Deregulation and Niagara Mohawk - Is There a Story? 1074
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?).
history repeats itself (Score:4, Informative)
http://blackout.gmu.edu/events/tl1965.html
Robert
Fraud a significant contributing factor (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, there was a significant amount of fraud involved. Check it out here: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/26/nationa
Fraud was a contribution factor in California... (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, there was a significant amount of fraud involved. Check it out here: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/26/nationa
Kudos to Jamie for using Google cache for NM site (Score:2, Informative)
Now they just have to deal with Google. ;)
There's a difference (Score:2, Informative)
The rolling blackouts were caused by energy companies gaming the market and withholding power in order to drive up prices. Cascade events are purely accidental and difficult to predict due to the complexity of the grid. It's like a butterfly causing a hurricane on the other side of the world, or something like that.
This happened in 1965 too (Score:2, Informative)
Deregulation was not in effect then; so if there is a strong parallel between the cases, it's then doubtful that it was due to dereg.
When more facts are in, we will know.
How the power grid works... (Score:5, Informative)
The power grid works [howstuffworks.com]
Other problems with the power grid? (Score:4, Informative)
On the other hand, the need for redundancy, or possibly for areas to draw power from other sources is expensive, and does not fit the model of a profitable buisness. Regulation could help by fueling money into redundancy and requireing a certian ammount of backup systems in place so that major black outs occour. Also, as far as I understand, the power grids is large cities have not grown to keep up with demand in said cities making blackouts or atleast brown outs more plausable.
Then again, this is only news because black outs of the magnitude happen so rarely. In all likelyhood this was a freak accident on the level that will not happen again for another 30 years or so. Hopefuly the people in charge of both the power grid in most areas as well as most major metropolitan areas have backup plans for when events such as this one occour. One can only hope.
The problem is it WASN'T deregulated (Score:4, Informative)
Quite frankly, we're a living in a tech world now. We need the power. Until we stop politically cowtowing to "eco-nuts", "consumer advocates". and other neo-luddites this is going to keep happening.
Thunderstorm US side of the border 19:35 (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, in some ways (Score:3, Informative)
Without a well regulated grid in operation, the market in power breaks down, just like it did today.
Re:Nothing to do with deregulation (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Nothing to do with deregulation (Score:5, Informative)
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 [ualberta.ca]
Re:Nothing to do with deregulation (Score:4, Informative)
Regarding the rolling blackouts in California, they had more to do with Enron witholding power than with deregulation.
Not just Enron:
They've behave better because they'd have to. (Score:5, Informative)
So yes, in this case, eliminate the rules that dictated that the price of power was based on the competition for transmission lines at a particular time (something the people controlling the transmission lines could easily inflate by moving power around unnecessarily) and the companies would not have been able to misbehave. The regulations gave the power companies the ability to set the prices for what they were selling.
Re:Nothing to do with deregulation (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Calm down... don't forget Occum's Razor (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Thunderstorm US side of the border 19:35 (Score:2, Informative)
It went something like this... (Score:5, Informative)
The obvious pitfall being that power line congestion could be artificially created - Enron (and others) took to moving power around more than necessary, creating more congestion, and thus artificially inflating the prices local power providers had to pay to get power over transmission lines.
Even worse, not only did the "deregulation" regulations allow Enron et. al. to artificially inflate the price of wholesale power, they ALSO prevented local power providers (the guys who actually delivered the power to your house) from raising the prices to make up for it, forcing them to sell power at a loss.
This could only go on so long before the local power companies started to run out of money, at which point they just said "Screw it", and instead of delivering power at a loss that they couldn't pay for anyway, they just stopped delivering power at all.
Re:DAMN! (Score:5, Informative)
I worked in the power control/data aquisition field for a while and can assure you that in a complex grid it is very difficult to pin-point failures.
Consider that there are normally many redundant lines and generation points. If a generation point goes offline, then the load through the lines changes. If a line's capcacity is exceeded it trips. This increses the load through other lines and you can get run-away instability. All this shit goes down in a second or so, so figuring out where things went wrong is not easy. Figuring the *trigger* might be easy (eg. generation point failed), but at what point does the redundancy fail (ie does the system itself fails)?
To keep on top of this, most grids run constant 'what if' analysis of their network. ie. if line x or generator y trips what will happen? if load increases at point x what will happen? The analysis helps to ensure that sufficient redundancy is switched in to cover certain failures to a certain risk level.
Unfortuantely with cost cutting etc, building of new lines and upgrading often gets delayed. Thus, the opportunities for redundancy are decreased and the risk levels are increased.
BTW: It is also a hell of a task to restart a grid.
Re:Damnit, look - California was NEVER deregulated (Score:3, Informative)
Woohoo! I hope she's cute! One quick question though, is this a full french kiss, or just a quick Aunt Maybelle peck?
Anyway, here's some articles from the Cato Institute. The first two came our immediately after AB1890, but before any effects of it occured. Maybe they don't count because of the date, but they do have references to pre-AB1890 articles: "Stranded In Sacramento" [cato.org], and "High-Voltage Swindle" [cato.org].
