http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/news/electricity_blackouts.htm Corporate Watch: News NEWS October 21st 2003
Brittle Power or: Everything you need to know about electricity but don't - yet... Keith Parkins "As America plunged into the dark ages, and millions of Americans went without electricity, the message was clear: the terrorists had struck. Except these terrorists weren't your easy-to-target Allah-lovers, they were the barons of fossil and nuclear power and their government cronies. Their weapon is an ancient electric grid that's, in their own words, fit for 'a third world country'. It's an insanely fragile device that inefficiently sends electricity from polluting, centralised generating plants to buildings that waste massive amounts of energy and generate none. And it will crash, crash and crash until it's replaced." -- SchNEWS The recent cascading power failures along the entire east coast of North America were a graphic illustration of the vulnerability and brittleness of hard energy supply paths. They were not due to a dilapidated grid, though that would not have helped. Nor was the problem new - it had happened before. When part of the system goes down, it puts extra load on other parts of the system. These become overloaded, putting further overload on the remainder of the system, and thus the problem cascades until it takes out the entire network. Once the system is down, it is not an easy matter to bring it back up. Loads and power generators have to be matched, hence the plea to everyone to switch off. There also has to be a matching of frequency and phase over the entire network: every generator in sync with every other generator. Not easy to achieve. Power stations, when down, rely on the grid to spin up their rotors. Many power cables are fluid cooled, and rely on pumps to maintain the pressure. If there's no grid, the whole system fails. No surprise then that it took several days to get the system back up and running, and that it kept collapsing. At the height of the blackout more than 50 million people were left without power in eight US states and eastern Canada, including in major cities like New York, Detroit, Cleveland, Toronto and Ottawa. The US government used to take responsibility for ensuring that each area had enough spare capacity to act as a safeguard in times of difficulty. But, since the deregulation of the industry in the 1980s, the rules have been much less strict. Demand for electricity in the US has been growing steadily, alongside increased use of air conditioning and computers. But electricity firms have not been investing in building new high voltage distribution lines. US power demand has grown by 30% in the last decade, while transmission capacity has grown by just 15%. The California-based Electric Power Research Institute has calculated that if the US government does want to upgrade the grid, it will cost between $50bn and $100bn. If it is upgraded it will the public who will pay, not the electricity companies. It can't happen here, was the smug reaction in the UK when the east coast of North America was blacked out. Before the month was out, London and a huge swathe of Kent and Sussex were blacked out and 400,000 customers lost power for on average half an hour. In London it was chaos as lifts and trains ground to a halt and traffic lights defaulted to red. The blackout caused rush-hour misery for 250,000 people when it stopped around 1,800 trains and closed 60% of the Tube network. The cause was two near-simultaneous failures on the grid. They did not cause the cascading blackouts we saw in North America, but they should not have happened at all. For a system to be reliable it has to have built in redundancy. In an electric power supply system this means alternative switching and routing and spare generating capacity. In the broader sense, alternative sources of supply, and less reliance on electricity. The UK regulator, Ofgem, has been a failure. Ofgem has concentrated on driving down generator price to the exclusion of all else. A policy that has not resulted in lower consumer prices (rather, increased profits for distribution companies), but has removed all spare generating capacity from the system. London Underground used to have its own generating capacity, last year it closed its last power station. The National Grid has lost 10% of its generating capacity in the last two years. It will only take one sharp cold spell this coming winter to see rolling blackouts across the country, something we last saw in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. But why were we so complacent? Last winter saw power failures across East Anglia, which then took weeks to restore. The weather was nowhere as severe as previous bad winters. The problem was deregulation and corporate greed. This led to a lack of regular maintenance and routine maintenance workers and insufficient engineers and equipment to get the system back up and running. Around 15,000 jobs have been axed from the electricity distribution network over the past five years. Engineers had to be drafted in from across the country and eventually brought over from France. An unstable system needs tough regulation, recognized by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, but lacking in today's neo-liberal environment. Roosevelt ensured energy prices were linked to actual costs, blackouts were penalised and all electricity companies were closely monitored by the federal power commission. Maybe even more importantly, FDR banned political contributions from utilities. Then along came George Bush Snr, and in came deregulation. To show their gratitude, the power companies showered Bush Jnr with money to ensure his election. One of these companies was FirstEnergy. FirstEnergy's President, Anthony Alexander, was a Bush Pioneer in 2000, meaning he raised at least $100,000 for Bush Jnr. He then went on to serve on the Energy Department transition team. Peter Burg, FirstEnergy CEO and chairman of the board, hosted a June 2003 event that raised more than half a million dollars for the Bush-Cheney 2004 election campaign. FirstEnergy is believed to be the cause of the August 2003 North America blackout. FirstEnergy's 550-megawatt, coal-fired Eastlake power plant in Ohio stopped running. In response, FirstEnergy began to pull roughly 20% of its load of electricity out of Michigan to meet its needs. This transfer overloaded several transmission lines, causing them to trip. Non-FirstEnergy plants in