Electricity: The real threat to America's power

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Electricity: The Real Threat To America's Power

Sure, California is suffering from a generator shortage-- but overloaded power lines pose a much greater risk of blowing the fuses of the national economy.

FORTUNE

Monday, March 5, 2001, By David Stipp

Fair use for educational purposes only!

Ask a hardhatted power engineer what is most needed to prevent California's electricity crisis from proliferating, undercutting America's vaunted productivity gains, cratering the economy, and erasing trillions more from our already stunningly shrunken net worths. You're likely to get an earful about peak-time congestion on high-kV lines, level-three alerts, and unstable N-minus-five situations.

That's the long answer. For the short one, nothing beats novelist E.M. Forster's timeless maxim: "Only connect." We need more wires.

Utility investments in high-voltage power lines, our electrical superhighways, have been falling since the late 1970s. That mattered little when most of our power traveled only short distances from local utilities' generators.

But in 1996 the federal government ordered utilities to open their big, high-voltage transmission lines to other suppliers, triggering explosive growth in the long-distance transmission of electricity. Since then, many utilities have left the generation game to become middlemen that distribute power from vendors potentially hundreds of miles away.

This trend, not the generator shortage that plagues California, is the main threat to the system nationwide. But the fallout nationwide may be much the same as in California: sky-high electric prices during periods of peak demand and a calamitous drop in the system's reliability.

If the California crisis is a heart attack, the clogging of the transmission grid is the atherosclerosis that precedes it. Consider how the Haywire State got that way. The common wisdom is that bad planning and bungled deregulation caused too few generators to be built as demand for electricity soared. That is true. But zoom up high enough to look down on the whole grid west of the Rockies, the "Western Interconnection," and you'll see the deeper problem of grid congestion at work.

California's worst-clogged electric artery is Path 15, a 90-mile bottleneck in the main transmission line between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Recently it has carried spare megawatts from Southern California to power-strapped Northern California. Unfortunately, Path 15 hasn't been able to convey enough electricity to prevent rolling blackouts in the north.

Scrambling to keep San Francisco's lights on, California's beleaguered Independent System Operator, the state's grid controller, has resorted to shipping power on a giant detour around Path 15. The power is sent north from L.A. through the 846-mile-long "Pacific DC intertie" to the Celilo Converter Station, a building perched on a bucolic, orchard-covered hill overlooking the Columbia River in Oregon.

At Celilo, which is run by the federal Bonneville Power Administration, the power is converted from DC to AC (direct current to alternating current), then returned south through the "Pacific AC intertie," three lines linking Oregon and Northern California.

The detour worked fine until the afternoon of Jan. 21, when a 12-year-old computer at the Celilo station crashed, knocking out some of its DC-to-AC converters--monster devices reminiscent of Scotty's beloved warp drive on the starship Enterprise. That sharply cut the power going through the station. ("Captain, we canna do more than warp three!") Instantly hundreds of megawatts formerly looping from L.A. through Oregon rerouted themselves to Path 15 to reach the lights, computers, and other Northern California "loads" that were sucking them in at the speed of light.

That put Path 15 in danger of overload. To avert it, operators in California quickly instigated a "controlled outage" of 120 megawatts--about 100,000 houses' worth of electricity. Meanwhile, Bonneville operators in Vancouver, Wash., opened massive intake gates at dams on the Columbia River to ramp up their turbines. Seconds later an emergency 500 megawatts from the dams was pouring down the AC intertie to California.

Fortunately it was Sunday, a time of relatively low demand. Within 20 minutes the out-of-kilter flow was fixed and the outage ended.

It seemed business as usual at Celilo when I dropped by the station four days after the emergency. But it wasn't. "We're walking on eggs," confided operations manager Bruce Lavier. "When you're maxing out the capacity of the system, minor things can have major impact." That, in a nutshell, is why California's crisis, though largely due to blunders peculiar to the state, may portend nationwide calamities.

Several trends are conspiring to max out the grid. First, deregulation has triggered an electric land rush--more than 190,000 megawatts of new capacity is on power vendors' drawing boards, enough to boost U.S. capacity by 25%. If only half of the planned generators are built, "capacity margins will be adequate" across the land by 2004, projects the North American Electric Reliability Council, or NERC, a Princeton, N.J., nonprofit. Even California should have watts aplenty.

