| ||
| ||
| ||
 |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Investigators piece together blackout puzzle
CLEVELAND, Ohio (AP) -- It might have been the unexplained voltage swings that rippled across the power grid here. Or maybe the tree branch that shorted the high-voltage line south of town. The failures of a coal-fired generator and an automated warning system might have played a part. More likely, say experts, is that these four otherwise innocuous events -- which appear to have started on the northeast Ohio power grid owned by FirstEnergy Corp. -- combined to raise a destructive tsunami that smothered the lights across a huge patch of the eastern United States and Canada. "In order to have a big problem, you have to have three or four bad things happen all at the same time," said Hoff Stauffer, a power transmission consultant with Cambridge Energy Research Associates. A posse of U.S. and Canadian investigators will ponder the fruits of several separate probes that have mined details from utility computer logs across the region. Officials close to the investigation have said an interim report on last week's blackout could be released by mid-September. But a final report may be months away. "It is way too early to engage in speculation about the role any (incident) might have had in the overall problem," U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham told reporters at a news conference in Washington. Abraham said he felt that there needed to be "one ultimate finding" by a single investigation and that an industry watchdog group -- the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) -- would work with a U.S.-Canadian task force. Abraham and Canada's Minister of Natural Resources Herb Dhaliwal will co-chair the task force to investigate the causes of Thursday's power outage and to identify ways to prevent a recurrence. Abraham and Dhaliwal plan to discuss the investigation for about an hour in Detroit on Wednesday after stopping in Ohio to brief state and utility officials. Girding for the summit meeting, utility and regulatory officials are combing their computer logs for records that could point to outages on their grids that may have caused -- or been triggered by -- the surging blackout. Grid operators in New York -- which lost power -- and New England, which mostly did not, have gathered data to hand over to the bi-national investigation, as well as federal and state probes also studying the outage. Abraham said Department of Energy investigators are already seeking the cause of the outage. And technicians from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will be joining the U.S.-Canadian task force, but FERC is not pursuing a separate investigation, FERC commissioner William Massey said Tuesday. Massey echoed statements made by Bush and members of Congress since the blackout, saying Congress ought to approve mandatory reliability standards and sanctions. "This blackout should not have occurred. We need mandatory rules for the grid and we need tough penalties for violators," said Massey, one of three FERC commissioners.
In Washington, House Energy and Commerce Chairman Billy Tauzin, R-Louisiana, said Tuesday that his panel would hold a two-day hearing on the blackout on September 4-5. Tauzin said he sent 15 letters to federal, state and local officials, as well as utility officials, asking for information on the blackout's cause. Experts say investigators may not find a single event that triggered the cascade of shutdowns. None of the single glitches would be enough to kill a city's lights on a normal day, and the grid is designed to work around one or two failures, but not more, Stauffer said. "There are a lot of people that are looking for easy answers and there aren't any easy answers at this point," said Carol Murphy, spokeswoman for the New York System Operator, which oversees the state's grid. The big questions that need answering, Stauffer said, are the reasons behind intra-grid failures that allowed the blackout to proliferate like a computer virus from FirstEnergy's lines around Cleveland and into the neighboring utility network in Michigan. After darkening Detroit, the plague spread into Ontario, darkening Toronto, and then south into New York state, where it surged the length of the Empire State, finally toppling the mighty grid that feeds New York City. Amid such debacles, many things worked as they should have, Stauffer said. Power networks that lock into FirstEnergy -- including those operated by PJM Interconnection and American Electric Power -- did seal themselves off from the storm, saving Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Ohio, and other cities from the same fate. "Why didn't Michigan separate itself from FirstEnergy, like PJM and AEP?" Stauffer asked. "If they'd have done that Detroit would have been all right. Ontario would've been all right. And New York would've been all right." New high-tech switches and software monitors might've isolated the problem grid sections, said Paul Gilbert, a power consultant and member of the National Academy of Engineering, who chaired report for Congress on energy systems in 2002. But, Gilbert said, transmission lines are chronically overtaxed, running at 90 to 95 percent capacity. When one line fails, switches are supposed to reroute its power to other lines. "When they get an added load they've got no place to put it," he said. "You've got to have more lines." Copyright 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
