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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?).
So far this is an isolated event... it looks more like an accident than the result of bad policies (CA deregulated power, refused to construct new power plants, signed some dumb deals, etc.). The parent post is correct about ripple effects. Everly system has potention bottlenecks/points of failure, and it sounds like one of those went down and overloaded the rest. No clear place to point fingers yet... if there is place to put the blame, CNN hasn't found it yet :)
Your problem is tv. I get my (non-nerd news) from news.bbc.co.uk and my subscription to the Wall Street Journal. If you give it a try, I think you'll find that you're disgusted a lot less by the BBC than you are with CNN. It's really not very UK-centric either. It's very world-centric, if you know what I mean, and I think does a better job of covering American news than CNN does.
I like the last bit in that title line, "Is there a story?". A friend of mine from Bangladesh recently moved back there. I was chatting with him on ICQ when I noticed every 2-3 minutes he'd go offline and come back. He told me that the power kept going out. It is a regular occurance, and the external modem he was using to connect to the net wasn't on the backup power system.
:)
Here in New Orleans, we lose power about once a week for 10-20 minutes (more frequent if it rains, also depends on where in the city you are). Sometimes, power is out for a few hours. It's just a way of life.
I realize that it's impressive that such a wide area recieved a blackout, but really, is this such a big deal? Everything should be fixed soon. People just need to relax. Maybe GO OUTSIDE!!!
----
Squirrel
In March, 1998, Auckland - New Zealand's major city (though not the capital, that's Wellington, in case you need to know) - had a FIVE week blackout.
This was after the system was privatised. They cut back on maintanance and instead of three main feeds, they had one. It blew up.
Five weeks with no power. In a major(-ish - hey, I live in Sydney) city. Incredible.
If any city NOT privatised has suffered such an indignity I have not heard about it.
So I blame privatisation - the accountants tend to outrank and overrule the engineers (heard that one before? Remember Challenger?)
"Cats like plain crisps"
Right. What we're seeing here is a lan-storm.
Deregulation would only help this sort of crisis, because it would be in the individual stake-holder's best interest to shield themselves from such an event.
But, considering how rare these grid overloads are, increased deregulation would do more harm than good, because it would complicate the normal daily function, and allow price gouging at every turn, while preventing the rare outage.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. The previous major blackout for the area was in 1965. That is one HELL of a MTBF. By comparison to deregulated California, we in the North East will keep our 29 year uptime, thanks.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
What you need most is that Nuclear plants have ways to keep working when their connections to the Grid are broken. If they can't output electricity to the grid, the plants have to power down, because the electricity can't go anywhere. And Nuclear plants will take more than a few hours to cool down enought to be started up again.
At least 9 nuclear plants are power-down right now, it's all that electricity that won't be able to rejoin the grid fast enough to normalize the situation.
The reason that deregulation occurs is to stop these problems, so why do they still continue even after the company has been deregulated.
There is arguements for both sides, but usually when a utility company is not deregulated, prices are cheaper, and service is better.
Free means no restrictions, ironic the FSF's GPL forces restrictions, isn't it? What's your definition of free?
They used to point at the airline industry - remember? "Oh, look how great the airline industry did after it was deregulated!" Yeah, well, so now the taxpayers get to bail them out to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. Might as well have subsidized them from the beginning...
The excuse for the 1965 power outage was effectively "we didn't know." Obviously they know now, so "tbey didn't care" is a plausible theory.
Obviously the power company didn't say "Haha! We've been deregulated!" and then intentionaly pull the plug. However reduced spending on maintenance and backups could reduce the threshold at which such an event occurs.
I don't know enough about the industry to say, but theoretically they've installed equipment since 1965 that should theoretically prevent occurances such as this. Why didn't those systems operate as intended? Was the overload just too big to prevent, or were they not installed or maintained properly?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
That doesn't make too much sense to me. Assuming the blackout is a result of cost cutting, it seems like an unreasonable risk, because now that the power's out, people CAN'T use the power, and thus the utilities can't bill until they lights come back on.
Personally, I spent $800 on a moderate 10w solar cell, cables, power invertor, deep cycle battery and assorted switches to power an outdoor shed. It would have cost twice that much to run electricity to it. Now I have enough power to run all my power tools and a few lights.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
Private-entreprise zealots quickly lose steam whenever you point Hydro-Quebec at them as a shining example of profitable State ownership.