Here's the rub, though: There's no parallel move to upgrade the grid, which increasingly "looks like L.A. freeways on a hot Friday afternoon," says Karl Stahlkopf, vice president at the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto. "And if you can't get a supply to market, you don't have a supply."

Since 1975, annual utility investments in the U.S. power-transmission system have fallen by more than half, to about $2 billion, according to a study by industry consultant Eric Hirst of Oak Ridge, Tenn. Meanwhile, sales of power loaded onto the lines have risen more than 100-fold since mid-decade, thanks largely to the advent of hundreds of Enron wannabes--companies seeking to emulate the giant Houston energy broker.

Episodes of congestion requiring grid operators to apply anti-clogging procedures, including curtailment of power transfers, more than doubled last summer compared with 1999's hot season. Operators of the grid are forced to run it ever closer to its limits. The average number of megawatts loaded onto transmission lines during summer peak demand rose 22% from 1989 to 1999, says Hirst. It's expected to rise another 14% by 2009.

The grid is literally heating up--when lines are heavily loaded, they get hot, expand, and sag. Wires drooping onto branches on sweltering days are a major cause of voltage sags and blackouts.

The computerization of everything vastly multiplies the cost of such mishaps. A tree shorting out a distant power line might cause a voltage sag too brief to make your lights flicker. But such blips can crash hundreds of computers controlling factory machines. Annual U.S. losses in economic output from such relatively minor glitches already total an estimated $50 billion. If bigger outages become more frequent, our bright Information Age could rapidly become a lot darker. In sum, says Hirst, we must beef up the transmission system within a few years or face a crisis.

That's a tall order. Scary reports about the carcinogenic risks of electric and magnetic fields near power lines have greatly intensified public resistance to them. Never mind that after an exhaustive review, the U.S. National Research Council flatly concluded the "evidence does not show exposure to these fields presents a human-health hazard." Further, power transmission remains a regulated business, overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Utilities' potential returns on investments in unregulated energy businesses have been much higher than their FERC-allowed returns on transmission investments--a major deterrent to capital spending on the grid.

A seminal tract published in 1968 by biologist Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons," best sums up what is going wrong. Hardin described how herdsmen sharing a pasture, or common, inevitably spoil it by quite rationally enlarging their flocks--a herdsman's gain from adding an animal goes entirely to him, while the cost is borne by everyone using the common.

For decades, utilities tended the grid in a collaborative way, knowing they could recoup the costs in their rate bases. Now they're becoming rival electron herders, less willing to invest in the wiry commons --especially given uncertainty about how transmission assets will be divvied up as deregulation unfolds.

Says John F. Hauer, a senior scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., who recently served on two federal teams that analyzed major blackouts: Utilities' strategy increasingly has been "to accept more risk and not spend money on problems until they occur."

New watt vendors don't own wires and actually stand to gain from heavily loading the grid--they can reap huge profits when peak-time line congestion pushes wholesale power prices sky-high. "We're always under pressure from power sellers to reduce our reserve margins," says Gordon van Welie, chief operating officer of ISO New England, which operates the region's grid from a control center in Holyoke, Mass. But heavily loading the grid cuts down the spare transmission capacity that serves as a safety margin if something goes wrong.

Industry veterans regard an episode two years ago involving Cinergy, a Cincinnati utility, as an ominous sign of the tragedy of the grid. Headed by former Enron executive James E. Rogers, Cinergy charged into power dealing in the mid-1990s. In August 1999, the company jarred Wall Street by disclosing that it had racked up $73 million in losses during a record heat wave in July--the company had had to buy scarce power for up to $7,000 a megawatt-hour, more than 100 times the average rate, to meet high demand in its service area and fulfill wholesale power contracts with outsiders.

An even more jarring story was unfolding behind the scenes. On three afternoons in late July, spinning generators all over the Eastern Interconnection, the grid east of the Rockies, had mysteriously slowed, a sign that somewhere a mammoth load had unexpectedly come online. The load alarmingly depressed the Interconnection's AC frequency--when the grid's normal 60-cycles-a-second rhythm dips as little as 2%, operators may be forced to activate emergency "load shedding," or rolling blackouts, to prevent damage to generators. (If generators go even slightly out of sync with the grid, terrific forces build up inside them, potentially cracking turbines or causing fires.)

