Slashdot Mirror
Deregulation and Niagara Mohawk - Is There a Story?
It's just a few hours after the Northeast U.S. power outage, and facts are trickling in; as of right now, it looks like an accidental overload knocked out a large part of the Niagara Mohawk power grid. A few years ago, California went through rolling blackouts that were largely due to a poorly-executed deregulation of that state's power industry. The question that's probably occurring to many of us is, did late-'90s deregulation play a role in today's power event? I don't know the answer, so I'm turning it over to you -- moderators, please check links and up-mod the most informative, pro or con. Here is some information to get you started:
"We support deregulation 100 percent..." (N-M spokesman, 1997; notes N-M wanted to sell generators and "concentrate on the transmission and distribution of energy" -- did it?);
N-M made some bad investments and is
scheduled to request a rate hike (did it?);
and N-M's own website says:
"Deregulation [has] changed the laws and regulations governing the electricity industry to promote competition..." (how so?).
"California went through rolling blackouts that were largely due to a poorly-executed deregulation of that state's power industry"
l /main546097.shtml
Actually, there was a significant amount of fraud involved. Check it out here: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/26/nationa
In case people are wondering how the power grid works, here is an article on howstuffworks.com on how
The power grid works
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Wrong. It has everything to do with deregulation.
If a power company builds a new power line at their expense, they must allow other companies access and sell power using that line.
Companies aren't building power infrastructure beyond the minimum required because they get screwed. You will see more of this happening.
PS Full Disclosure. I am biased as I have worked in the power supply business for several decades.
-- I wasn't there. I didn't do it. I don't know how. I don't know anyone who does.
the results have generally been regarded as disasterous - most notably a rise in power bills for both domestic and industrial consumers that topped out at well over double. the power rate increase resulted in less disposable consumer income and increased cost of doing business in the province and was regarded as an election-killer by the current administration.
so they spent their way out of it to the the tune of $2.3 billion. that was direct subsidies to rate payers. of course the whole subsidy was a charade since those same rate payers were going to pay for their "subsidies" in income tax increases or reduced social spending in other areas. clearly a case of cutting you a cheque with your own money.
so who got rich? the power companies. same service, same power, more money.
bottom line: electricity is a necessity. like water, or the police service. it is a completely inelastic commodity and privatizing it is only encouraging the new power overlord (since there is, really, only one major power provider... a monopoly) to charge the maximum the market will bear and damn the consequences.
source here: here
2 1337 4 u!
A former DTE employee, I am typing this on my laptop with no power here in Detroit, MI. I agree, this is certainly not a result of deregulation. Perhaps I can offer some insight on some of the specifics.
The reason so many plants are now offline is because of a safety system put in place to protect their generating equipment. An overload can severely damage generators. The device which disconnects the plant from the grid is a shoebox-sized relay. The great northeastern blackout of 1965 was actually caused by a defective relay.
However, it is highly unlikely that a relay was the cause of this outage. If not for faulty equipment, what caused it to happen? Since the problem seems to have originated in Niagra Falls, New York, I suspect that a major line which provedes part of the northeastern US with power from generating plants in Canada went down. This event would have triggered the above scenario, causing plants in both the US and Canada to shut down.
It is interesting to note that, as with land-based phone systems, little has changed in the way power is distributed to customers in the last 30 years (certainly advances in fiber optics have advanced phone systems, but the last-mile copper systems have remained unchanged in over 50 years). Hopefully now, systems will be put in place to prevent outages of this magnitude from happening again. A system of automated switches with real-time network links could be used to disconnect parts of the grid instantly before the problem could spread. Maybe we will see some of this technology in the future, now that there is a definate need to persue it.
Look, people. There isn't anything or anyone to blame for this.
The Niagra Mohawk power grid serves the area in question. The way a power grid works is that there is a mesh of generation stations that are all interconnected by high-voltage transmission lines, 480kV on up. Each generation station has a primary service area and one or more (usually more) entry/exit stations where energy can either enter or exit the primary service area, depending on what they're telling the control system to do.
A network of generation stations makes up a grid, and at the boundary of a grid, there are similar entry/exit stations.
