The Northeast Blackout of 2003 was a massive widespread power outage that occurred throughout parts of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States and Ontario, Canada on Thursday, August 14, 2003, at approximately 4:15 p.m. EDT (UTC-04). At the time, it was the second most widespread electrical blackout in history, after the 1999 Southern Brazil blackout. The blackout affected an estimated 10 million people in Ontario and 45 million people in eight U.S. states.
Immediate impact
During the first two hours of the event, various officials offered speculative explanations as to its root cause:
- Official reports from the office of Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien stated that lightning had struck a power plant in northern New York, resulting in a cascading failure of the surrounding power grid and wide-area electric power transmission grid. However, power officials in the State of New York responded by stating that the problem did not originate in the United States, that there was no rain storm in the area where the lightning strike was supposed to have taken place, and that the power plant in question remained in operation throughout the blackout.
- Canadian Defence Minister John McCallum blamed an outage at a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, but that state's authorities reported that all the plants were functioning normally. McCallum later stated that his sources had given him incorrect information.
- New York state Governor George Pataki blamed the power outage on Canada, stating "the New York independent systems operator says they are virtually certain it had nothing to do in New York state. And they believe it occurred west of Ontario, cascaded from there into Ontario, Canada, and through the northeast." This was later proven to be false.
- CNN cited unnamed officials as saying that the Niagara-Mohawk power grid, which provides power for large portions of New York and parts of Canada, was overloaded. Between 4:10 and 4:13 p.m. EDT, 21 power stations throughout that grid shut down.
- New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, who formerly headed the Department of Energy, in a live television interview 2 hours into the blackout characterized the United States as "a superpower with a third-world electricity grid." In Europe, this statement was published accompanied with comparisons highlighting the tighter, safer and better interconnected European electricity network (though it would suffer a similar blackout six weeks later).
- In the ensuing days, various critics focused on the role of electricity market deregulation for the inadequate state of the electric power transmission grid, claiming that deregulation laws and electricity market mechanisms have failed to provide market participants with sufficient incentives to construct new transmission lines and maintain system security.
- Later that night, claims surfaced that the blackout may have started in Ohio up to one hour before the network shut down, a claim denied by Ohio's FirstEnergy utility.
- The president of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation said that the problem originated in Ohio.
- As of Saturday morning, investigators believed that the problem began with a sudden shift in the direction of power flow on the northern portion of the Lake Erie Transmission Loop, a system of transmission lines that circles Lake Erie on both U.S. and Canadian soil.
Causes
Background
Electrical power cannot easily be stored over extended periods of time, and is generally consumed less than a second after being produced. The demand load on any power grid must be matched by the supply to it and its ability to transmit that power. Any great overload of a power line, or underload/overload of a generator, can cause hard-to-repair and costly damage, so the power grid is disconnected if a serious imbalance is detected.
As power lines carry more power, they get hotter. This causes them to lengthen and sag between towers, reaching a designated clearance height above the ground. If the lines sag further, a flashover to nearby objects (such as trees) can occur, causing a rapid increase in current. Automatic protective relays detect the high current and quickly act to disconnect the faulted line from service. To maintain the lines' specified operating clearance, it is necessary to periodically prune nearby trees.
Should a fault occur and take a line out of service, the resulting power changes can sometimes cause cascading failures in the areas around them as other parts of the system see the fluctuations. These are normally controlled by relays built into the shutdown processes and by robust power networks with many alternative paths for power to take, which has the effect of reducing the size of the ripples. The borders of the blacked out areas on 14 August were where the blackout areas encountered systems with more spare capacity.
Operators at power system control centers are responsible for ensuring that power supply and loads remain balanced, and for keeping the system within operational parameters such that no single fault can cause the system to fail. After a failure affecting their system, operators are required within thirty minutes to obtain more power from generators or other regions or to shed load (meaning cut power to some areas) until they can be sure that the worst remaining possible failure anywhere in the system will not cause an unplanned system collapse. In an emergency, they are expected to immediately shed load as required to bring the system into balance.
To assist the operators there are computer systems, with backups, which issue alarms when there are faults on the transmission or generation system. Power flow modeling tools let them analyze the current state of their network, predict whether any parts of it may be overloaded, and predict what the worst possible failure left is, so that they can change the distribution of generation or reconfigure the transmission system to prevent a failure should this situation occur. If the computer systems and their backups fail, the operators are required to monitor the grid manually, instead of relying on computer alerts. If they cannot interpret the current state of the power grid in such an event, they are to invoke a contingent operational pattern. If there is a failure, they are also required to notify adjacent areas which may be affected, so those can predict the possible effects on their own systems.
Backing up the local operators are regional coordinating centers which bring together information from adjacent areas and perform further checks on the system, looking for possible failures and alerting operators in different systems to them.
Investigation efforts
A joint federal task force was formed by the governments of Canada and the U.S. to oversee the investigation and report directly to Ottawa and Washington. The task force was led by then-Canadian Natural Resource Minister Herb Dhaliwal and U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham.
In addition to determining the initial cause of the cascading failure, the investigation of the incident also included an examination of the failure of safeguards designed to prevent a repetition of the Northeast Blackout of 1965. Issues of failure to maintain the electrical infrastructure, failure of upgrading to so-called "smart cables," failure of shunting and rerouting mechanisms, AC vs. DC intersystem ties, and substitution of electricity market forces for central planning were expected to arise. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a joint Canada-U.S. council, is responsible for dealing with these issues.
On November 19, 2003, U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said his department would not seek to punish FirstEnergy Corp for its role in the blackout because current U.S. law does not require electric reliability standards. Abraham stated, "The absence of enforceable reliability standards creates a situation in which there are limits in terms of federal level punishment."
Findings
In February 2004, the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force released their final report, placing the main cause of the blackout on FirstEnergy Corporation's failure to trim trees in part of its Ohio service area. The report states that a generating plant in Eastlake, Ohio (a suburb of Cleveland) went offline amid high electrical demand, putting a strain on high-voltage power lines (located in a distant rural setting) which later went out of service when they came in contact with "overgrown trees". The cascading effect that resulted ultimately forced the shutdown of more than 100 power plants.
Computer failure
A software bug known as a race condition existed in General Electric Energy's Unix-based XA/21 energy management system. Once triggered, the bug stalled FirstEnergy's control room alarm system for over an hour. System operators were unaware of the malfunction; the failure deprived them of both audio and visual alerts for important changes in system state. After the alarm system failure, unprocessed events queued up and the primary server failed within 30 minutes. Then all applications (including the stalled alarm system) were automatically transferred to the backup server, which itself failed at 14:54. The server failures slowed the screen refresh rate of the operators' computer consoles from 1–3 seconds to 59 seconds per screen. The lack of alarms
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