
Follow the Crumbling Road: US Infrastructure Is Falling Apart

America is literally falling apart. From natural disasters, to massive power blackouts, to bridge collapses, U.S. infrastructure has shown that it is not up to standards. American investment in infrastructure is not keeping up with the rest of the world and could prove to be an economy killer.

The Great San Diego Blackout of 2011

A Preview of Things to Come?

by RUSSELL D. HOFFMAN

 

It looks like everyone survived the Great San Diego Black-Out of 2011.

I didn’t even notice there was a black-out at first, other than the printer going off while I was trying to print protest books against San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.   A group of us formed up post-Fukushima, and we’re going places and raising awareness.  And we need books — lots of books!  People are pretty ignorant about the dangers, even post-Fukushima. There’s a lot of information being kept from the public and misinformation being presented to them.

San Onofre didn’t help at all to keep the power on when the grid went down.

Instead, they had to shut down themselves!  Supposedly this was because “they had no place to send the power.”  That’s how the spokesperson for the plant describes it.

But I would say it was because they had no offsite power coming INTO the plant!  That’s what probably really shut the plant down.

But one way or the other, here’s the obvious thing:  San Onofre is not helping.

San Onofre is presumably currently operating on Emergency Diesel Generators as I write this — and generating ZERO power to help alleviate the situation.

Thanks for your help, SONGS — NOT!

About one and a half million homes — five million people — were without power for at least six to eight hours yesterday and today, and many of them are still without power.

There WAS a seven-car pile-up on I-5 (the main freeway that runs near San Onofre), which shut it down in both directions, and I-5 was shut down heading out of San Diego elsewhere at the same time — it was a mess!

But I was prepared — or so I thought.  When the printer went out, my UPS beeped and the front panel lit up.

Those were my clues that five million of us were in the dark.  I paid little attention, being in the middle of writing a newsletter about what an atom is, an alpha particle, a beta particle, a gamma ray, a half-life, and so on.

But then the UPS beeped again, and the print job was clearly not running (the printer pauses now and then anyway, for some reason), so I went upstairs and checked the printer, and it was completely off and the on/off switch wouldn’t do anything.

So then I started to grasp that there was a blackout, and shut down the computer so that I wouldn’t drain the UPS battery just in case I needed it.

I tried to count up all the ways I wasn’t prepared for real trouble — like, a meltdown at San Onofre because of the “Station Black-Out” conditions (the same as occurred at Fukushima after the earthquake and tsunami, but minus the earthquake (which actually started the inexorable sequence that led to meltdown of the three reactors in Japan) and minus the tsunami (which is blamed for the meltdowns, but apparently was NOT responsible — it was the earthquake).

We have earthquakes here, too.  Bad ones.  Right near San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

Small-scale distributed renewable energy is a much safer way to power the grid.  In an emergency, nuclear power is unlikely to be there to help at all!  We’ve seen this now, time and again.

And the traffic!  Oh, the traffic!  Because the traffic lights were out everywhere, it took my wife more than an hour to get home, normally a 12 minute drive in clear traffic and a 20 minute drive at rush hour.  The 60 or so trollies in the city of San Diego all stopped at the same time, and only a couple of trains ran, so if you missed them, you missed them.

Could we evacuate five million people if San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station melted down?  No!  Can San Onofre melt down?

In a heartbeat.  It’s useless, wrong, and crazy to continue risking the enormous death and destruction that would accompany an serious accident at San Onofre.  Trapped as we are with only a few roads out of the area, San Onofre actually cuts in half the main evacuation route needed in case of an accident at the plant!  That is, the plant itself is located so close to the freeway that ANY accident at the plant will close I-5 immediately, and probably I-15 as well.

Meanwhile, the plant itself has been on restrictions and tightened inspections for years now because of worker apathy, anxiety, and audacious arrogance:  They faked safety inspections, fire inspections, security inspections, and medical claims, work records, time sheets, and, of course, worker’s own complaints were filed in the “circular” file or actually given to the supervisor about whom the complaint was filed — the LAST person who should be seeing the complaint!

