Smaller, more numerous power plants would cut risk of blackouts,
By Tom Adams
How to prevent a repeat of the Aug. 14 blackout — one of the biggest news stories of 2003 — is the challenge now facing the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force.
In November, the international Outage Task Force published a thorough report setting out its immediate causes — particularly maintenance and communications failures by several utilities and grid operators, and failure by the Ohio utility First Energy to follow co-operative reliability rules.
The Outage Task Force's final report is expected to focus on preventing future blackouts and is due out early in the new year.
Greater reliability can be achieved by developing a power grid emulating the web-like structure of the Internet, with multiple paths and intelligent nodes directing traffic where it can move easiest and safest. High power solid-state technologies are rapidly advancing, capable of directing electricity traffic on the transmission highways of the future.
While Ontario now relies on relatively few, but very large, generating stations, we would be better off with smaller but more numerous power plants. Such diversity would cut the risk of blackouts when individual generators fail.
High-efficiency co-generation stations, which supply both heat and power locally, reduce not only fuel costs and emissions in ordinary operations but also customer impacts in the event of fuel shortage.
Locally generated power reduces our reliance on inherently vulnerable transmission networks. Designing the overall grid around the concept of decentralization offers substantial reliability advantages as well as significant environmental and economic benefits.
Nuclear plants — the epitome of a highly centralized power system — are particularly vulnerable.
Just when we needed their electrical output most, many of Ontario's large nuclear generators were among the province's largest power users following the blackout.
Ontario is twice as nuclear-dependent as New York, which is the reason why the post-blackout emergency lasted eight days in Ontario while New York was back to normal in two days.
A more decentralized design is urgently needed so that our power system can develop greater resilience, not just for mechanical failures but also for malicious attacks.
The Aug. 14 grid collapse happened without an external initiating event. Given this demonstrated vulnerability, consider the damage our power system could suffer if groups like the architects of the Sept. 11 attacks, or their students, aim their ingenious malice at our power system.
While ruling out terrorism as a cause of the blackout, the November report of the international Outage Task Force notes that the power system "has been, and continues to be, the target of malicious individuals and groups intent on disrupting the electric power system."
The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), in presenting its views to the international Outage Task Force, has suggested that Ontario should not have electrical interconnections with the United States.
At public hearings in Ontario earlier last month, Brian O'Keefe, CUPE Ontario's secretary-treasurer, said that interconnection and commercial trade between Ontario and utilities in neighbouring states is "dragging us into a swamp."
The opposite is true.
Ontario, of all the provinces, is most reliant on large two-way flows of power across the international border. Without the access to U.S. electricity supplies, Ontario would have suffered rolling blackouts during the winter of 2002-2003, during August and September 2002, in May 1999, and for extended periods in 1990.
Some have pointed to Quebec's success in avoiding the August blackout, suggesting Ontario should adopt Quebec's approach of isolating its power system from the rest of the eastern North American grid.
Isolating our power grid would be a mistake.
Due to Quebec's isolation — made necessary to protect the rest of eastern North America's grid from risks created by the extremely centralized "hub and spoke" grid architecture in Quebec — consumers there suffer more interruption than consumers in Ontario.
For practical reasons, Ontario's primary electrical interconnections are with Michigan and New York.
Happily, regions of the U.S. capable of helping meet Ontario needs, like New York, New England and Pennsylvania, are rapidly modernizing, expanding and decentralizing their power generators. Motivated by competition to cut costs, the reliability benefits are just gravy.
Now is the time to weave an electrical safety net of the future based on the concept of decentralization. With many more treads, each designed to avoid failure but to fail gracefully when they do, our power grid would serve us better.
Tom Adams is executive director of Energy Probe, a national consumer and environmental think tank specializing in energy sustainability.