In the belly of a generating beast

Bruce Stafkey woke suddenly from a sound sleep with a bad feeling; the familiar hum of the air conditioner in his bedroom had stopped - and so had the fan. He thrashed out of his covers, looking for his clothes.

As chief shift operator at the Albany Steam Station, a 400 megawatt power plant just south of New York's capital, he was not supposed to report until 11 p.m., and it was 4:04 on a Thursday afternoon.

But something was wrong, he knew. After all, it was his plant that helped pump electricity north to Albany, south to New York City - and to his own home. And none was coming to his bedroom.

That fact was also starkly apparent to two of Stafkey's colleagues, Adie Johnson and Edward Sullivan. At that moment, they were scrambling in near darkness, deep inside the monolithic brick generating plant, assailed by wailing battery-powered emergency sirens and disorienting red lights flashing on a bank of instrument panels.

Their plant is just a tiny cog in the huge and complex electric-transmission web that, for much of the Northeastern US and parts of Canada, broke down Aug. 14 in the biggest power outage in American history.

But the Albany Steam Station, situated at a strategic geographic point, plays an important role. It is used by Niagara Mohawk Power to stabilize region-wide transmission by pumping out power at a special frequency and voltage, known as "megavars." In that role, the 51-year-old plant was to provide vital support as the grid struggled to reboot.

Sullivan and Johnson didn't know the magnitude of the power failure, as they jabbed the flashing red buttons to silence the sirens, peering with flashlights at amp meters and other gauges. Both wondered what was going on. Their phones were knocked out and cellphone systems were jammed. This had never happened to either man in decades of experience here.

Both knew the history. Only once since the Albany Steam Station was built in 1952 had it totally lost power and "gone dark" - during a catastrophic 1965 blackout of New York City. That time, the plant had been dark for days. After that, special breaker systems had been put in place at this station and others to protect the generators.

Measured in megawatts, this plant's role on the grid was marginal. The aging steam station would probably be retired within a year or two. Rarely do all four turbine boilers fire up, since they burn through 462,000 gallons of No. 6 fuel oil a day, making it far more costly to operate than natural-gas-fired turbines like those being built next door by PSEG Power New York, the state's dominant power company.

The steam station here has been hanging by a financial thread. Niagara Mohawk Power sold the station to PSEG three years ago. Niagara Mohawk still contracts to buy power from the steam station as needed, but it is rarely economical. And it can take 12 hours to fire up the station's enormous boilers - versus perhaps three for new gas turbines.

So, at the moment crisis struck, the one-time coal-burning dinosaur was operating at one-quarter capacity. Just one elderly 100 megawatt turbine - the No. 2 unit - was on line, powered by one of the station's four nine-story high boilers.

Still, the plant has one thing going for it: Its location on the grid positions it perfectly to provide grid-stabilizing "pushback power," managers say. Spinning at 3,600 RPMs, the single No. 2 turbine was supplying 85 megawatts of specialty "megavar" power.

That's what it was doing until 26 seconds after 4:04 p.m., when the rasping dot-matrix printer in the control room spat out an ominous "frequency high or low" warning. Just 50 seconds later a protective circuit breaker automatically threw the 115,000-volt main generator breaker down in the switch yard below, disconnecting the turbine and station from the regional grid. The lights went out.

Now, 10 minutes later, checking and rechecking his systems, Mr. Johnson, a 25-year veteran, quietly pondered the black steel breaker handle in front of him at the end of a long panel. Over the handle, a small blue, battery-powered indicator light glowed, showing the backup breaker for the plant was open - leaving the plant off the grid.

Johnson knew twisting the handle clockwise and releasing would cause the metal teeth of a circuit breaker inside a huge gray switch unit outside to snap shut. Reconnecting the plant to the grid, the blue indicator light would flick out and a nearby red one flash on - along with lights in the control room and throughout the plant.

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