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Officials blame ohio Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2003/08/18/ohio_utility_says_trouble_perhaps_began_elsewherehttp://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2003/08/18/ohio_utility_says_trouble_perhaps_began_elsewhere
Ohio utility says trouble perhaps began elsewhere
By Peter J. Howe, Globe Staff, 8/18/2003
Officials with the Ohio energy conglomerate and power grid that have been fingered as the probable source of last week's catastrophic power failures insisted late yesterday they were not ready to accept blame.
They said they could not rule out the possibility that a series of failures of high-voltage lines and power plants near Cleveland that began an hour before blackouts swept across the eastern United States and Canada, affecting about 50 million people, was not the original cause, but a symptom of other problems that began across eastern North America up to three hours earlier.
As the Bush administration dispatched its own investigators to launch a probe, the head of the North American Electric Reliability Council, a Princeton, N.J., industry group formed to stave off a repeat of the 1965 Northeast blackout, said its investigators were "fairly certain" the breakdowns near Cleveland triggered cascading failures for hundreds of miles. "We are now trying to determine why the situation was not brought under control," the council chief executive, Michehl R. Gent, said.
Three of the 345,000-volt lines south of Cleveland that failed in the hour before the blackouts began at 4:10 p.m. are owned by FirstEnergy Corp., an Akron, Ohio, energy conglomerate. Over the weekend, FirstEnergy officials confirmed an alarm system designed to alert control-room operators of the breakdown was not functioning at the time, although they said a backup system remained in place.
FirstEnergy spokeswoman Kristen Baird said in a telephone interview yesterday that company employees were continuing to look for information about what she called widespread disturbances and anomalies plaguing the entire eastern US electric grid, some of them reported up to three hours before FirstEnergy's lines shut down.
"Certainly we believe that what happened is much more complex than a few tripped power lines on our system," Baird said. "You can't conclude that this was the reason, but it's certainly being portrayed that way."
Baird said FirstEnergy is evaluating information that shows there were "unusual electric conditions and disturbances" throughout the eastern United States beginning at noon Thursday, three hours before the Cleveland line failures and four hours before the spreading power failures. These included big shifts in voltage levels and electrical "frequency" on grids, or conditions making electric flows swing above or below the normal 60 cycles per second.
The entire United States has just three main interconnections of local grids -- one in Texas, a second covering the United States west of the Continental Divide, and a sprawling eastern interconnection that links to Ontario and Quebec. Regional grids such as those in New England, New York state, the mid-Atlantic, and other areas are connected to one another with high-voltage lines to facilitate the trading of wholesale power and to let grids with emergencies import electricity.
"Our understanding, from preliminary analysis of data that we're gathering and information from others, is certainly that the transmission grid in the entire eastern interconnection was experiencing unusual electrical disturbances, contrary to early reports that [all] these things happened in Ohio," Baird said.
FirstEnergy, with annual revenues of more than $12 billion, owns 16 power plants and serves 4.4 million utility customers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. FirstEnergy could face not only enormous corporate humiliation, but also multibillion-dollar lawsuits if it is shown that it was negligent in operating electric grid systems and that this triggered the failures.
The Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator, or Midwest ISO, which runs the 111,000-mile power grid in Ohio, 14 other states, and part of Manitoba, Canada, also said it was too soon to confirm that the breakdowns in Cleveland were the precipitating cause.
"What is unknown is the relationship among the events in the Midwest and what was happening elsewhere in the eastern interconnection at that time," said James P. Torgerson, Midwest ISO's president and chief executive, in a statement issued yesterday afternoon.
"The Midwest ISO continues to coordinate with" the North American council "and member utilities in gathering and analyzing information on system conditions at the time of the disturbances and is looking forward to obtaining additional information as it becomes available," Torgerson said.
Beth Foley, a spokeswoman for PJM Interconnection, the counterpart agency running the mid-Atlantic power grid, said PJM agrees it is too soon to fix blame on the Ohio problems definitively.
Gent said investigators spent the weekend examining more than 10,000 pages of data to figure out the sequence of events and likely causes. Gent added it was definitely possible that human error -- power grid technicians failing to control the spread of outages -- was the reason problems in the Ohio-Michigan area cascaded as far away as New York City, Toronto, and Ottawa. "The system has been designed and rules have been created to prevent this escalation and cascading. It should have stopped."
In an interview last week, PJM Interconnection's president, Phillip Harris, whose organization largely succeeded in fending off penetration of its grid by neighbors' woes, said: "We operate the power system by analyzing every 10 minutes the 300 worst contingencies that could happen. Something is always failing on the system."
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
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