Last week’s massive blackout in the Northeast and Canada probably began in northern Ohio, the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) has cautiously concluded, but it refused to lay the blame on a single utility. Analysts and investors were quick to assign blame, however, and pointed to FirstEnergy Corp.’s Ohio Edison subsidiary as the instigator.

“We now are fairly certain this disturbance started in Ohio,” said NERC President Michehl R. Gent over the weekend. “We are now trying to determine why this situation was not brought under control after the first three transmission lines relayed out of service.”

Akron, OH-based FirstEnergy Corp., which owns seven utilities in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, has come under increasing scrutiny after three of its transmission lines and one line jointly owned by FirstEnergy and American Electric Power in northern Ohio tripped out of service prior to the outages that struck the Midwest, Northeast and eastern Canada. FirstEnergy’s Ohio Edison utility is being named as a possible culprit for the eight-state blackout.

“We think…right now to identify a lone cause would be speculative and premature,” said FirstEnergy spokesman Mark Durbin. “Everybody is quick to point blame” at this stage. “What happened on Thursday afternoon is a very complex situation, far broader than the power line outages we experienced on our system,” the company said.

The “infamy of being the epicenter of last week’s crisis could weigh heavily” on FirstEnergy stock, said Charles Schwab energy analyst Christine Tezak. The company’s stock fell $2.86 to close at $27.75 a share Monday.

The Midwest Independent System Operator (MISO), which monitors the reliability of lines in 15 states and a Canadian province, said it was in communications with other control area operators in northern Ohio and a neighboring region about the status of the tripped transmission lines before the blackouts spread throughout the Eastern Interconnection.

“Although we may have identified the area where the cascading outages began, any attempt on our part to identify the cause of the outages at this point would be speculative and premature,” said NERC’s Gent. He noted this will be a “challenging task” because “events that occurred on one utility’s system may have been affected by events on utility systems elsewhere in the Eastern Interconnection” last Thursday.

“What we really need to focus on now is why protective schemes that should have localized the impact of various events did not work,” Gent said. FirstEnergy said there was no reason to isolate its system from the rest of the grid last Thursday because none of its utility customers experienced service interruptions as a result of the events.

“We are fairly confident that this event will not reoccur in the foreseeable future,” Gent noted. Still, the transmission system will be operated in a “very conservative manner until we get to the bottom of what happened.”

The New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), which operates the grid serving New York City and other parts of the state, had not issued a public appeal for the Big Apple to conserve energy Monday, said NYISO spokeswoman Carol Murphy.

“We are looking okay for the day,” she told NGI’s Power Markets Today. Power demand in New York City was expected to be 25,000 MW Monday, said Murphy, adding that the NYISO had 3,000 MW of additional reserves.

Gent said NERC was turning its attention to gathering and examining the data leading up to the massive power disturbance. “There were probably over 10,000 discrete system events that we will need to examine…These logs will come from energy management systems of system operators throughout the affected area,” he noted. “It will take awhile to retrieve the data and even longer to analyze it.”

NYISO’s Murphy believes “it could be months before people really know what the sequence [of events] really was.” But FERC Chairman Pat Wood said Monday he believed an answer would be forthcoming in days or weeks.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham on Sunday sent teams of federal investigators to the Northeast and Upper Midwest to begin on-site investigations at utilities, NERC and independent system operators to determine the cause of the biggest North American blackout. In addition, Abraham is scheduled to meet with Canadian Minister of Natural Resources Herb Dhaliwal on Wednesday in Detroit, MI, to begin work on a U.S.-Canadian task force that will explore the cause of the outage and ways to prevent future blackouts.

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