Now, these guys are all scared the power plant WILL actually be shut down!  They put on a brave face, but scratch the surface, and you find out they are being told not to talk to the public, not to talk to reporters, not to talk to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission unless they absolutely have too — and WHY are they so scared?

They’re afraid they’ll lose their jobs.  Get thrown out in the bad economy just like so many of the rest of us.

 Never mind that they could be building solar and wind turbine power supplies instead.  Never mind that they are generating 500 pounds of high-level nuclear waste every day that they don’t know how to store or how to get rid of. (The most toxic stuff on earth, and, thanks to Fukushima, the most toxic stuff in your lungs and the rest of your body right now.)

Never mind that there is no way to evacuate San Diego, Orange County, Los Angeles ….

Never mind the lives that would be lost if there was a meltdown, or a spent fuel pool fire, or a dry cask fire, or all three, due to an earthquake, or a tsunami, or a power black-out, or all three.

Never mind all that — they are afraid they’ll lose their jobs.

U.S. electricity blackouts skyrocketing

Non-disaster U.S. power outages up 124 percent since early '90s
By Thom Patterson, CNN

(CNN) -- New York's Staten Island was broiling under a life-threatening heat wave and borough President James Molinaro was seriously concerned about the area's Little League baseball players.

It was last July's Eastern heat wave and Consolidated Edison was responding to scattered power outages as electricity usage neared record highs.

So, authorities followed Molinaro's suggestion to cancel that night's Little League games, which were to be played under electricity-sucking stadium lights.

"Number one, it was a danger to the children that were playing out there in that heat, and secondly it would save electricity that people would need for air conditioning in their homes," said Molinaro, who'd been forced to sleep at his office that night because of a blackout in his own neighborhood.

Throughout New York City, about 52,000 of ConEd's 3.2 million customers lost power during the heat wave. Triple-digit temperatures forced residents like 77 year-old Rui Zhi Chen, to seek shelter at one of the city's 400 emergency cooling centers. "It felt like an oven in my home and on the street," Chen said.

Should Americans view these kinds of scenarios as extraordinary circumstances -- or a warning sign of a darker future?

Experts on the nation's electricity system point to a frighteningly steep increase in non-disaster-related outages affecting at least 50,000 consumers.

During the past two decades, such blackouts have increased 124 percent -- up from 41 blackouts between 1991 and 1995, to 92 between 2001 and 2005, according to research at the University of Minnesota.

In the most recently analyzed data available, utilities reported 36 such outages in 2006 alone.

"It's hard to imagine how anyone could believe that -- in the United States -- we should learn to cope with blackouts," said University of Minnesota Professor Massoud Amin, a leading expert on the U.S. electricity grid.

Amin supports construction of a nationwide "smart grid" that would avert blackouts and save billions of dollars in wasted electricity.

In a nutshell, a smart grid is an automated electricity system that improves the reliability, security and efficiency of electric power. It more easily connects with new energy sources, such as wind and solar, and is designed to charge electric vehicles and control home appliances via a so-called "smart" devices.

Summer of '77

You might say Amin's connection with electricity began in New York City with a bolt of lightning.

In July 1977, Amin was a 16-year-old high school student visiting from his native Iran when lightning triggered a 24-hour blackout that cut power to nine million.

As he and his father walked near their Midtown Manhattan hotel, they were shocked to see looters smash their way into an electronics store less than 20 yards down the street.

Amin recalls feeling violated by the ugly scene -- and wondering if the nation's infrastructure was in danger of collapse. "... not just the electric grid that underpins our lives," he said, "but also the human condition."

More than 30 years later, the United States is still "operating the most advanced economy in the world with 1960s and 70s technology," said Amin. Failing to modernize the grid, he said, will threaten the U.S. position as an economic super power.

