Sabrina Eaton and John Funk
Plain Dealer Reporters
Saturday, August 17, 2003
Electric-industry investigators and state regulators tracking down the cause of the biggest blackout in U.S. history are focusing on problems in power transmission lines that ring Lake Erie — including those under the control of FirstEnergy Corp.
“All indications are that it started in Ohio,” said Alan Schriber, chairman of the Ohio Public Utilities Commission. “But we are not sure Ohio was the cause.”
The PUCO yesterday launched an investigation into the event.
Voltage flow problems first appeared in the Midwestern section of the “Lake Erie loop,” said Michehl R. Gent, chief executive officer of the North American Electric Reliability Council, an industry group that oversees the electric transmission lines.
“The flow was about 300 megawatts, going from west to east” just before the power failure occurred, he said. “Then as events unfolded .¤.¤. the power reversed itself and ended up with at least 500 megawatts going the other way.”
Gent said the reversal over a nine-second period could have happened if a power plant that fed into the lines abruptly ceased generation. Electricity flowing over the grid from other power plants would then reverse to replace the lost voltage.
Wild fluctuations then traveled the entire Lake Erie loop, which includes major bulk-power high- voltage lines running from Buffalo to Cleveland to Detroit and then back to Toronto before returning to Buffalo.
The electric council last night released a report from its Mid´ west division showing that four of FirstEnergy’s major transmission lines were knocked off the grid beginning as early as 3:06 p.m.
By 4:08 p.m. the disruption had spread through lines serving several states and Canada.
An automatic shutdown system designed to protect plants knocked 22 nuclear plants offline as well as roughly 80 plants that use fossil fuels.
FirstEnergy said last night it was investigating an explosion at its Eastlake coal-fired plant that occurred Thursday afternoon before the nationwide problems began, as well as a blown trans´ former in the area.
Investigators have ruled out terrorism and a rumored light´ ning strike in Canada, Gent said. He said, however, that a plant operator may have failed to follow operating rules set by his group.
“Either the rules we have are inadequate to accommodate this unknown condition, or someone wasn’t following the rules,” said Gent. “We don’t know which.” He was unsure whether violators could face penalties.
ABC News reported, citing unnamed FBI sources, that General Motors Corp.’s Parma stamping plant was the “pivotal point” in the blackout. It further said that FirstEnergy’s system failed to disconnect itself from the grid, allowing the problem to cascade to New York. FirstEnergy de´ clined to comment.
Even if the event began in Ohio, the cause of the massive outage may lie with multiple failures at companies across the grid, said Schriber.
“These systems were built to respond to variations outside the norm. American Electric Power [headquartered in Columbus] responded appropriately,” he said. “To the extent others did not, we don’t know if they failed or if the problem was so egregious that it would not have mattered.”
FirstEnergy’s position last night was that its first obligation was restoring power to its cus´ tomers rather than spending time searching for what kicked off the disaster.
“We are going to participate [in the investigation] the same way everybody else will in the region and review exactly what happened,” said company spokesman Ralph DiNicola. “Right now we are trying to keep our system together.”
Gent said his organization, which was founded to ensure smooth electrical flow and prevent massive failures, is putting together a team of experts to determine what went wrong and keep it from happening again.
Gent said he was unsure why the power failure spread to a 9,300-square-mile section of the country and was “personally embarrassed” by the system failure that affected 50 million people.
“My job is to see that this doesn’t happen,” Gent said. “You can say that I failed in my job. That is why I am upset.”
The White House last night announced it is creating a joint task force with Canada to study the causes of the failure. The special panel will ask for information from the industry as well as state and provincial authorities. Spokesmen for the federal energy and homeland security depart´ ments said their agencies will assist.
Roger Harszy of the Midwest
Independent Transmission System Operator, which oversees
the power lines that serve Northeast Ohio, said that power grid
disruptions were reported in
Northeast Ohio as well as To
“There were multiple events,”
said the Midwest transmission
operator’s president and chief executive officer, Jim Torgerson.
“We don’t know what happened
everywhere. It will take several
weeks before we do.”
President Bush earlier in the
day called the blackout “a
wakeup call” that showed the
need to modernize the nation’s
“antiquated” electricity delivery
system.
“It’s a good opportunity for us
to analyze what went wrong and
deal with it,” Bush told reporters
in California. “We don’t know yet
what went wrong, but we will.
We’ve got to figure out how to
make the electricity system have
the redundancy necessary so that
if there is an outage .¤.¤. it doesn’t
affect as many people as it did in
the past.”
Torgerson said utilities in his
service area are planning $1.5
billion in transmission line improvements in the next few
years, but “more can be done.”
“Most people will tell you that
the transmission system in the
U.S. is inadequate today,” he
said. “Hopefully, more construction will alleviate some of this.”
Mary Lynn Webster, spokeswoman for the Midwest trans´
mission operator, said the Lake
Erie loop has had trouble in the
past because there is high demand for electricity in cities clustered around the lake, and because it is “geographically tough”
to build transmission lines in
that area. “You have a lake, and it
is very expensive to go under the
lake,” she said.
To reach these Plain Dealer reporters:
seaton@plaind.com, 216-999-4212
jfunk@plaind.com, 216-999-4138