All generators, whether they be nuclear, hydro, wind, or whatever, have TONS of safety interlocks that engage at various points during abnormal conditions to prevent catastrophic failure. One of these interlock behaviors is to shut down and remove the generator from the grid in the event of an overload.
The likely sequence of events in this situation is that there was a failure at one of the generators in the N-M grid that resulted in the shutdown of that generator. What happens when a generator shuts down is that all of the entry/exit points flip to "entry" mode to allow neighboring generators to take up the slack. Most generator companies have agreements with their neighbors to buy however much electricity they need at whatever the current price is, without acknowledgement, when one of these shutdown events happens.
Anyway, once the initial generator shut down and the entry/exit stations flipped to entry mode, the neighboring generators were unable to take up the slack, so they in turn shut down as well. Then, a domino effect set in until it reached the boundary of the N-M grid, or when someone at the operator station woke up and hit the red button that prevents the transfer stations from automatically flipping to "entry" mode.
Keep in mind that it didn't necessarily have to be an overload that caused it - a generator can shut down for a number of reasons.
This all could have been a control system failure, an operator error, or some other unfortunate combination of events that happened to lead to a catastrophic grid failure.
After doing some research on this for an undergrad paper, it turns out that it was a combination of bad luck and accounting/management.
:)
The major 110kV CBD feeder lines had their lifetimes "reassessed" and it was decided that there were still plenty of years left in them. So they took their time replacing them (it was underway when the crisis started), but it turns out their lifetimes were more like the original specifications (funny that).
One major 110kV line failed while one was down for maintenance, which lead to the failure of another two 110kV lines a few days later due to overloading. It didn't help when some monkey roadworker dug thru one of the smaller 40kV feeders that were helping prop up the cbd either.
Then it got fun - rolling morning/afternoon blackouts, companies moving to offices out in the suburbs, temporary overhead lines erected running 20km to one of the other distribution yards, generators everywhere...
Deregulation hadn't been completed at that stage - the new lines/distribution company in Auckland which came in to being a year or so after the crisis is taking their job very seriously and has done a lot to improve uptime and redundancy.
Rob
Thanks for the backup on this one.
While I don't necessarily agree that regulation is the answer, it's a simple matter of ethics.
De-regulation wasn't really de-regulation. It was RE-regulation. The rules simply changed, and there became many more of them, one of which was that no new generating plants could be built. Why the hell they decided this was beyond me. Most of these generators were built "way back when" before the age of computers and ubiquitous use of air conditioning. PECO Energy became the most expensive electricity in the nation after PA "de-regulated" the electricity industry. I pay almost $0.16 per kWh, which is ridiculous by any standard. That money is used to pay for electricity that is practically given away to neighboring producers like PP&L and ConEd.
Anyway...
You'd be AMAZED at what percentage of all generated power is dissipated in either a computer or an air conditioner/chiller/etc. 100 million computers at 200 watts each is 20 BILLION watts. 20 GIGAwatts. That's the capacity of more than 20 average-sized nuclear reactors. Limerick here in PA has two reactors each capable of about 1.134 (I was really hoping it was 1.21, really I was!) gigawatts.
Here's a Link to a list of all U.S. Nuclear facilities and their statistics and capacities.
And here is a link to a list of all the reactor statuses showing they're loaded to the teeth - almost all of them at 100%.
The U.S. Department of Energy maintains lots of useful information about the power grids in the United States and how they are running. There are also publicly available status reports on each generation facility.
One graph on the DoE site showed that generation capacity hasn't increased at all since about 1992 (when Clinton took office, what a surprise... bastard killed the military AND our power infrastructure... but that's another thread)...
It's not surprising that this happened since we've been increasing generation rapidly due to the deployment of computers and other tech gadgets, but not increasing capacity to make up for it. It also doesn't help that there's no incentive other than cost for people to use Alternative Energy like solar or wind. Well, that's not totally true, there are actually Lots and Lots of Incentives in some states for end-user renewable energy, but it's still really expensive.
Greg Palast takes a look at why the lights went out.