Actually, I found this a long time ago and think it is somewhat related... a movie of an exploding power transformer:
g
http://205.243.100.155/frames/mpg/XfrmBlast1.mp
(from www.teslamania.com)
one day soon, every home and business will have its own fuel cell, and the grid will only be used to power the electrolysis required to produce hydrogen, which each consumer will be able to store in some quantity. electrical consumption will decrease, and everyone will have enough stored hydrogen to run their own shit for awhile in case of outages. once again, technology will change the whole game. 20 years? 50? hard to say, but the hydrogen economy is coming...
Realistically, though, the deregulation and fraud were closely tied together. Under the old, regulated system, there wouldn't have been the opportunity to commit the fraud in the first place. The exact form of the deregulation, specifically the way that long-term contracts weren't allowed, was also important. Had the California Legislature done a better job on the deregulation then the fraud probably wouldn't have taken place.
That doesn't excuse the power industry, of course. The opportunity to commit fraud profitably is not an excuse for doing so. The power industry was also deeply involved in writing the deregulation legislation, so they're also partly responsible for setting up the damaging conditions in the first place. (Note that this is an example of one problem of legislative term limits; the legislators involved were inexperienced, which tends to give more influence to lobbiests and beaurocrats.)
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Nope, the last one was in 1977. The one BEFORE that was 1965.
I've been called a "Fucking Dick" by better people than you.
The law that some called a deregulation law in California did not deregulate the power companies.
Electricity transmission is (and was during the blackouts) controlled by the Independent System Operator, which is a CA government agency. In addition to controlling the flow of electricity, it also implements price caps and production limits. It also refused to let power companies build new stations.
How exactly is that "deregulation"?
True deregulation (which politicians will fight to avoid, because it takes away their beloved political power) is the only thing that will prevent crises like these.
We have a similar problem in Phoenix this week. One of the two gasoline pipelines into the city was shut down, because of a problem (when inspectors said it could run at 80% with no risk). So now we have gas shortages and inflated prices.
Companies with a government regulated monopoly provide piss-poor service, because they have no competition. Government babysitters don't increase the quality of a service, only the price. Competition imcreases the quality while decreasing the price.
It USED to be that people thought ahead. It was normal to keep the electrical capacity at 30% above usage peaks. This way parts of the system could go down for planed and unplaned maintenence and there would not be black outs. It USED to be very well planned.
:(
In the last 30 or so years. It has become harder to build new plants, coupled with a lazy engineering and planning malaize that has come over nearly every part of the civil engineering branches of local and federal government. This left the west with less than 5% of capacity over peak usage (It's still about that today).
Obviously the same back east. So a single failure anywhere cannot possibly be taken up by anyone else.
A complete lack of far range thinking/planning over the last 30 years has brought us to this. Here in the west we have a similar crisis involving water that is very close to blowing up in our faces.
We had it too good for too long. Everyone "forgot" what it took to make it that good in the first place
Oh well.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
There are eco nuts, but American LostWages (Los Vegas) style power usage is also largely to blaim. Conservation measures have largely been ignored by the republican "pigs in paradise" attitude toward resources. This goes for all forms of resources. You want it all right now, and the concequences of blind consumerism are starting to hit home! Canada tried a wage and price control sceme and it failed also. The upset of Kensian market forces are the result of rabid consumerism and no way to regulate. Cost is the only way to reward conservation and punish gluttony. There are going to be power price increases and the pigs will howl till they finally get the message. It is the only other alternative, if we do not, then the limitations of resources will. As you pointed out it just did!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
No way. The cost of dealing with a wide-spread blackout like this one is gigantic. Think about how many man-hours were billed in today's fiasco? They had to shutdown all generators and then turn them back on. That combined with the damage done to their system and the repairs they will have to make means big losses. Not to mention parent's point about loss of money tonight. When you have rolling long term blackouts due to localized stresses then you can point the deregulation finger, but with major grid-wide blackouts its a huge financial burdon.
That would be an excellent slogan for slashdot.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
The Energy Wed
Regarding the rolling blackouts in California, they had more to do with Enron witholding power than with deregulation.
The blackouts in CA were a direct result of a poorly designed market. In the politicians rush to be the first deregulated state, they let a PhD economist set things up so that the big three utility companies had to sell off most of their generating assets. They also forced them to buy most of their power in the short-term market instead of letting them procure longer-term power supplies. They did this in order to make sure the market had liquidity - but it came at the expense of reliability.
