- 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.
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- 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.
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- SHADES OF 1965
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- STRONG ASIAN, AUSTRALIAN SYSTEMS
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- 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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