West’s Electrical Grid: Effective and Flawed

Does the western states’ electrical power grid make sense if a sagging line in Oregon can cause long outages over a huge area including Southern California?

An affirmative answer wasn’t to be found on Saturday, when a problem with transmission lines near Malin, Ore., appears to have triggered one of the largest power outages on record. No, that answer comes instead from the 1994 Northridge earthquake, when electrical power was restored to much of a blacked-out metropolis within 38 minutes of the first jolt, rather than the days it might have taken a local, isolated utility. The Department of Water and Power, in part, used its power-sharing agreements with utilities as far away as Oregon and Washington to quickly kick-start its generators after the Northridge temblor. The grid system paid off for Los Angeles that time, at the cost of inconveniences in Alberta, Canada, and some western U.S. states.

Saturday the inconvenience fell here, as it did in July when a tree went down onto a power line in Idaho and crippled power in California and 13 other states.

This past weekend seven states were affected, and the shutdown limited activities ranging from airport flight operations to the functioning of traffic stoplights.

The grid system was designed to accomplish many things, including the swapping of electricity among regions during periods of peak demand. A case in point is the Pacific Intertie, which routes needed power from the Pacific Northwest to air-conditioned Southern California during the summer months. But the weather wasn’t cooperating Saturday. Oregon and Idaho were suffering their own 100-degree-plus heat wave and experiencing unusual demands in their own sectors of the grid.

An already complex and interdependent system will become even more so when industry deregulation takes full effect in 1998. Even now questions have been raised over whether the lines that were sending power to California were overloaded by large bulk electricity transactions.

At the very least, the recent outages call for better contingency planning. Is the system likely to fail again when the Pacific Northwest has high temperatures? Reliance on power transfer systems such as the Pacific Intertie has been scaled back until answers can be found. The grid system works and has greatly helped our region. But it should be made to work far better.