Michigan Green - Florida Sparks Dark Visions

March 5, 2008

When power outages spread 300 miles across Florida, dark visions occurred. It all seemed reminiscent of the 2003 blackout that left 50 million people in the United States and Canada without electricity -- a scenario that undoubtedly could occur again.

Utility planners have long warned that the nation's power infrastructure is not only stretched thin but also that is running on outdated technologies. Given the projected rise in electricity demand, the nation is still short generation and transmission. Improvements, no doubt, have occurred in some regions, but in others the problems are real and will ripple through their local economies.

Florida may have been the most recent state to suffer. But, according to the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), California, the Midwest, New England, the Rocky Mountain States and the Southwest are most at risk. The matter is exacerbated because of the continued high level of dependence on natural gas in some of these areas, particularly the Northeast and Southern California. Unless those regions diversify their fuel sources and generation capacity, their difficulties are only going to deepen.

In the case of Florida, 3 million homeowners were affected last week. The initial prognosis is that an equipment malfunction at an electrical substation in Miami set off smoke and fire. That created a domino effect that disabled power lines and generators, all of which was facilitated by human error.

The demand for power ultimately exceeded the ability to deliver that electricity, causing system monitors to automatically shut down power facilities. Estimates are that the state lost up to 10 percent of its total generation capacity on a peak day. Altogether, a dozen generating units, 26 transmission lines, 4,000 megawatts of load were lost.

"While we can't predict the timetable of analysis, information collected by new monitoring technologies, called 'synchro-phasors,' will enable our teams to analyze (the) outages more quickly than in the past," says Rick Sergel, chairman of NERC. "This new technology is like the 'MRI' of bulk power systems, giving operators and analysts more granulated data and helping them to dissect and piece together the events that occurred step by step, microsecond by microsecond."

NERC, which is empowered under the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to develop, audit and enforce new reliability standards for 1,400 different power plants, transmission operators and substations, classified the outage as a "Category Four" rating. "Category Five" is the most severe. The organization "commended" the affected utilities for their actions immediately following the blackout, saying their first priority is to safely restore power. No one was injured during the incident.

Similar Incidents

Invariably, utility planners will be forced to draw parallels between the massive 2003 blackout and the recent one in Florida. At the heart of the matter is the fact that the nation will need an additional 141,000 megawatts of electricity by 2015 to accommodate a 19 percent increase by then, says NERC. But only 57,000 megawatts are planned.

At the same time, it says that significant investment in transmission is still required in many areas of North America and that such construction lags behind the growth of proposed new power plants. The total number of transmission miles is projected to increase by 8.8 percent, or 14,500 circuit miles in the United States over the next 10 years. But NERC cautions that more investment is necessary as each peak season puts increasing strains on the network and especially in those regions of the country that are already experiencing the most congestion.

Utilities understand implicitly their roles -- to produce and deliver safe, reliable and cost effective power. The attention of those at the top has been diverted, however, and the job of fixing any problems associated with those goals has been the responsibility of those who are more technically oriented. But now that the federal law has more bite, those at the top of the chain of command are expected to be more involved.

Those in the trenches have always known that the capacity of the transmission system is insufficient and will be unable over a sustained period to support huge increases in power demand. The same infrastructure, meantime, is from a bygone era. Translation: The difficulties in winning permits coupled with lack of capital flowing to transmission projects has meant that the risks of large-scale reliability problems have increased because of inadequate or congested transmission lines.

"New developments of wind, solar, and eventually nuclear -- in addition to developments of more traditional resources -- all have a common denominator: They need transmission to reliably integrate them into the grid," says Dave Nevius, senior vice president at NERC.

As far as the Florida blackouts go, experts say that the initial smoke and fire should have been contained. It was not, causing operating systems shut down when demand had exceeded the available supplies. Investigators will want to learn if any of the power plants and specifically the two affected nuclear reactors became prematurely disabled or whether they performed as advertised.

For its part, the Nuclear Energy Institute says that nuclear power plants are designed to shut down safely in response to disturbances within the electrical grid. The situation in Florida is not the first time such precautions have been taken, it adds, noting that nuclear plants did the same during the 2003 blackout. "Once the electricity grid is functioning and ready to be re-energized, power plant operators will follow precise procedures to ensure the safe restart .."

Once a thorough examination is completed, a detailed explanation of what caused the Florida outage to precipitously spread will be provided. But one thing is already clear: The nation's generation and transmission infrastructure is overburdened and that Florida's woes could be a precursor of events to come.

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