And two not specifically about California, and before AB1890, so these should count: "A Historical Perspective on Electric Utility Regulation" [cato.org], and "Regulatory Reform in the Electric Power Industry" [cato.org].
And some others for your reading pleasure: "Electric Utility Reform" [cato.org], "Time to Repeal the PUHCA" [cato.org], and "The Public Utility Holding Company Act" [cato.org].
Just a quick trip to Cato. I'm sure there's other stuff from local California publications, but it's time for me to move on to other posts.
p.s. Please send photo of girlfriend, so as to heighten the anticipation...
Re:Thunderstorm US side of the border 19:35 - NOT! (Score:2, Informative)
I can readily attest to this (Score:5, Informative)
My electrical cost in BC was more than half the KWh rate it is in Alberta, somewhere around 4.5 cents/KWh. On top of the KWh rate, I pay a consent fee and a storage rider and a whole host of bullshit fees that I did not see in BC because of REGULATION. I paid usage in KWh and that was it. I could even look on the meter and calculate my KWh usage and get a rough idea of what my bill was going to be (if you remember this from High School). You sure as hell can't do that here, who knows what the "storage rider" will be this month.
I have never understood the deregulation mentality; electricity is a necessity and business, especially high technology sectors, require and are attracted to cheap, reliable power. Deregulation has done none of that here in Alberta, costs are up and generation is down to maximize profit. I know several companies that locate themselves in BC due to the high demand they place on electricity, power that cannot be supplied by other provinces at such an attractive rate.
Now they are talking about partial deregulation of the BC market. Once again businesses small and large will get the shaft and the electrical producing companies will reap the rewards. Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Re:New Zealand (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:Nothing to do with deregulation (Score:2, Informative)
Catch 22 (Score:2, Informative)
In addition some power companys have switched to completely "high tech" systems in which power has to be present to operate physical equipment and power to operate things like fiber ethernet infastructure. In other words some power companies do not have a means to control equipment in anyway other than over a network which requires power to operate.
It could be argued that a power grid is much more difficult to maintain than a data network due to the fact that the service which it provides isnt required to provide the service that it provides =). A router can go down but it can always be replaced and power and network hookups will be waiting for it.
Due to these factors power grids are very vulnerable to the domino effect.
Re:New Zealand (Score:3, Informative)
Just for the record: Sydney is the 31st largest city in the world, with a population just above 4 million, according to this site [citymayors.com].
The US has only one city larger, and that's the Big Apple (with LA coming second, at about 3.8 million); there are 9 US cities with a population exceeding one million.
The population of the greater Auckland region is just above 1 million. So yes, it's a major city (and yes, I know that administratively it's actually 4 cities)
Re:Nothing to do with deregulation (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Nothing to do with deregulation (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Nothing to do with deregulation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:CA rolling blackouts not due to deregulation (Score:2, Informative)
Search on google for "death star" enron for more information on this -- there's a LOT of sources on it. Except in the event of Enron-style malfeasance California had more than enough power plants to provide continual service, and even if they had built more Enron would have taken just enough of them offline to make the state desperate.
IMO it's an absolute travesty how little national attention the Enron "Death Star" plan received, even after Ken Lay and friends channeled all the profits to their private accounts and let the empty shell of Enron fall over. As far as I can tell, the only places it got reported at all were local California and Texas newspapers.
Re:Moment of silence (Score:3, Informative)
insufficient margin (Score:5, Informative)
This is not the first massive northeastern blackout. There were wipespread blackouts like this in the early 1960s. The engineers learned that all sections of the grid must have significant over-capacity designed in so that the entire system could recover from large transients and short duration system oscillation without tripping protection devices. They beefed up the system so it could ride through these events.
The safety margin is gone. Demand has grown but capacity has not. If lightning runs in on a substation, it can trigger a chain of events leading to a couple generator switchyards opening their air breakers. From there, the overload snowballs.
Does deregulation play a part? Yes. Power brokering activities create additional burden on the system. There is less incentive to increase capacity. There is also diffusion of responsibility.
The electric power industry was not broken prior to deregulation and didn't need fixing. It's infrastructure and regulated monopolies suck less than gov't run or private run ventures.
This is apt to get worse.
Re:Nothing to do with deregulation (Score:2, Informative)
Apparently there were a couple of screw-ups here a couple of years ago, and Daley(Mayor) Gave them the ultimatium to fix it, or get out. The power grid here is now redundant, and made to NOT do the cascading falure thing, according to 'them'.
I was going to move East... but now i think ill stay here.
This had to do with the design of the grid! (Score:5, Informative)
and everything to do with frequency. See, every generator on the power grid is
syncronized to a common source. Indeed, before a power plant comes back on
line it must first syncronize its generators. The generators normally sit
there running at a boring 3600 RPM (60hz*60 seconds). All plants have a
monitor that kicks them off line if their frequency varies by more than +/- a
hz or so. As an aside, the power grid is not always EXACTLY 60 hz. The
frequency of the entire grid is allowed to float a bit, though drifts are
corrected so the frequency averaged over a certain time is a nominal 60 Hz.