It came down to how much CA was willing to pay to keep the lights on. And boy did they pay through the nose. I should know, I'm not only directly involved with power markets in CA, I'm also a ratepayer. Ouch!
Okay since you worked in the industry you might be able to answer this question:
Why isn't the system set up so that when a major generator goes down and the other generators can't support the additional load, some part of the grid is immediately blacked out to reduce the load? That way only a small portion of your customers get blacked out instead of an entire region of the country.
Right now, numerous stargazers are pulling out their dusty telescopes for some clean astronomy. Something not possible unless you drove out into the boonies where the light interference and pollution is minimal.
Think of them all pulling their fist and going "YES! Mars here we come!".
As at this time it has not been determined exactly why the Northeast Blackout of 2003 has occurred, there has been much speculation that it is due to Niagara Mohawk's grid failure.
Being an "insider", I would just like to say that the thought that is running through my mind about this is that several years ago, when the original Niagara Mohawk wanted to sell the company, suddenly all the engineering employees were told that they were no longer to perform preventative maintenance work on tranmission and distribution lines. For quite a period of time, they literally sat around with nothing to do. Then the company was sold to a British company, and this "hands off" attitude has continued.
So, I am very curious to know whether NiMo's lack of maintenance has something to do with today's problem. Another aspect of this problem is the fact that many long-time technical workers at Niagara Mohawk have either retired or been forced out, with their jobs not being filled. The crew sizes are down considerably. The amount of work never decreases - it mostly likely increases - but there are less KNOWLEDGEABLE people on board to handle such technical matters.
I truly hope that a full investigation into this matter is done, and if NiMo has dropped the ball, they be held accountable.
On the other side of the coin, we just learned that two or three well placed attacks could plunge the entire nation into darkness and we can start planning now to make sure that doesn't happen. Do you think we will?
I'd start by mandating that towns either take their traffic signal systems off the main power grid or insure adequate backup power for them. The last thing we need in the middle of a blackout is traffic jams preventing emergency vehicles from getting where they need to go.
I'd also make sure hospitals and air ports have adequate backup capacity. Apparently a lot of them don't.
Then I'd have the Al-Capone Teamwork dinner with the CEOs of the various power companies, during which the NiMo CEO would get asked why one power station going down can take out a quarter of the nation's power. You know how that scene goes. Teamwork!
That'd be a good start I guess. Gives us something to do for the next 5 years or so.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The first thing I did when I came to this discussion was search for 'Bush' to find out how people were going to use this event as an excuse to do some Bush bashing. When none came up, I was a bit disappointed, but I started to wade through the posts. Yours was quite sensible...at first.
The real problem is people who substitute ideology for thinking about a problem.
Excellent!
The free market is not the solution to every problem. Get over it.
The state is not the solution to every problem either. Get over it.
Very well said, and balanced, too.
The solution to every domestic energy issue must be to drill oil wells in Alaska. The solution to every foreign policy problem must be to invade a country in the gulf with large oil reserves.
Oh, you lost me. You could have taken one of those, plus one of these: "The answer to every attempt at oil drilling is 'No!' The solution to every foreign policy problem, even those involving violent thugs who have no problems killing and torturing citizens and neighbors, is to talk and plead over decades," in order to sound as thoughtful as you began.
Not everything is about Bush. Get over it.
Evil is the money of root.
I live in the affected area (Northeast US) and have the same method of heating as 60% of this area: Home heating oil.
I've half considered trying to find a generator that would tap into my home heating oil tank for fuel. Hey, a 300 gallon tank, even half full at 150 gallons, would power a generator for at least a couple weeks, right? Also, it would power my furnace (which requires electric ignition to operate the spark plug.)
Of course, if power were out for a couple weeks, I'd have a little more to worry about than just generating my own.
You all know that phone system conveys its own power so phones stay working when power is down.
But did you know that also hold true for DSL service?
It does in my area (north of NYC). Power has been down for seven hours, but I just hooked up my DSL modem through an extension cord to my car (which has an cig-lighter-to-AC-adapter) and DSL is working fine and that's how I'm posting this.
Oh, and my laptop is running off a battery which, using the above mechanism, I can recharge in my car as needed.
Quite handy. I'm not positive if this works for cable modems but I don't think so. I'd be curious if someone could confirm/deny that.