NERC, the reliability council, launched an investigation that led to Cinergy. On the three days in question, the utility had quietly siphoned 9,616 megawatt-hours from power lines linking its service area to surrounding ones--in effect, it had taken electricity worth tens of millions of dollars from unsuspecting peers.

Worse, it had knowingly "jeopardized the reliability of the Eastern Interconnection" in "blatant disregard for NERC policy," raged a Dec. 6 letter to the utility's CEO from NERC's regional office in Ohio. Cinergy, which didn't contest the charges, says it has take vigorous steps to ensure such episodes don't happen again.

In any case, simple neglect may threaten the commons more than abuse. While trying to transform themselves from poky old utilities into lean, mean energy dealers, many of the grid's keepers have cut their maintenance budgets. The trend was a prime contributor to major outages during the hot summer of 1999, according to a study by the Department of Energy.

From 1991 to 1998, for example, Commonwealth Edison's maintenance spending on key substations in the Chicago area fell by two-thirds, setting the stage for blackouts that left up to 100,000 customers with dead fans and air conditioners over several sweltering days in 1999.

A related threat, says Hauer, the national lab expert, is a "collective loss of memory" at power companies about the subtle workings of the grid, as budget cuts thin their ranks of senior engineers.

In a fascinating 1999 report written with colleague Jeff E. Dagle, Hauer showed how this experience drain led to the biggest outage of recent decades, which blacked out most of the Western Interconnection on Saturday, Aug. 10, 1996.

As with most big blackouts, its immediate cause was hot weather. Temperatures along the West Coast soared to 100 degrees, prompting a heavy flow of power to California from western Canada's dams. At first, it seemed a fairly routine summer day, one in which operators might have to contend, at worst, with local glitches from a few "sagged out" lines. But the situation looked quite treacherous to Hauer.

To understand why, you have to know a bit about how the grid runs. First, the regional operators who sit in control rooms surrounded by giant grid boards can't work like air-traffic controllers. The speeding electrons they oversee move much too fast to be managed like aircraft, and widespread outages can unfold in seconds. Thus, the operators rely heavily on automatic safeguards--"relays" on generators, for example, instantly switch them offline if they get too far out of sync with the grid.

As I boned up on the vast system of generators behind all our plugs, I began picturing it as a choir of whales singing in unison a single cosmic note, which we know as AC hum. If one singer notices the collective hum getting a little flat, it momentarily hums a little sharp to get the choir back on key. If the group is going sharp, it corrects by humming flat. The simile is rough--automatic "power system stabilizers" on generators are geared not only to help keep the grid's AC frequency steady but also to help stabilize its voltage and power flow. Still, the whale choir helps explain why Hauer was worried.

Years of analyzing the Western Interconnection with the aid of computer models had taught him that when lots of power is being sent from Canada to California, the grid is like a choir stretched out over a very great distance, making unison difficult to achieve. Weakly linked generators can wind up reinforcing off-key notes rather than damping them out. This uncoordinated humming, in turn, can lead to "ringing"--gridwide power oscillations that aren't damped out. Ringing can quickly lead to wild oscillations that cause the grid to crash.

Hauer and a few others had warned the West's gridmeisters about this risk, noting that computer models used to set safety margins overestimated the amount of automatic damping that would occur during heavy power flows from Canada to California. "I thought everyone knew about the risk and would run the system accordingly," with extra-large safety margins, says Hauer. "But the institutional memory had faded."

The risk on that Saturday in 1996 was especially high because dams on the Columbia River east of Portland, Ore., were largely powered down for the annual "fish flush," in which water is fed through spillways next to dams so that fingerling salmon can migrate downstream. The Army Corps of Engineers' four dams along the lower Columbia, like the whale choir's centrally located members, are critical for maintaining harmony--they supply strategically located "voltage support." During fish flushes this support is much reduced.

Still, the grid was copacetic on Aug. 10 until 2:06 P.M., when a major line between The Dalles, Ore., and Portland sagged into a tree and shorted out. Bonneville operators in Vancouver, Wash., delayed closing the relays that would reactivate the line after getting a report that gunshots had been fired near it--they feared a trigger-happy citizen had been using a glass insulator for target practice, making it unsafe to re-energize the 500,000-volt line.