Ontario, Canada, began supplying energy to the underpowered Michigan market, which then led to overload on those transmission lines. This movement of power in Canada deprived New York of power it had relied on, which led to the blackouts there. FirstEnergy may have triggered the crisis, but there is no talk of them paying the price. Instead it will be the US taxpayer who will stump up the cash to pay to overhaul the transmission system, even though it will be companies like FirstEnergy who will benefit. Although FirstEnergy are seen as the immediate villains, it is deregulation that is ultimately to blame. The US transmission system was never designed to shift large amounts of electricity across the continent, to satisfy the 'free market'. In the past the utilities were obliged to invest in the infrastructure, now they 'invest' in the purchase of overseas companies. US companies own British companies, French companies own British companies, the National Grid owns the New York system that went down. Money that should be ploughed back into the electricity system is going instead on building global companies. Deregulation has been likened by investigative journalist Greg Palast to a 'committee of bank robbers figuring out how to make safecracking legal'. Under GATS, as the utilities cast their predatory eye on Third World markets, it can only get worse. In Brazil, Houston Industries seized ownership of Rio de Janeiro's electric company. Bush's buddies fired workers, raised prices, cut maintenance. Blackouts occurred so often the locals called it Rio Dark. In 1952, a Blue Ribbon report to Harry Truman predicted that the future of America's energy rested with the sun. It predicted 13 million solar-powered homes by 1975, and the promise of decentralized, off-grid self-sufficiency. Instead, Dwight Eisenhower embarked on the Peaceful Atom. A trillion dollars programme that has left us with crashing grids and dangerous nukes that are vulnerable to terrorism and must shut down precisely when they're most needed, as they did during this latest blackout. Jimmy Carter, frightened by the OPEC severing of Middle East oil, pushed a massive solar energy and energy saving programme, only for it to be immediately abandoned when Reagan took office. In the mid 1990s, there was proposed for California a 600-megawatt network of solar, wind and other renewable generators that would have entirely prevented the fake deregulatory crisis of 2000-1. It was approved by the California Public Utilities Commission, but then killed by Southern California Edison and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Of course, all energy supply systems have costs, if we mean environmental and social costs, not just monetary costs. As a rough rule of thumb, costs are determined by size. The larger the scale the greater the cost, and the larger the mismatch between supply and demand. The classic example would be a nuclear reactor with a core plasma temperature equivalent to the heart of a star, supplying heating via electricity to raise the ambient temperature by a few degrees. But our needs for electricity or, for that matter, energy, are widely distributed - usually low power, and local. It is needed in some applications, eg medical equipment, telecoms, computing, but not in others, eg space heating (if a district heating system went down for a few hours we would probably not notice, and if we did we could put on extra clothing or turn on alternative heating). We should therefore be looking at localising the grid, making areas self-sufficient, so the grid is then only used to correct minor imbalances, not as a major transmission conduit. The University of East Anglia (UEA), is to build two wind turbines, which will generate more than enough power for the whole campus, with the surplus being sold back to the National Grid. A turbine at Cassop Primary School in County Durham has been in operation since 1999 and provides twice the school's electricity, with surplus going back to the Grid. Catchgate School in County Durham powers itself completely with its own turbine. Large scale wind turbine farms are unsightly, noisy and dangerous to birdlife. Why despoil our few remaining wild spaces? The large amounts of capital required makes us dependent on big business. We should tap into natural energy flows, divert a small amount for our needs, and allow the remainder to flow on past. The classic example would be the pre-industrial miller diverting part of a stream. He has little impact on the eco-system. Our energy needs are low power and widely distributed. Natural energy flows are low power and widely distributed. If we need space heating then design our buildings to tap light from the sun, not build a dangerous nuclear reactor and connect it to our house by a fragile grid. Our dependence on a fragile grid is not only the electricity grid. It is the fragile supply lines stretching halfway around the world, vulnerable to natural disasters and terrorist attack. Do we really need the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline stretching from the Caspian through Turkish occupied Kurdistan or the OCP (Oleoducto de Crudos Pesados) pipeline running through Amazonian Ecuador? A criticism of local generation is that it is not 100% reliable, demand is not matched to supply. True, but we then use the grid to make up the difference. A hard, brittle energy system is dependent on, nourished by and embedded in, a hard political system - corrupt, unrepresentative elites, there to do the bidding of big business. A localised, community-based, self -sufficient soft energy system depends on the active support of, and active participation of, the local community. The blackouts in North America and London and the southeast show how vulnerable we are to equipment failure, system overload or terrorist attack. Indeed, in both New York and London the reaction on the street was that it was a terrorist attack. The irony is that we spend billions of dollars on attacking Iraq, impose Draconian security and civil rights clampdowns in the name of homeland security, and yet do nothing about our decrepit power supply systems either in terms of system upgrades, redundancy, regulation or diversity of supply. Environmental campaigner Keith Parkins has a Masters Degree in System Science. A regular contributor to Indymedia, he has written in the past for Corporate Watch and Red Pepper. He is currently working on a manifesto for the new revolution. 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