Utility could have halted blackout

Utility could have halted blackout

Apr 06 - Deseret News (Salt Lake City)

An Ohio power company should have prevented last summer's blackout across a wide swath of North America by intentionally cutting off electricity to most of the Cleveland area, U.S. and Canadian officials said Monday.

In their final report on the Aug. 14 blackout that darkened much of the Midwest, the Northeast and Ontario, a panel convened by the two national governments put much of the blame on FirstEnergy Corp., one of the United States' largest utilities, in whose eastern Ohio territory the collapse began. The inquiry found that not only did FirstEnergy not "shed load," or shut off some customers as a preventive measure, the company apparently did not have a plan for doing so on short notice.

"We believe that if First Energy had shed as much as 1,500 megawatts of load in the Cleveland-Akron area" then the blackout "would have been a local Ohio problem," said Alison Silverstein, senior energy policy adviser to the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which was one of the investigators. FirstEnergy's problems became acute at about 3:05 p.m., but Silverstein said the cascading failure could have been prevented until 4:05:57, about three minutes before the blackout began.

Power companies fairly frequently cut off electricity to some customers to prevent an isolated problem from spreading, but they are loath to do so on a large scale. Federal officials say that without a protocol for blacking out a wide area, doing it quickly would have been chaotic.

"Had we blacked out Cleveland, it may or may not have prevented the event," said Chuck Jones, senior vice president for energy delivery at FirstEnergy.

But Jones said the international investigation had glossed over the problems created by a rise in long-distance power transmission in recent years. He said power being shipped from southern Ohio to Ontario, across FirstEnergy's territory, was one cause of the company's problems the day of the blackout.

"We take exception to the idea that you should interrupt local customers in favor of long-distance transactions," he said.

The report did not fully explain why the cascade spread from Ohio to Michigan to Ontario to New York, while other areas were spared. Each region is connected to its neighbors by relays, switches on the major transmission lines, that can cut off the flow of power automatically when serious trouble is detected.