--LP
Experts have been worrying about our power infastructure for at least the better part of a decade. Our world politics prof was tellng us that he could educate a team of 4 or 5 who could take out most of the power and water infastructure in LA or any other major city in one night, with the right places attacked, in 1997.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Theres a pretty good photo album of all the news coverage today.
4 2
Available at:
http://hackingthemainframe.com/gallery/albun
Add to that an unexpected increase in air-conditioner usage
It's summer. Fucking expect it.
Only one very large problem with your logic.
Clinton deregulated the power grid, not Bush.
Power Deregulation started in 97-98 not in 00-01
so you need to check your dates before placing blame, just because the problem occurred during this presidency, doesn't mean this president created the problem.
As I had just posted on www.fark.com the other day, I didn't even know you guys _had_ liberals in the United States. I thought it was just conservatives and.. well.. guys a little more conservative.
I have to admit there's those very few leftists like Noam Chomsky, but it's not like he has any influence other than on people who agree with him anyway. All five of 'em.
IANAE (...not an economist), but from what I've heard from an economist professor who was involved with the deregulation in california, the jist of the problem is that the transitional phase that government set up artificially restricted prices, which resulted in lowered revenue and resultant output problems. In the end, it was gov't regulation during a phase of deregulation that caused the problems.
The power distribution everywhere in the western world is done using high voltage 3-phase AC systems.
They fail, if
a) the frequency slips or
b) if the power balance between production and demand gets to big.
The reason for all the hazzle of AC distribution is that it's simple to change voltages via transformers.
With modern power electronics, transformers will no longer be needed.
A DC distribution grid will be much more stable since the only reasons to take a generator off the network will be overload or overvoltage.
There is no frequency to lock to. There is no syncronizing phase when the generator starts production again.
At times with high demand, the DC grid voltage will drop. Surplus production will push up the grid voltage.
Circuit breakers can be set to turn on at a certain voltage, that automatically will turn on demand when the grid voltage can drive the load. Low priority areas can have the high-voltage switches, high priority areas have low-voltage switches.
Combine this with a varying price: Low voltage = high price, high voltage = low price and you'll get system which can smoothe out changes in the balance between supply and demand.
Will it work? Well, we do have some DC links from Denmark to Germany and to Norway. They are relatively small but power electronics are developing fast.
-- From Denmark
The same for the british rail : it worked perfectly. deregulation came in and it went down in flames, late trains, dirty wagons, and dead peoples in accidents
I'm guessing you're too young to have ever actually used BR, or have clear memories of doing so. It sucked. Not quite as high-profile as modern failures, but then nothing was because the media lacked the ability it has now to actually be there as things went wrong. But it was late, and filthy, and unsafe.
The problem faced by the old BR was that it was forced to provide services where they weren't economically viable - running trains to tiny, out-of-the way villages where almost no-one used trains anyway, for example. This starved it of resources for the core infrastrucure - the busy intercity and commuter routes. And it also faced the same problem that modern train companies face, unions who refuse to link pay to performance.
You know, I'll never fault the USPS again. They got a personal package from the eastern United States to South America door to door in under 3 days. FedEx and UPS both refused to even send it, since it was not a commercial package.
My wife tried to send two packages via UPS ground yesterday. She was quoted $13. She went down the road to USPS and sent them for $5. However, if I needed to get the packages sent overnight, I would have chosen UPS. If my wife was ideologically impaired, she would have only gone to UPS or she would have only gone to the USPS. However, as the original poster indicated, she thought through the problem and came to a logical decision.
The USPS fills an important role that private enterpise would never fill, by providing service even in rural areas. Think about the crappy job private enterprise has done in providing broadband to rural areas. My father's farm didn't get electricity until after WWII when the Rural Electrification Authority showed up.
I have worked in the power business for over 30 years and the real fact is that the power system hasn't been deregulated. It has been Re-regulated. This has esatblished an enegry marekt where electricity is traded like cattle. Market clearing price rules the day.
In the past power utilities worried about reliable power to their consumers. Transmission and generation were planned to be built to meet increasing demand with a large margin for unexpected events ( spinnig reserve, or generators required to be runnig but not supplying load were and still are used for contingency planning). Due to overzealous environmental activists and NIMBY (not in my back yard) philosophy building new generation and transmission while keeping electric rates low has become a daunting if not impossible task.
