Had FirstEnergy Corp.'s power coordinators been able to predict that
the utility's power line and generator problems would cascade outside of
their territory, they still may not have thought about isolating their
part of the grid - or even been able to.
The interconnections between utilities were built with the idea of
ensuring reliability by shunting power between contiguous systems, said
FirstEnergy spokesman Ralph DiNicola, not as bottlenecks easily plugged.
"You cannot really isolate yourself," he said. "I don't know if it's
even possible. The reason for being interconnected is to ensure
reliability."
Breaking away from the larger grid is not a normal operating procedure,
agreed experts. Instead, utility grid coordinators are trained to isolate
the problem and limit the outage to one smaller area. Completely isolating
one utility may no longer even be possible, they said.
"The short answer is, No,' " said Fernando Alvarado, professor emeritus
of engineering at the University of Wisconsin.
Alvarado is co-author of a white paper suggesting the disaster would
not have happened had the Midwest been under central control as the grid
is in the East.
"The grid is all integrated, a very complex thing," he said. "Imagine
you are in a gigantic ballroom that has a number of brightly lit
chandeliers, all connected by rubber bands and to the ceiling by rubber
bands.
"What if somebody cuts a rubber band? It breaks. Nothing happens.
Suppose two are cut. Things may not be OK. But if you cut three? Bing,
bing, bang, crash. Some chandeliers will crash to the floor."
Disconnecting was hardly an option, said Alvarado. But a centralized
control is.
Analyst Hoff Stauffer, senior consultant at Cambridge Energy Research
Associates, which has presented the theory that the cascading problems
started here, said disconnecting is not the normal way of thinking. "I
guess a utility can separate, but I'm told by engineers that that's not a
good idea," said Stauffer. "You should instead . . . create your own
blackout on a managed basis."
And FirstEnergy had another reason to stay plugged into the grid while
grappling with its failed line problems in the hours before the blackout.
With the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant still down for repairs, with
the loss of half of its Eastlake power plant at 2 p.m. that day, and with
all of the new customers that came with the purchase of New Jersey-based
GPU Inc., FirstEnergy does not generate enough power to supply more than
4.4 million customers.
"If you are net short in resources [power], you have every incentive,
you absolutely want to maintain that [grid] connection," said Shanthi
Muthiah, director of wholesale practice for ICF Consulting of Fairfax, Va.
"You have only two options, import more power, or shed load," she said.
"Had they severed their connections, a blackout in northern Ohio would
have been inevitable. It appears they were trying to maximize their
importing capability."
FirstEnergy is not the only utility short on power these days, since
many traditional utilities have sold off their power plants with the
advent of federal deregulation, Muthiah said. But even so, most would turn
to a neighbor first, as FirstEnergy turned to Columbus-based American
Electric Power.
The company did not try to isolate itself, said DiNicola, because its
control center operators did not see anything extraordinary in the part of
the grid they monitor.
"Our system appeared to be stable," he said. "We had some lines down.
And we lost some customers. But it did not appear necessary to take any
additional intervention. We were serving our customers."
Plain Dealer reporter Peter Krouse contributed to this story
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