Forty-six minutes later, another big line south of Portland sagged out. Then, at 3:42, a key line linking Portland and Seattle drooped onto a hazelnut tree a few miles west of Portland, knocking it out. At that point, the Western Interconnection began ringing--the whales were losing it. When yet another line near Portland sagged into a tree six minutes later, there was a gridwide voltage drop and the onset of portentous power gyrations.

Instantly, automatic controls at McNary Dam, a key grid node 160 miles east of Portland, revved its dynamos to the max in an effort to hold up the grid's voltage--at that moment, the dam became the Western grid's main prop. But seconds later, faulty controls at the dam, 18 months overdue for maintenance or replacement, began disconnecting its generators. Over the next 73 seconds, helpless operators watched in dismay as all 13 dynamos tripped off, one after another.

As McNary toppled, the grid's gyrations went wild. Seconds later, relays on the Pacific AC intertie in Oregon automatically opened, severing Canada from California.

That was the final blow--in a split second, relays protectively tripped all over the West, tearing its power system into four disconnected gridlets filled with shut-down generators and blacked-out buildings. California resembled a scene from the 1951 sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. Some 7.5 million people lost power for six or more hours. Economic losses were estimated at more than $2 billion.

By Monday the grid was mostly back to normal, and a far-reaching effort to beef up reliability was under way. A ferocious Bonneville crew completely chainsawed the defunct hazelnut orchard where the key Portland-Seattle line had shorted out. The fish flush was abruptly ended. Helicopters buzzed countless power lines, checking for overgrown trees.

In a longer-term effort, the Bonneville Power Administration has spearheaded development of high-speed grid monitors to alert operators about abnormally low voltage support and other danger signs. Over time, these monitoring devices are expected to combine into a futuristic control system that may be able to orchestrate gridwide activities by the millisecond--a computerized conductor to keep the whales in perfect unison.

But Hauer and other experts say such efforts are just a beginning. To fully address the national problem, policymakers must find ways to overcome the tragedy of the grid. In a first stab, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in December 1999 called for utilities to form regionwide companies to manage the transmission grid with the broad perspective needed to cope with long-distance power dealing.

FERC also has signaled that it may allow higher returns to transmission companies that efficiently increase the amount of power their lines can carry without jeopardizing reliability. NERC, the reliability council, is lobbying for a federal law that would enable it, in collaboration with FERC, to crack down on players that jeopardize the system.

But local resistance to new power lines isn't likely to go away, and the costs of expanding the transmission system might well be prohibitive--it would cost at least $50 billion over the next decade to add new power lines at the same rate that peak demand is expected to grow. Thus grid operators will probably be forced to run the system as hot as possible for years to come. That's a disconcerting prospect. Indeed, data from the new monitoring systems have shown that the computer models used to guide grid operations can be way off.

This doesn't mean we're all about to re-enact California's increasingly noir story. But if the tragedy of the grid isn't overcome, we eventually may find E.M. Forster's sunny slogan about connecting less apropos than his dark tale about what happens when a civilization's supporting technology seizes up. Its title: "The Machine Stops."

FEEDBACK: dstipp@fortunemail.com

©Copyright 2001 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

-- Swissrose (cellier3@mindspring.com), February 28, 2001

Answers

A summary of Forster's depressing little tale can be read at: http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/lit-med- db/webdocs/webdescrips/forster379-des-.html

Or read the entire Forster short story, plus lots of information about real-life technical mayhem, via this wonderful website:

http://home.earthlink.net/~wroush/disasters/index.html

-- Andre Weltman (aweltman@state.pa.us), February 28, 2001.


Suddenly, the stock market is beginning to wake up and realize that the "New Economy" is built on the neglected foundation of the "Old Economy." Electrical grid limitations are imposing new constraints on Information Technology development and bandwidth growt. This new realization may be one of the reasons why the technology sector has been performing so dismally as of late. And, there's no quick easy solution. Resources now have to be re-allocated, on a massive scale from New Economy development, into Old Economy maintenance and development.

-- Robert Riggs (rxr.999@worldnet.att.net), February 28, 2001.

I found this to a a tremendously enlightening and educational article. Thanks for posting it Swissrose.

-- LillyLP (lillyLP@aol.com), February 28, 2001.

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