The changes made to the industry do not help these issues. The "Energy Market" approach created hurts everyone except the large nationwide corporations. The problem is it is too late to return to the stable efficient systems we had. Power utilities were forced to split into "Generation" "Transmission" and other groups and were forced to sell assets. I know it sounds trite, but everyone needs to look at what is really happening and write/call/visit their governmental representatives to try to find a real way to solve the impending disaster. Also, the government needs to listen to actual experts, those with experience, not the idiots and "public servants" they now have making policy
"this is a one time deal due to equipment failure."
equipment failure doesn't explain why 50 million people were without electricity. This is a failure of the entire system. Problems in any grid system need to be isolated not propagated over a larege portion of the continent. This is more akin to a design flaw, or a overall management failure.
On this one I vote that this is a design flaw, there were far too many people saying that this was the way it was supposed to work coming out right after this happened... If cascading failures are a design feature, then the design is flawed.
I would go further to suggest that the grid system in general is a bad idea inherently, people need to build generating capacity near the people that use it, not transmit it over thousands of miles of lines in an interconnected system that runs near capacity. This should be similar to how the Internet operates, if the Internet backbones are running over 50% capacity that is a problem, since you are not providing redundancy if that is the case. Same thing here, the immediate problem is that the rest of the system was probably operating near capacity which means that there is no redundancy. In this case the solution is either to isolate parts of the system or add capacity. Or this is going to happen again soon.
"Today's failure is a dramatic reminder of the importance of the uninterrupted flow of power to the health, safety, and well being of our citizens and the defense of our country. "This failure should be immediately and carefully investigated in order to prevent a recurrence. "You are therefore directed to launch a thorough study of the cause of this failure. I am putting at your disposal full resources of the federal government and directing the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Defense and other agencies to support you in any way possible. You are to call upon the top experts in our nation in conducting the investigation. "A report is expected at the earliest possible moment as to the causes of the failure and the steps you recommend to be taken to prevent a recurrence." Signed, Lyndon B. Johnson
California did not refuse to construct new plants... ...nobody _wanted_ to invest in building a plant...
Oh, I'm sorry, I always thought refusal meant you didn't want to do something, and acceptance meant you did want to. I see now that's all a conservative lie! Refusal means you DO want to, and not wanting to means you accept...wait, now I'm even more confused than you are.
I would think that if no one wanted to construct new plants, that would mean no new plants were built...How is that not refusing to build new ones?
"Bob, I think we should build a new power plant."
"Nah, I don't want to. It isn't financially smart."
"Ok, well, as long as you don't want to, we won't build one... just don't refuse to!"
"Well, that's what I just did."
"Oh Bob, you're so silly, don't you know that words only mean what we want them to these days?"
http://xkcd.com/386/
The problem with that point of view is that nobody applied to build a plant while deregulation was being discussed.
It is entirely possible that California (the state) and its local governments would have "refused" to approve any given plant which was proposed by a utility or private company, but the misleading part of your statement is that you ASSUMED they would have refused to approve; when in fact, nobody ever applied.
This is, again, because deregulation was being painted as a panacea for lowering rates; and nobody (utility or private company) wanted to risk a huge capital investment on those terms.
So again, for those keeping score, the "conservative lie" is that "California refused to build any plants" (implying that California refused a bunch of plants which were being proposed by helpful businessmen); the truth is that everybody (outside perhaps Enron) thought no new plants would be needed.
It may be interesting to note that while criminal organizations like PG&E and Enron were manipulating the California energy market, the one county completely immune to the resulting blackouts was the one county with socialized power: Los Angeles, powered by the municipal Department of Water and Power.
We hear that private firms are _always_ "more efficient" than public works, but such a naive view discounts the effects of common human greed.
Well...technically open markets are more efficient than government controlled markets.
However, California's electric market wasn't an open market. Also, the rules for the market were written by companies like Enron who had put wrinkles in the rules to allow them to manipulate the market.
Basically, the problem with California's "deregulation" was that three fold. First, it only allowed wholesale power to be bought and sold at the market price. The prices charged to customers were still set by the Californian Goverment. Second, the rules forced power companies to buy power on a "spot" market. In most power markets, the spot market is used to make up for short term defficiencies and not for all power consumption. This meant the power companies couldn't have long-term, stable price contracts with power generators, they had to buy power at whatever price was available at that time of day. Finally, a whole power market was created from scratch without any oversight. There was no way to catch obvious price manipulation in the market.
If any group is to blame, it is California's Legislators for allowing themselves to be coerced by Enron into creating an uncontrolled power.