Herb Dhaliwal, Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources, last week said that the calamitous Aug. 14 blackout that cut through large swaths of the United States and Canada could have been prevented if electric utilities and grid operators in the U.S. had adhered to voluntary reliability standards set by the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC).

Dhaliwal, who made his comments after a joint U.S-Canada task force examining the series of historic power outages released an interim report related to the blackout, serves as a co-chair of the task force along with Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham.

Among its many findings, the report said that Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp. and the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator (MISO) violated various voluntary reliability standards set by NERC. The report underscored the fact that these are initial findings and are subject to further review by NERC. Also, additional violations may be identified.

“If the voluntary reliability standards were complied with, we wouldn’t have had a problem,” Dhaliwal told reporters in a press briefing following the report’s issuance. “And, of course, part of that is information, understanding what’s happening out there. If you don’t know that you’ve got a line down, and you can’t inform the coordinators and your neighbors, of course you have a problem. So right from the beginning, when that information was not available and it could not be passed on to the coordinator, then that creates a problem itself.”

Dhaliwal said that the voluntary reliability standards “were not followed and if they would have been, we wouldn’t have had a problem. That’s why…we support very much moving to mandatory reliability standards.” Comprehensive energy legislation working its way through the U.S. Congress calls for the establishment of mandatory electric reliability standards.

In terms of what is known to date as it relates to the cause of the cascading blackout, mandatory reliability standards “are the principle component of this energy bill that I believe would have very likely prevented this from happening,” said Abraham. “I believe that if standards were in place that were enforceable through punishments that were significant enough to have caused operators to observe the highest standards of behavior, that the problems we’ve identified would not have transpired.”

At a later point, Abraham refuted the notion that electric restructuring may have played a role in the power outages this summer. “I don’t personally think that is the problem,” he said. “I think the number of operators in the system isn’t, in my judgment, the cause. We haven’t concluded that based on the working groups’ analysis.”

The taskforce created three working groups to assist in the first phase of the overall blackout investigation — an electric system working group, a nuclear working group and a security working group.

“It’s the need to meet a certain standard of behavior,” Abraham continued. “And if there’s no enforceability of those standards, if people don’t have to, in reality, face consequences if they fail to meet those standards, you will have these problems whether there’s one utility operating nationwide or an unlimited number.” He said that there needs to be “consequences based on what comes out of this report for people who have not followed the rules and there needs to be consequences that are well known and enforceable on a clear basis in the future.”

“One major conclusion of the interim report is that this blackout was largely preventable,” the Secretary of Energy said. “However, the report also tells us that once the problem grew to a certain magnitude, nothing could have been done to prevent it from cascading out of control.”

Abraham said that the electric system working group found that the initial events that led to the cascading blackout occurred in Ohio. “The blackout was initiated when three high-voltage lines operated by FirstEnergy Corp. short-circuited and went out of service when they came into contact with trees that were too close to the lines.”

The report “tells us that FirstEnergy’s control room alarm system wasn’t working properly and the control room operators were unaware it was not working properly, which meant that they were also unaware that the transmission lines had gone down,” he said. Because the utility’s monitoring equipment “wasn’t telling them about the downed lines, the control room operators took no action, such as shedding load, which could have kept the problem from growing and becoming too large to control. Moreover, because FirstEnergy operators did not know their monitoring equipment had failed and were unaware of the growing problems, they did not inform neighboring utilities and reliability coordinators, who also could have helped address the problem.”

Abraham said that the loss of the three power lines resulted in too much electricity flowing onto other nearby lines, which caused them to overload.

As for violations of NERC’s voluntary reliability standards, the report said that following the outage of the Chamberlin-Harding 345-kV power line, FirstEnergy did not take the necessary actions to return the system to safe operating conditions within 30 minutes. The report cites a NERC operating policy that states: “Following a contingency or other event that results in an operating security limit violation, the control area shall return its transmission system to within operating security limits [as] soon as possible, but no longer than 30 minutes.”

Other FirstEnergy violations of NERC reliability standards cited in the report include the following:

As for MISO, the report said that the electric grid operator violated NERC reliability standards by failing to notify other reliability coordinators of potential problems. MISO also violated NERC reliability rules because it did not have adequate monitoring capability.

The report states that the outages were “caused by deficiencies in specific practices, equipment and human decisions that coincided that afternoon.” It lists three groups of blackout causes. The first group involves “inadequate situational awareness” at FirstEnergy. Specifically, the utility “failed to ensure the security of its transmission system after significant unforeseen contingencies because it did not use an effective contingency analysis capability on a routine basis.”

Also, FirstEnergy lacked procedures to ensure that the company’s operators were continually aware of the functional state of their “critical monitoring tools.” The utility also “lacked procedures to test effectively the functional state of these tools after repairs were made.” In addition, FirstEnergy “did not have additional monitoring tools for high-level visualization of the status of their transmission system to facilitate its operators’ understanding of transmission system conditions after the failure of their primary monitoring/alarming systems.”

The second group of causes involves what the report said was FirstEnergy’s failure to adequately manage tree growth in its transmission rights of way. “This failure was the common cause of the outage of three FE [FirstEnergy] 345-kV transmission lines.”

The third group of causes relates to the failure of the interconnected grid’s reliability organizations to “provide effective diagnostic support.” In particular, the report said that MISO did not have real-time data from Dayton Power & Light’s Stuart-Atlanta 345-kV line incorporated into its state estimator, a system monitoring tool. This precluded MISO from becoming aware of FirstEnergy’s system problems earlier and providing diagnostic assistance to FirstEnergy.

The report also said that MISO’s reliability coordinators were using non-real-time data to support real-time “flowgate” monitoring. This prevented MISO from detecting an “N-1” security violation in FirstEnergy’s system and from assisting FirstEnergy in necessary relief actions.

Also, the task force concluded that MISO lacked an effective means of identifying the location and significance of transmission line breaker operations reported by their Energy Management System. “Such information would have enabled MISO operators to become aware earlier of important line outages.”

In addition, the report said that PJM Interconnection and MISO lacked joint procedures or guidelines on when and how to coordinate a security limit violation observed by one of them in the other’s area due to a contingency near their common boundary.

The task force has divided its work into two phases. The first phase has involved the investigation of the outage to determine its causes and why it was not contained, while the second phase will develop recommendations to reduce the possibility of future outages and minimize the scope of any that occur.

The interim report will now be subject to public review and comment. The working groups will consider public commentary on the interim report and will oversee and review any additional analyses and investigation that may be required. The report will be finalized and made a part of the task force final report, which will include recommendations on how to minimize the likelihood and scope of future blackouts.

The task force will hold three public forums in which the public will have the opportunity to comment on the interim report and to offer recommendations for consideration by the working groups and the task force.

©Copyright 2003 Intelligence Press Inc. Allrights reserved. The preceding news report may not be republishedor redistributed, in whole or in part, in any form, without priorwritten consent of Intelligence Press, Inc.