FirstEnergy Corp. last week said that an interim report issued by a joint U.S.-Canada task force examining the Aug. 14 blackout that swept across large portions of both countries falls “far short” of providing a complete and comprehensive picture of the conditions that contributed to the devastating and historic series of outages. Meanwhile, the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) said in the wake of the report, it may seek to recover damages from entities responsible for the blackout.

Among other things, the report concludes that the Ohio-based utility and the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator (MISO) both violated voluntary reliability standards set by the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) (see related story).

“We remain convinced that the outage cannot be explained by events on any one utility system,” said FirstEnergy President Anthony Alexander. “We recognize that our computer system experienced problems that day, which we discussed publicly immediately following the outage. After an extensive analysis, we submitted a report to the task force that identified a previously undetected flaw in vendor software that resulted in the loss of an alarm function, affecting our operators’ understanding of events on our system.”

FirstEnergy believes that the interim report “does not adequately address the underlying causes of the outage,” said Alexander. “By focusing its analysis on a few selected events, the conclusions the task force reached don’t address the complexity and magnitude of operations on the interconnected grid. For example, most experts agree that the network was stressed and being asked to perform in ways for which it was not designed.”

Alexander said that while the task force acknowledged there were electrical conditions such as high power flows to Canada, system frequency variations, low voltages throughout the day, low reactive power output from independent power producers (IPP) and unavailability of individual generators or transmission lines, “they summarily dismissed them without analysis as non-contributory to the outage.” If these issues are not addressed in the final report, “we believe that the task force will not achieve its goal of ensuring that widespread outages are not repeated.”

Alexander said that FirstEnergy’s transmission system “was designed and built to provide reliable service to our customers, not to be a superhighway for long-distance transactions to Canada and elsewhere. Yet, on Aug. 14, the margins built into our system for serving our customers were being drained by those transactions, with little or no reactive power support to the grid for those sales.”

He said that the task force’s “solution to this problem would be to interrupt local customers in order to allow for long-distance bulk power sales. If the task force fails to consider in its final report these regional, underlying and contributory causes of the outage, an opportunity will have been missed to identify and begin to implement the significant changes necessary to update the transmission infrastructure to reliably accommodate the needs of local and broad regional markets.”

Meanwhile, LIPA Chairman Richard Kessel last Thursday said that the authority is carefully reviewing the report and that LIPA may seek to recover damages from entities responsible for the blackout.

“We’ll make a final decision soon on our legal options for recovering LIPA’s financial losses, and perhaps the financial losses suffered by LIPA’s customers,” Kessel said. “I personally think there needs to be more than just a finding of fault. There also needs to be some form of financial accountability.”

Elsewhere, officials with the Department of Energy (DOE) and the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) told a Congressional hearing that the adequacy of transmission lines and the overall robustness of the electrical grid on Aug. 14 are not the main culprits behind the historic series of power outages that left millions without electricity in portions of the Midwest, the Northeast and eastern Canada.

At a hearing held by a Senate Governmental Affairs subcommittee, Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) quizzed witnesses from FERC, the DOE and NERC as to whether the historic blackout reflected an inadequate transmission system “or was it strictly a matter of certain people not doing certain things?”

“I think it’s the latter, at least on this example,” said Jimmy Glotfelty, director of the DOE’s Office of Electric Transmission and Distribution. “FirstEnergy and MISO had the tools that were available. They had the responsibility to ensure that this didn’t happen. The system has worked very well every other day since and every day before.”

“I believe that the events, as they transpired, would transcend any robustness” of the power grid, added Michel Gent, president of NERC.

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