INDEPTH: POWER OUTAGE
Energy Warning Updates
June Chua, CBC News Online | August 14, 2003
Updated November 14, 2003
Energy experts have been warning about
large-scale blackouts in North America since the early eighties.
Bill Browning of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado
says a report for the U.S. Pentagon in 1982 cautioned the
American government about the fragility of the power grid
system in North America.
Downtown Toronto shortly after the power went out on August 14, 2003. |
The blackout affected Ontario and a handful of northeastern states, including New York.
The institute is an energy think tank. Browning runs the green
development section.
"Everyone is pulling power
and there's lots of big stations on the grid. All you need is
one tenuous problem and it cascades throughout," Browning
told CBC News Online.
Other experts agree.
"It's pretty close to peak
demand," Gerry Angiovine of Navigant Consulting in Calgary,
told CBC News Online.
"If suddenly you get one
or two of the big suppliers going down…you may have a
situation where you've got more being drawn than the system
can supply…" he said.
Browning says a few years ago the same thing happened on the
West Coast. Six states lost power all because a squirrel got
burned on one of the transformers at a crucial time.
"Can you imagine? The entire power system breaks down because
of a small rodent?" He says the solution would be to have
something called "distributed generation" - a grid
system supported by smaller producers, almost on a building
by building scale. Browning says other energy sources such as
fuel cells and micro-turbines should be used to shoulder the
burden of energy distribution.
"At one time,
the grid system seemed logical. If you have to do maintenance
on one plant, then the grid connects everyone so the power keeps
up. But that is also a fragility in the system."
Browning says he and other energy experts are not surprised
by the 2003 blackout. He says it is bound to happen from
time to time.
"The system, as we have designed
it, is brittle. The only way we can make it resilient is to have
a mixture so that if portion of it goes down we can have islands
of power still operating."
Browning says it often takes a major event to make authorities
realize something needs to be done.
During the August 2003 blackout, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
said nine nuclear power plants in four states were knocked out.
Power transmission across the continent is controlled from
a number of control centers where the flow of is monitored
minute by minute. There are three major centers, including the Eastern
Power Grid, the Western Power Grid and the Electric Reliability
Council based in Texas.
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