NEWS INDEX Archives 2004 June

Nation remains vulnerable to power blackouts, thanks to political impasse

Mark Reutter, Business Editor
217-333-0568

6/4/04

Photo by Bill Wiegand George Gross is a leading expert in transmission services and prices. He served on the 2002 National Transmission Grid Study for the U.S. Department of Energy, which assessed ways to improve the nation’s electricity network.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — As the peak electricity season approaches, little has been done in Washington to prevent a recurrence of last August’s power failure that produced a huge blackout in the Northeast, an expert at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign says.

Legislative steps to improve and enforce compliance with standards of reliability for electrical power transmission have been "held hostage to the politics that has stalled the energy bill in Congress," said George Gross, a professor of electrical and computer engineering.

The inability to get transmission reliability provisions through Congress means that the country will continue to be vulnerable to power disruptions when electricity demand spikes on hot summer days, Gross said.

"As the mega blackout last August 14 made amply clear, the reliability of our electricity infrastructure is a problem that must be tackled on a national basis due to the widespread interconnections between power systems," he said.

"But so far, there are insufficient numbers of legislators who have stepped up to the plate in Washington and said, ‘Pass this piece of legislation on its own, so that the necessary upgrades to the transmission system can begin and violators of standards are dealt with forcefully.’ "

The North American Electric Reliability Council, set up after the 1965 blackout to provide grid coordination, needs teeth to be an effective watchdog to enforce the standards for power systems planning and operations, Gross said.

"NERC and its regional reliability councils have created workable standards and operational protocols, but being voluntary industry bodies, they are unable to enforce compliance other than peer pressure," he said.

Since August 2003, the power industry has become more aware of specific shortcomings in communications and procedures, which helped lead to the blackout, Gross said.
"That’s the good news; the industry is trying to update its communications equipment and put in place procedures to insure we don’t have a repeat of last August. But the grid is only as strong as its weakest link, and without federal legislation that puts teeth in NERC standards, the system is vulnerable."

The electric grid in Illinois is part of the Eastern Interconnection, the world’s largest "spaghetti bowl" of electricity lines that cover most parts of the United States and Canada east of the Rocky Mountains.
While recent initiatives by Gov. Rod Blagojevich to improve power reliability in Illinois are welcome, state government and local utilities alone cannot solve the problem, according to Gross.

This is because transmission lines are no longer operated by a single power company to connect its generating stations to its customers. With the advent of competitive electric markets, the system is used for the exchange of electricity among large numbers of power generators and users.

"The number of transactions involving the exchange of electricity has grown by 400 percent in the last decade, but the transmission system has grown only slightly in this same time frame," Gross said.

He noted that last August’s massive blackout was not caused by lack of power generation. In fact, only 75 percent of the installed capacity was online, giving the system a healthy 25 percent margin in generation.

"But the same was not true on the transmission front," Gross continued, "where the stress on the grid led to cascading outages throughout the interconnections in the Midwest, Northeast, Eastern Canada and New England systems."

In addition to enforceable federal standards, Gross said that state governments should ease regulatory hurdles that prevent power companies from expanding their transmission network.

"While FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) can mandate a transmission-owning utility to provide transmission service to a new entity, it is within the purview of each state’s regulatory agency to approve the actual siting of the grid. And there’s the rub. Under pressure from local groups or politicians opposed to transmission lines, state agencies balk at giving permission to a new line, especially one that services a regional rather than a local purpose. So nothing gets built."

Gross is a leading expert in transmission services and prices. He served on the 2002 National Transmission Grid Study for the U.S. Department of Energy, which assessed ways to improve the nation’s electricity network.