Officials Seek Answers in Power Grid Failure

By LESLIE HELM, SHAWN HUBLER and PATRICK LEE

Aug. 13, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

PORTLAND, Ore. —

Chastened energy officials convened here Monday to get to the bottom of the power outage that rippled across the Western United States this weekend, but their initial findings shed little new light on the blackout and yielded only one concrete recommendation: to do a better job of trimming trees around power lines.

The representatives from utility companies, governments and the U.S. Department of Energy remained circumspect about pinpointing a cause behind Saturday’s power failure, which cut off electricity to more than 4 million customers from Canada to Mexico.

A probe of the incident has cited a confluence of snafus, beginning with a group of power lines outside Portland that sagged into some trees and ending with an apparent mechanical failure in an Oregon power plant that triggered a cascade of shutdowns across the Western power grid.

Although all power has been restored, the impact of the shutdown even spread to the salmon population in the Northwest, triggering an immediate environmental controversy when a plan to boost energy output for California prompted a temporary waiver of the Endangered Species Act.

The waiver was granted Monday after energy officials said that the extreme heat and the automatic shutdown of the Diablo Canyon nuclear facility in California during the blackout required them to step up hydroelectric production at a dam in eastern Oregon to meet power needs at Pacific Gas & Electric until Diablo returns to full capacity.

Saturday’s record blackout--the second widespread power failure across the West in six weeks--has prompted a wave of soul-searching in the energy industry, as officials question whether the infrastructure in the fast-growing Western states is keeping up with the demand for electricity and try to determine why backup systems didn’t work better.

Deputy Energy Secretary Charles Curtis called the outage “unacceptable.”

“It seems hard to accept that an outage of this character resulted from lines falling in trees,” Curtis said after the high-level Portland meeting. “This system should have held together.”

Post-Mortem

Monday’s post-mortem, also attended by representatives of major Western utilities and the Western Systems Coordinating Council, an industry consortium that manages the region’s power grid, marked the start of what is expected to be an in-depth look at the outage’s causes--from the systemic to the mundane--and at the likelihood of it happening again.

The blackout underscored the vulnerability of the Western power grid to disruptions as the system becomes increasingly complex. The power industry is being transformed across the nation as it deregulates and opens itself to market forces that can sometimes pit the needs of customers against the need to contain costs.

More narrowly, officials said, it pointed up the need for more conscientious line maintenance: A similar large-scale outage July 2 was also traced to a tree that came into contact with a power line--in Idaho--and numerous smaller outages have been blamed on poor maintenance in recent years.

Indeed, maintenance is a key concern of those who are monitoring the deregulation issue. Tree trimming costs money, especially in places like the Pacific Northwest, and utility officials fear that increased competition will be a disincentive to maintain lines.

“If you increase the number of players in the marketplace, there is pressure to invest less,” said Brandy Hardy, chief executive of Oregon-based Bonneville Power Administration, which operates the section of the power grid to which Saturday’s outage has been traced.

“We’re concerned about the future ramifications.”

Rising Consumption

To the south, in sunny California, triple-digit temperatures Monday continued to pump up the demand for electricity--a demand that was exacerbated by the outage-related shutdown of a key power plant.

Officials said the Diablo Canyon nuclear generating station in San Luis Obispo was knocked offline by the outage and would not be back in service until late this week. That loss of capacity triggered a call for extra power that in turn left environmentalists deeply concerned.

Officials at the Bonneville Power Administration, which wholesales federal hydroelectric power to utilities in the West, on Monday won permission from the National Marine Fishery Service to waive part of the Endangered Species Act, so that a dam in Oregon supplying power to the grid could divert more water into its turbines.

BPA officials said the generating station at the Eastern Oregon town of The Dalles, which was operating at one-third capacity to fulfill requirements of a Clinton administration plan to regenerate the population of endangered salmon, will temporarily operate at full capacity, providing an additional 800 megawatts of power.

BPA officials said the unprecedented move will help PG&E; to meet the demand of millions of sweltering humans in such hot spots as Fresno, Chico and Bakersfield.

But it will also impair the ability of baby Chinook and sockeye salmon to make it through the dam’s spillways for the next week. Environmentalists were surprised and outraged, saying it could cost the lives of as many as 18,000 endangered fish.

When the water is run through the turbines at the dam instead of released into the spillway, 10% to 15% of the migrating salmon are killed.

“We’re clearly really concerned and pretty angry,” said Diane Valantine, salmon protection advocate at the Oregon Natural Resources Council. “It’s very hard for us to believe the entire stability of the whole power system depends on one spillway of one dam. . . . It just seems like another example of the fish getting the short end of the stick and being the first to go.”

Salmon are an economic cornerstone as well as a cultural icon of the Pacific Northwest, yet their numbers have declined substantially in recent years.

“It’s outrageous,” said Jonathan Poisner, a Sierra Club associate representative in Oregon. “You’re talking about additional mortality among pretty devastated populations of salmon.”

But officials at the Bonneville Power Administration said the move was necessary and only short-term, and was a fair compromise between the needs of people and the needs of fish. The waiver is limited to this week.

