Progress on preventing blackouts
Mandatory rules governing the reliability of the US power grid go into effect Monday.
from the June 18, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Tree trimming along power lines, for example, is no longer discretionary. (A branch touching a power line has been cited as one cause of the 2003 blackout.) No longer is there any flexibility on credentialing operators who work in power-plant control rooms.
Mandatory rules governing grid reliability "were very much needed ... and long overdue," says Alison Silverstein, a consultant who helped investigate the 2003 blackout.
Within the industry, many agree on the need for mandatory national standards to deal with a power grid that has become much more complex. Since deregulation in the 1990s, hundreds of new players have entered the power industry.
"Some of my members have not been paying strict attention to NERC standards," says Allen Mosher, director of policy analysis and reliability for the American Public Power Association, a Washington trade group for municipal and public power companies. "They've been operating reliably, but following their own approach. Now they have a set of formal rules that will help them."
So far, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has approved 83 standards for NERC to enforce. At least 20 other NERC-approved standards are being reviewed or awaiting review by FERC.
For close observers of grid reliability such as New York's Mr. Loehr, the worry is that national standards will mean the bar is set too low. Several cite a proposed standard that requires regional grids to keep operating in the event one power plant or transmission line goes down. Though that "single contingency" standard is prevalent in the utility industry, some experts – especially in the Northeast – would like to see a requirement that a regional grid keep operating in the face of two such failures.
The single-contingency standard has just been approved by NERC. FERC is now reviewing it for final approval.
Its OK would not mean that New York would have to lower its standards. But it does mean that neighboring regions won't have to raise theirs. For some, that ignores the lesson of August 2003, when New Yorkers learned the hard way that what its Midwest neighbors failed to do (tree trimming, for instance) could affect them, as the blackout cascaded into the Northeast.
"Some of these standards tend to be watered down to lowest common denominator so others [will] accept them," says Richard Bolbrock, an official with Long Island Power Authority, who voted against the single-contingency standard. "They want them to be one-size-fits-all, so they water them down to universal standards."
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