The cascade happens when a either big plant or a big load suddenly goes off
line. In the case of a big plant the other plants try to take up the load, but
in the process their frequency drops as the generators get loaded more (much
like shifting a car's manual transmission to a higher gear before it hits the
right engine RPM). Once a generator drops below 59 hz, it also trips off
making it even harder for the ones left to keep up, and generators begin to
fall off the grid like dominoes.
The opposite happens when a load suddenly goes away, but in that case the
generators' frequency abruptly jumps upward, which also results in it tripping
off the grid. Either way the result is a cascade like happened today.
Once the dominoes (generators) begin to fall off, the grid becomes unglued.
There's an old saying in the power industry:
59.5 Hz = trouble. 59 Hz = BIG trouble!
I believe the new power management software mentioned in the news reports that
should have prevented this works by intelligently shedding loads distant from where the anomaly occurrs (for example, shedding load in NYC for an anomaly in Canada). This would give the generators time to react to the change. Obviously it didn't work.
Re:Cause: Overloaded grid and bad logic (Score:5, Informative)
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 [doe.gov] to a list of all U.S. Nuclear facilities and their statistics and capacities.
And here [nrc.gov] 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 [doe.gov] 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 [google.com] like solar [solarhardware.com] or wind [awea.org]. Well, that's not totally true, there are actually Lots and Lots of Incentives [dsireusa.org] in some states for end-user renewable energy, but it's still really expensive.
Re:Nothing to do with deregulation (Score:5, Informative)
Federal Power Commission investigators found a single faulty relay at the Sir Adam Beck Station no. 2 in Ontario, Canada, which caused a key transmission line to disconnect ("open").
This small failure triggered a sequence of escalating line overloads that quickly raced down the main trunk lines of the grid, separating major generation sources from load centers and weakening the entire system with each subsequent separation.
As town after town went dark throughout the northeast, power plants in the New York City area automatically shut themselves off to prevent the surging grid from overloading their turbines.
Re:A long term fix will be DC distribution (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The real question (Score:3, Informative)
In the Northeast, if we started regularly losing power for 10-20 minutes once or twice a week, political careers would be ended in quick succession until someone fixed the problem, that or the region's economy would start crumbling because businesses couldn't keep reliable power happening, and people would get sick of dealing with regular power outages.
Re:Nothing to do with deregulation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nothing to do with deregulation (Score:3, Informative)
sPh
A "fair and balanced" analysis (Score:5, Informative)
history your weak subject? (Score:2, Informative)
None of what you said is true. First of all, monarchy has nothing to do with liberals/left/etc. If anything leftists are the ones who are strongly in favour of overthrowing institutions like monarchy, along with stuff like religion, etc. The French Revolution is a good example of that (other revolutions like the Russian Revolution and Communist Revolution accomplished something similar). If anything, it is conservatives who are in favour of status-quo establishments. Just go and study your history--proper history. You'll find that the people who were advocating the overthrow of monarchies were liberals. Those who were in favour of the monarchy were often conservatives (although I admit that these were only the elites). Conservatives actually LIKED the monarchy because it supported and strengthened religion. Conservatives only got sick of th establishment after taxes were raised high.
Second, what you said about people leaving Europe was complete nonsense. They did not leave because they wanted to be away from the monarchs. That is wrong because even when the settlers came to USA (for example) they were still under the power of the monarch. If the people really left to get away from monarchy, they would have formed an independent country. Of course this never happend for a long time (until the American Revolution). Most people who fled to USA were fleeing from religious persecution and economic suffering.
The biggest problem with the US today is that too many people have forgotten that aspect of living in the land of the free. They think we should emulate Europe. Why? Where did both World Wars start? Why should we be dragged into acting like that? Unfortunately we have. Now we think we have to do all the stupid things Europeans have been doing for a thousand years. And of course tax everyone to death to pay for it (oh wait, that is another of the stupid things Europeans think is normal).
Clearly shows your lack of understanding of history or the world. You blame both World Wars on Europe yet you fail to see the cause of those wars. The wars happened in Europe, and not in USA, for a simple reason. Europe was a superpower. The wars, if you recall, was mostly a battle betwen these superpowers. The reason USA never had any war is because it wasn't a superpower at that time (it's true whether you admit it or not), and it is geographically isolated. If there is a next world war, USA will be right in the middle of it. Do you know why? And no, it's not because of Europe. It's because USA is a superpower.
As far as taxes are concerned, contrary to your beliefs, Americans paid similar taxes (to Europeans) throughout most of the 1700's and 1800's. The whole anti-tax movement only started in the 1900's. Even hardcore conservatives didn't preach anti-tax views until the last century.
And for the record, the second biggest problem with the US today is that the religious right can't dissociate their version of GOD from their civic life or their political and legal activities.
Since you are on the right, that's your own problem. You are probably more religious than anyone on the left (just a guess) so you go and figure out how to solve that.
While many Africans did the same, and were free men, the majority were brought over as slaves.
AGain, your lack of history is appaling. The majority of Africans weren't brough over as slaves. ALL of them were. Every single African-American (don't mix up with hispanics or Carribeans) can likely trace their life to slavery.
Liberals in the US like to make this group think they deserve