“Putting the lights out in California for the second time in three days constitutes an emergency,” said BPA chief Hardy, adding that the region risked another blackout unless capacity was increased.

Multiple Problems

Meanwhile, an ongoing investigation into the cause of Saturday’s outage focused on a confluence of problems, rather than one precipitating event.

Officials said the immediate cause was heavy power demand from California combined with hot temperatures that led power lines to sag onto trees, causing the power lines in four separate locations to short.

BPA spokeswoman Darcy Mahar said that ordinarily, those lines would not have hit trees. But a wet spring this year caused such abundant foliage in Oregon that the BPA--which is responsible for clearing vegetation from 15,000 high voltage transmission lines--simply could not keep up with the growth.

Consequently, she said, when a heat wave hit Oregon and the temperatures caused power lines to expand, they came into contact with nearby trees. The contact, known as a “flashover,” caused the lines to automatically shut themselves down, and when that happened, the power had to be rerouted onto other lines, which in turn caused oscillations on the grid, Mahar said.

Meanwhile, for reasons that are not yet clear, officials said a key generating facility at the McNary hydroelectric plant in Eastern Oregon automatically shut down. This pulled 600 more megawatts of electricity out of the grid and caused more instability, prompting the shutdown of the Pacific Intertie, a collection of four power arteries that link California to the Pacific Northwest.

In the past 36 hours, officials said, power companies have cut several thousand trees to clear the areas under power lines.

But while the immediate problems are clear, officials were uncertain why the various backup systems throughout the grid were incapable of preventing the widespread outage--and why the region has suffered two major power failures in as many months.

“I think they’re just flukes,” said Bill Comish, director of dispatcher training with the Western Systems Coordinating Council. “But you can believe we’ll be taking a hard look at it. . . . to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Ever since 1965, when a blackout darkened the Atlantic Seaboard and left New York City powerless for 13 hours in a heat wave, utilities have used a regional system in which power can be channeled across broad swaths of the country to help answer peak demand in a particular area.

The system helps ward off localized blackouts, and allows cities to swap power during peak times so that customers in, say, Orange County, can cool themselves with cheap electricity from a plant in temperate Oregon during the summer months, when demand in the Pacific Northwest is low. In winter, power flows the other way.

But the interconnectedness also means that a tree falling in a forest outside Portland can be felt by utility customers in Los Angeles. And trees are a major problem for power companies, which, under the current system, share responsibility for clearing vegetation from around power lines.

Utility critics say electric companies already tend to shirk their line-maintenance responsibilities, due to pressures to cut costs and maximize shareholder value.

Nicolette Toussaint, spokeswoman for Toward Utility Rate Normalization, a San Francisco-based consumer group, cites the example of Pacific Gas & Electric, which she argues spent $186 million less than it was allowed by the Public Utilities Commission on line maintenance between 1986 and 1995.

PG&E; disputes TURN’s figure. “Certain years we may have spent more, others we may have spent less,” said spokesman Greg Pruett. In 1996, PG&E; will spend $100 million on tree trimming alone, he added.

Still, tree trimming was an issue in a power-line-caused fire in Nevada County in 1995, for which the utility was charged with negligence by the local district attorney’s office. That case is pending; PG&E; denies it is responsible for the fire. (PG&E;’s tree trimming is not an issue in the latest power outage).

Other critics argue that forthcoming deregulation will only complicate efforts to make sure the infrastructure is secure and well-maintained.

The stage is being set now for market pricing in California’s $20-billion power industry. This will bring more power companies into the system, splitting the utilities’ traditional power transmission and generation functions and increasing the demands on system operators.

“There’s no doubt that the system is much more complex, and because of the economic changes in regulation . . . there is less margin for error in the system than there used to be,” said the Western Systems Coordinating Council’s Comish.

Helm reported from Portland, Hubler and Lee from Los Angeles. Staff writer Marla Cone in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Break in The Grid

The gigantic power grid that delivers California’s electricity is fed by utilities as far away as Washington and New Mexico, allowing power companies to share electricity during periods of peak use. It was during such a transfer that Saturday’s massive outage occurred. A combination of heavy demand for electricity and random shut-downs of transmission lines along the Oregon-Washington border set off a chain-reaction of outages.

On Saturday afternoon, several major transmission lines expanded from the heat and began to sag into trees. The lines--with names like “Big Eddy” and “John Day”--then shut themselves down, prompting electricity to flood other transmission lines in the area.

The heavy flow of electricity then deactivated the McNary hydroelectric generating station on the Columbia River. The outage at McNary, along with the loss of the major transmission lines, then prompted a cascade of outages throughout the region.

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Charging the Future

The Western Systems Coordinating Council (WSCC) organizes the transfer of electricity in twelve states and parts of Canada and Mexico.

TOTAL

Current number of generators: 1,972

Additional planned generators: 82

Increase in capability (megawatts): 4,320

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PETROLEUM & GAS

Current number of generators: 525

Additional planned generators: 35

Increase in capability (megawatts): 2,131