Extreme Conditions Threaten Power Grid

As the eastern United States struggles to recover from yet another weather shock, energy officials are acknowledging climate change as a force that finally has to be reckoned with — even as concern grows about other threats that can set off catastrophic blackouts.

Winter storms, chains of heat waves and late June’s “super derecho” — a thunderstorm with straight-line winds that snapped electrical transmission towers and shredded power poles — have forced the climate change issue and electric supply vulnerability to the top of an already-daunting list of blackout triggers. Those threats range from computer-hacking cyber terrorists to solar flares, utility mistakes and plain bad luck.

Regulators in the U.S. hope to avoid the kind of cascading grid failure that hit India in late July, leaving some 600 million — 10 percent of the world’s population — without power. Miners were trapped underground. Trains shut down. Unimaginable traffic snarls popped up across the country. And India’s image as a rising economic power was cast in darkness. A major blackout in hyper-wired America would also have crippling consequences, with some experts predicting economic losses of up to $180 billion.

“This is really the fundamental linchpin for everything in our society, our economy, our quality of life,” said Massoud Amin, a University of Minnesota professor and longtime electric industry analyst and consultant. “By deferring infrastructure upgrades, we are basically increasing the risk for the whole system.”

In America, extreme weather is driving the discussion.

Terry Boston, president of the PJM bulk electricity management grid that serves 60 million residents in parts of 13 states, said doubts are growing about forecasts based on long-term weather trends, typically 30-year averages. PJM experts, he said, could soon factor climate change and extreme events into their planning models for delivering power — and for restoring it when big storms turn off the lights.

“I cannot think of any year in my career with more challenges,” said Boston, whose group serves all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington, D.C.

“With the number of events and frequency of extreme events, we’re saying, ‘Hey, maybe we need to use something closer to the here and now,’ ” Boston added. “I think that there’s a high probability that we will do that.”

Energy Secretary Steven Chu said there’s urgency in moving forward quickly. In congressional testimony earlier this year, Chu said that blackouts and brownouts cost the country tens of billions yearly, “and we risk ever more serious consequences if we continue to rely on outdated and inflexible infrastructure.”

America’s grid is a diverse amalgamation of giant turbines in hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, coal-fired plants, windmills and solar panels — all of which feed electricity into more than 200,000 miles of high voltage wire, and more than 1 million miles of local and regional distribution lines.

Ten system or grid operators and power pools — such as PJM, New York ISO and New England ISO — control the continuous flow of electricity in the United States, some of it suspended from aging towers and poles.

The system and pool operators manage 5,800 regulated — and unregulated — electric utilities, which pump juice into the system from more than 15,000 generating units. Grid operators are overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and national and regional reliability organizations, but grid operators can’t fully control all utilities in their regions because of gaps in regulations across America.

“There are a lot of people working on it, a lot of entities, but nobody’s in charge, and in particular nobody’s in charge of, say, the federal system or the municipal system or the cooperatives,” said Richard Schmalensee, Howard W. Johnson Professor of Economics and Management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. “Organizationally, we’re not up to the scale of the problem.”

PAGE 3 OF 6 HERE