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Biggest Ever US Blackout
Points To Larger Problems

By James Jelter
8-15-03


SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The vulnerability of the North American electric system was highlighted on Thursday as millions in North America lost their power on one of the hottest afternoons of the summer.
 
Industry officials have long warned that the North American power transmission system, which saw its greatest expansion in the years following World War II, is groaning under the weight of the heavy loads it carries today.
 
"We're a superpower with a third-world grid. We need a new grid," New Mexico Gov. and former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson told the CNN television network. "The problem is that nobody is building enough transmission capacity."
 
According to the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, U.S. power demand has surged 30 percent in the last decade, while transmission capacity grew a mere 15 percent.
 
And during muggy weather like the kind blanketing the Northeast on Thursday, air conditioning accounts for a hefty 30 percent of all power flowing over the lines, severely taxing an already overworked transmission network.
 
It was the biggest blackout in North American history, according to U.S. power grid operators. It eclipsed the 1965 blackout in the United States and Canada that affected about 30 million people.
 
It spread in a matter of seconds, tripping circuit breakers from the Great Lakes to New England to protect costly electrical equipment from a sudden voltage jolt.
 
Power was returning to some of the affected areas. By early (on) Friday, power had been restored to New York's Bronx borough and suburban Westchester County, TV networks reported.
 
SHADES OF 1965
 
The blackout was reminiscent of the infamous 1965 outage, triggered by a lightning strike on a high-voltage line running from Canada to New York, stranding about 30 million people without electricity along the populous New York-New England corridor.
 
The 1965 outage shocked the nation and gave birth to the North American Electric Reliability Council, a New Jersey-based industry group that works to ensure reliable service on the 500,000-mile network of high-voltage lines that serve 270 million U.S. and 31 million Canadian customers.
 
Despite the council's efforts, and hard work by utilities to maintain the system, it teeters on days when too many megawatts are crowded onto too few lines. It is constantly at the mercy of severe weather.
 
"Each time we have to learn more about the transmission system and we have the opportunities to take steps to prevent a reoccurrence," said Terry Winter, president and CEO of the California Independent System Operator which manages the state's grid.
 
Winter said the nation's electric grid urgently needs to be upgraded. But efforts to do so typically face fierce opposition in communities seeking to keep transmission towers and cables out of their neighborhoods.
 
Efforts to build up the grid have also been stalled by a lack of incentive to invest in the tightly regulated power transmission business.
 
STRONG ASIAN, AUSTRALIAN SYSTEMS
 
Asian and Australian electricity companies are unlikely to face the kind of widespread blackout that hit the northeastern power grid in the United States and Canada on Thursday, according to power company representatives.
 
"Asian power interconnections are relatively limited, and the ones that are there can be readily detached," an Asian electricity analyst told Reuters. "If something went haywire in Guangdong (the Chinese province bordering Hong Kong), the Hong Kong utilities could close the connection to prevent it."
 
Koji Morita, general manager at the Institute of Energy Economics Japan, an energy think tank, said a massive power outage was unlikely to happen in Japan ... because most Japanese power utilities' power grids were not as extensive as those found in the United States.
 
"I would find it very difficult to believe that an outage of this scale where all of Tokyo suffers a power outage ... would happen in Japan," he said.
 
But both Australia's National Electricity Market Management Company and New Zealand's Transpower were quick to point out that no matter how many contingency plans were in place, electricity systems around the world remained vulnerable to total failure.
 
"In the Australian context we haven't had a system blackout since way back in the 1960s. The Australia power system is designed to deal with contingency events, such as lightning strikes," said Paul Panther-Price, Australia's electricity market management company spokesman.
 
New Zealand's Transpower, which operates that nation's electricity grid, said the chance of a "cascade failure" was very slim.
 
 
 
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