By Richard G. Biever
When power use rose along the eastern Great Lakes in November 50 years ago, a small safety device prematurely tripped, as it was mistakenly set to do, and shut down its transmission line. The Great Northeast Blackout of 1965 began.
Equipment down the interconnected lines overloaded. The failures rippled then cascaded out. Within minutes, most of New York state and parts of seven neighboring states and Canada, were left in the dark. Almost everything electrical shut down over 80,000 square miles. The blackout affected some 30 million people and lasted about 13 hours.
“Where were you when the lights went out?” became a catch phrase for the decade and even the title of a big-screen Doris Day comedy about crazy events set in motion that night.
But to utilities and policymakers on both sides of the Great Lakes, the blackout was no laughing matter. It exposed issues in the humongous North American electrical highway called “the grid,” the largest machine mankind ever built, that interconnects power generators, power lines and the end-use electric consumers.
“That was the first blackout of that scale in the United States and really got the attention of our government,” said Barry Lawson, associate director of power delivery and reliability with the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. “It was a significant wake up call for everybody.”
Congress demanded improvements. Utilities that generated and transmitted electricity came together to create a voluntary organization — the National Electric Reliability Council — to establish standards and policies and provide peer oversight. “It put into place a lot of practices and policies that the industry agreed to do,” Lawson said.
Since then, innovations in technology allowed for better gathering of data and monitoring of the flow of power across the grid. But at the same time, changing laws and regulations fundamentally shifted the way the grid and utilities operate. A whole new set of challenges arose affecting the largest power producers down to the smallest distribution cooperatives.
A patchwork of design
North America’s electric grid may be the largest interconnected machine on earth and truly a marvel of engineering, but it wasn’t initially designed that way. It was created as needed over the course of 100 years, one section at a time.
Today’s grid includes approximately 3,000 utilities and other entities operating 10,000 power plants sending energy across 450,000 miles of transmission lines.
The power grid envisioned in the 1900s was not built for today’s population and the profusion of electrical devices that now permeate our lives. The grid is now stretched to capacity.
Girding of the grid
After NERC came along in 1968, overall reliability improved for 30 years.
Congress tossed the monkey wrench of unintended consequences into the already complicated grid works in 1992 when it deregulated the generation of electricity. Competitive independent generators with no transmission operations or load-serving obligations entered the wholesale marketplace. Owners of existing transmission lines were required by law to allow open access to the network.
By the late 1990s, voluntary compliance with NERC standards and policies became inconsistent. New reliability problems began showing with outages in the Western grid. Lawmakers and utility industry folks talked about establishing additional oversight.
“It was not clear if this voluntary regulatory group using peer pressure would be able to continue to ensure the high level of grid reliability that the utility industry provided,” Lawson said.
That answer became clearer Aug. 14, 2003 when a series of malfunctions, mishaps and mistakes escalated into the worst blackout in North American history. It started when heavily loaded transmission lines sagged into overgrown trees in Northern Ohio, causing those lines to fail. Alarms to warn operators of the growing malaise malfunctioned, and the severity of the situation went unrecognized until it was too late. Just as in 1965, a blackout cascaded across the Northeast. Some 300 transmission lines failed. Well over 50 million people were affected.
An estimated $10 billion economic loss was attributed to the blackout.
The 2003 blackout pushed reforms into “hyper-speed mode,” Lawson said. “Congress finally said, ‘We need something with teeth that’s mandatory and enforceable.’”
The ensuing Energy Policy Act of 2005 gave the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission authority over reliability. FERC chose NERC as the oversight organization, giving NERC, now called the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, new powers. In 2007, NERC’s 83 Reliability Standards were approved by FERC as the first set of legally enforceable standards for the U.S. bulk power system.
In collaboration with NERC, the power industry adopted and implemented a preventative approach to maintain and improve bulk power system reliability. The idea is to aggressively go after the many small failures, such as maintenance issues, that can aggregate into larger problems.
Coming down the lines
Even though electricity is at our fingertips almost 100 percent of the time, getting it to our homes and workplaces from where it’s generated is a challenging process. Because large amounts of energy cannot be stored, electricity must be produced as it is used.
Renewable energy resources will require new transmission lines.
The grid must respond quickly to shifting demand and continuously generate and route electricity to where it’s needed the most. But significant changes and challenges are coming down the line. Issues affecting the grid include:
• Age. Parts of the electrical transmission facilities in the U.S. are many decades old. Given the age, some existing lines have to be replaced or upgraded and new lines may need to be constructed to maintain the electrical system’s overall reliability.
• New technology. Upgrades in technology now let consumers connect their own home-generated electricity to the grid, using solar panels or wind generators. The federal government is also investing in smart grid digital technology to more efficiently manage energy resources. The smart grid project also will extend the reach of the grid to access remote sources of renewable energy like geothermal power and wind farms.
• Cost. According to a study done by the Electric Power Research Institute, creating a smart grid could cost up to $476 billion over the next 20 years. Utilities are likely to be stuck with a large chunk of the bill, which could impact consumers’ energy costs. But EPRI noted the country is likely to recoup those costs and then some. The report said the smart grid could provide up to $2 trillion in benefits over a 20-year period, such as power reliability, integration of renewable energy, stronger cybersecurity and reduced electricity demand.
• Renewables. Federal climate change policy will rely on boosting energy efficiency and developing more sources of renewable energy. Renewable energy resources will likely require construction of new transmission lines. Renewable energy resources typically share a common setback: The areas where the power can be generated best are not population centers. For remote renewable facilities to be as beneficial as possible, associated transmission lines must also be built to move the power to where folks live. Renewables also present intermittency challenges for grid operators.
• Security. The cyber system is used to control the bulk power system and an attack can cause a blackout just as surely as if the transmission line was taken out of service.
One solution may be microgrids: localized grids that are normally connected to the more traditional electric grid but can disconnect to operate autonomously. Because they can operate independently of the grid during outages, microgrids could be used to provide reliable power during extreme weather events.
Are these new challenges capable of creating a cascading blackout on the scale of the one in 2003 or 1965? “You can’t say it could never happen again. There are still things we haven’t planned for or have protections for, or are too costly to plan for,” Lawson said.
Utilities, agencies and regulators worked hard to mitigate and eliminate such events and are cautiously optimistic. But fail-safe reliability may never be possible. Weather, the main cause of power outages, always remains a risk. And newer concerns like terrorist acts and cyber-attacks only added to the overall complexity and cost of keeping the power flowing.
This article was compiled, written in most part, and edited by Richard G. Biever, senior editor of Electric Consumer. Contributions were edited from articles by the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Other sources of information included Wikipedia, the American Public Power Association and NERC.