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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 :)
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
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.
Private-entreprise zealots quickly lose steam whenever you point Hydro-Quebec at them as a shining example of profitable State ownership.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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
"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
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.