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INDEPTH: POWER OUTAGE
Energy Warning Updates
June Chua, CBC News Online | August 14, 2003
Updated November 14, 2003

Energy experts have been warning about large-scale blackouts in North America since the early eighties.

Bill Browning of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado says a report for the U.S. Pentagon in 1982 cautioned the American government about the fragility of the power grid system in North America.

Downtown Toronto shortly after the power went out on August 14, 2003.

The blackout affected Ontario and a handful of northeastern states, including New York.

The institute is an energy think tank. Browning runs the green development section.

"Everyone is pulling power and there's lots of big stations on the grid. All you need is one tenuous problem and it cascades throughout," Browning told CBC News Online.

Other experts agree.

"It's pretty close to peak demand," Gerry Angiovine of Navigant Consulting in Calgary, told CBC News Online.

"If suddenly you get one or two of the big suppliers going down…you may have a situation where you've got more being drawn than the system can supply…" he said.

Browning says a few years ago the same thing happened on the West Coast. Six states lost power all because a squirrel got burned on one of the transformers at a crucial time.

"Can you imagine? The entire power system breaks down because of a small rodent?" He says the solution would be to have something called "distributed generation" - a grid system supported by smaller producers, almost on a building by building scale. Browning says other energy sources such as fuel cells and micro-turbines should be used to shoulder the burden of energy distribution.
"At one time, the grid system seemed logical. If you have to do maintenance on one plant, then the grid connects everyone so the power keeps up. But that is also a fragility in the system."

Browning says he and other energy experts are not surprised by the 2003 blackout. He says it is bound to happen from time to time.

"The system, as we have designed it, is brittle. The only way we can make it resilient is to have a mixture so that if portion of it goes down we can have islands of power still operating."

Browning says it often takes a major event to make authorities realize something needs to be done.

During the August 2003 blackout, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said nine nuclear power plants in four states were knocked out.

Power transmission across the continent is controlled from a number of control centers where the flow of is monitored minute by minute. There are three major centers, including the Eastern Power Grid, the Western Power Grid and the Electric Reliability Council based in Texas.

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