Aug. 9, 2001

Western power grid has a close call

Delivery problem could have led to blackouts throughout region

BY JOHN WOOLFOLK AND STEVE JOHNSON Mercury News

The Western power grid serving 65 million people nearly collapsed a week ago when generators failed to deliver promised electricity -- a problem California officials warned Wednesday is occurring with alarming frequency.

Last Thursday's close call could have knocked out power in 14 states and parts of Canada and Mexico, causing the region's worst outages in five years.

``You're standing on the edge of a cliff when a generator fails to do what you order them to do,'' said Jim Detmers, vice president of grid operations at the California Independent System Operator. ``It's not just California that's at risk. It's the whole Western United States.''

The dire warning comes as California's energy crisis seems to be easing, with not one of the predicted blackouts rolling across the state so far this summer.

The intricately balanced system came so close to failure last Thursday that an unexpected outage at just one generator anywhere in the region could have triggered blackouts, Detmers said.

Air-traffic analogy

Detmers likened the problem to airliners ignoring orders from the air-traffic control tower. The ISO controls the California grid, scheduling delivery of electricity much as control towers schedule airplanes for landings.

``It's really no different than if a plane comes into San Francisco International Airport and doesn't follow the rules of the air traffic controller,'' Detmers said. ``We had a near miss on our system. You had two planes getting very close.''

Although the ISO has seen similar problems as far back as December, last week's event prompted grid managers to fire a stern warning late Wednesday to California's power generators and to call for federal regulators to investigate.

The warning cited ``a growing pattern among market participants'' of ``untenable acts'' that include ``failure to comply with dispatch instructions.''

``Such system performance threatens the reliability of the Western Interconnection and cannot be tolerated,'' the ISO report said.

Steve Maviglio, spokesman for Gov. Gray Davis, said he hadn't been notified of the grid manager's concerns, but after being read language in the report, said it was ``pretty strong stuff coming from the ISO.''

Jan Smutny-Jones, a former ISO official who heads the Independent Energy Producers Association, which represents generators, said he was unaware of the reported problems but agreed the matter is a serious one.

``The issue that the ISO is identifying here, I can't recall ever seeing that before,'' Smutny-Jones said, adding that it is crucial to ``get to the bottom of what the problem is and fix it quick.''

``System reliability is important to everybody,'' he said.

Companies not named

Grid officials would not name the companies involved or say whether they believe the problems resulted from confusion or attempts to manipulate the system to boost market prices. The offenders were reported to federal regulators who will make that call, Detmers said.

Smutny-Jones said the problem may stem from lingering confusion among energy sellers over the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's June 19 order extending price controls throughout the West.

``I don't think anybody is deliberately trying to put the system in jeopardy,'' Smutny-Jones said. ``There is some confusion and some controversy around.''

Grid managers cited two recent examples of problems that are threatening the stability of the system. In one case, a generator scheduled far more power than it was capable of delivering and fell more than 1,600 megawatts short. A megawatt is enough to power some 750 homes or more.

In another case, a generator balked at an ISO order to deliver power needed to stabilize the system.

Because electricity must be used as it is produced, the grid manager must precisely match power supply with demand throughout the day. A mismatch can trigger circuit breakers throughout the system, causing widespread blackouts.

The last major failure on the Western grid was on July 2, 1996, when a tree growing too close to a high-voltage line in Idaho sparked outages across the region affecting 2 million customers.

Managers' goal

Grid managers aim to keep the system running at a frequency of 60 hertz. It normally fluctuates between 60.01 and 59.99 hertz, Detmers said. Last Thursday, it fell to 59.93 hertz.

Blackouts can begin when it gets down to 59.65 hertz, he said. Every loss of 1,000 megawatts costs the system .10 hertz, he said.

A substantial drop in frequency can cause widespread outages that can take days to fix, he said.

To maintain balance, the ISO must keep supply and demand within 117 megawatts, Detmers said. Last Thursday, the system slipped more than 1,100 megawatts out of balance for more than 10 minutes and was as much as 1,500 megawatts off.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contact John Woolfolk at jwoolfolk@sjmercury.com or (408) 278-3410.

http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/depth/power080901.htm

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), August 09, 2001

Answers

As you probably realize, I'm on this grid, Martin. Not a word about this story here, and no signs of problems, in spite of the heat we were accommodating last Thur.

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), August 09, 2001.

Rachel

It is truly amazing what is happening in the energy situation and just about everything else that 99% of of the public is unaware of. One of these days the shift will hit the fan and there wll be a lot of miserable people out there.

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), August 09, 2001.

It certainly looks like the trap door could snap shut at any time, doesn't it? Swiftly, suddenly, unexpectedly, I guess. And, here, this is the only place I've been made aware of this. Thanks, Martin.

-- QMan (qman@c-zone.net), August 09, 2001.

Worse, the I.S.O. website gives no "blackout warning", not even a "system warning", which was in perpetual effect until mid-June. This potential cascading blackout scenario --- which would NOT spare mission-critical infrastructure, (unlike the much publicized "rolling blackout" threats) is indeed being covered up, and lulling even many otherwise savvy people into a false sense of complacency.

Stay Prepared for "Y2K" type disruptions!

-- Robert Riggs (rxr.999@worldnet.att.net), August 09, 2001.