Millions remember the historic August 2003 blackout, when overgrown trees on powerlines triggered an outage that cascaded across an overloaded regional grid. An estimated 50 million people lost power in Canada and eight northeastern states. Smart grid technology, experts say, would have immediately detected the potential crisis, diverted power and likely saved $6 billion in estimated business losses.

By April of 2013 ConEd hopes to install a "smart" automated self-healing system aimed at preventing the burnout of large feeder cables during peak demand periods -- such as heat waves.

The new technology would anticipate possible equipment failure in specific neighborhoods and reroute electricity to compensate. For example, a project to help Queens' Flushing neighborhood will "give us the capability to remotely control up to 26 underground switches," said Con Ed smart grid manager Thomas Magee.

Had systems like this been in place, said ConEd's Aseem Kapur, it might have prevented or reduced New York's scattered outages last July.

Who's got the juice?

Some of the most reliable utilities are in the heartland states of Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas.

In those states, the power is out an average of only 92 minutes per year, according to a 2008 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study. On the other end of the spectrum, utilities in New York Pennsylvania and New Jersey averaged 214 minutes of total interruptions each year. These figures don't include power outages blamed on tornadoes or other disasters.

Map: How often do the lights go out where you live?

But compare the U.S. data to Japan which averages only four minutes of total interrupted service each year. "As you can see, we have a long way to go," said Andres Carvallo, who played a key role in planning the smart grid inAustin, Texas.

Experts point to the northeastern and southeastern U.S. as regions where outages pose the most threat -- mainly due to aging wires, pole transformers and other lagging infrastructure.

"They know where they have tight spots," said Mark Lauby, of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which enforces reliability standards. Without mentioning specific regions, Lauby said utilities are "making sure the generation and the transmission are available to help support those consumers."

Building a national smart grid "won't be cheap and it wont be easy," acknowledged Amin. Much of it could be completed as soon as 2030 at a cost of up to $1.5 trillion, according to the Department of Energy. It's unclear who would foot the entire bill, but the Obama administration has committed about $4 billion in investment grants.

The 'Easy Button'

Carvallo jokes about the so-called "Easy Button" at Austin Energy. It's not really a big red button on the wall, but it is a mechanism that allows an operator to control tens of thousands of home thermostats.

"Austin is two to three years ahead of everybody else," said Carvallo, now chief strategy officer for the smart grid software firm Grid Net.

He points to a volunteer program that offers free thermostats to customers who allow the utility to remotely control their air conditioners during specific months and hours. This way, thousands of power-gulping air conditioners can be cycled off for a short time when electricity was needed elsewhere.

By summer's end, Austin expects to begin enabling its 700,000 streetlights to be turned "on and off with a flip of a switch," saving $340,000 in electricity each year, and eliminating 200 tons of carbon dioxide air pollution.

Replacing old-style electric meters with "smart meters" is often described as the first step in creating a smart grid. All 400,000 of Austin's meters are smart meters.

Nationwide, 26 utilities in 15 states have installed some 16 million smart meters in homes and businesses.

Soon, when power goes out in a neighborhood with smart meters, utilities won't have to wait for customers to report outages -- the smart meters will alert utilities automatically. Utilities will then e-mail or text message each affected customer information about when the lights will be back on.

Critics question smart meter accuracy and whether the devices will really save energy in the long run.

"It feels a bit like the utilities are jumping the gun and they're trying to put these meters in before the rest of the pieces of the so-called smart grid are in place and before we even know that the smart meters are going to have advantages commensurate with the cost," said electricity consumer advocate Mindy Spatt of The Utility Reform Network.

One advantage of smart grid technology may be jobs.

High-tech manufacturers want to locate their factories in places where electricity is most reliable, said Carvallo. "That's where the manufacturing facilities move to. That's where you get your high-paying jobs."