The Lost Decade

I am truly fascinated by the San Diego power outage of last week -- fascinated, because it is my little belief that the root cause will not be addressed, will never be addressed, because to do so would ignite a political shitstorm that cannot be allowed to occur.

I am led to speculate here, as is everyone not involved in the outage, because the details of such an outage can never be released in today's electric environment. Too many lawyers and litigators are involved these days to allow for the release of detailed information that might help prevent another blackout. Data is now no longer made available for public engineering consumption (it's sensitive and confidential these days), so we will have to take the forthcoming watered-down FERC and NERC reports as our only source of information on such events -- reports that are not technically but politically developed. To prevent embarrassment to certain individuals or parties or organizations. To be careful about assigning blame. That sorta thing.

I can speculate, can't I? Here on a blog? I have no more information than anyone else, or so I think. One man's opinion. I can find scads of detailed data on the 1964 Northwest blackout, but I'd bet I will never be able to find one fucking thing about last week's outage, the largest in California history.

I believe that a single contingency occurred, perhaps the loss of the North Gila - Imperial Valley 500kV transmission line, that ultimately caused voltage collapse. I believe that the Southern California Import Nomogram (SCIT) either 1) wasn't followed, or 2) engineering analysis did not correctly evaluate this single contingency as capable of resulting in a voltage collapse under the operating conditions of last Thursday. It is my belief that if either were the case, they will not be made public. Imagine the bad press the ISO would receive if it was revealed that they failed to operate within established limits, or that they failed to correctly establish said limits! Post engineering analysis will be developed that will support pre-determined conclusions about the cause of this event. Oh, yeah, your ratepaying dollars at work!

We operate the electric system, universally I might add, such that all single contingencies and credible double contingencies do not result in voltage collapse, in instability, or result in widespread, uncontrolled outages. This is the work of transmission planning engineers and operations engineers. They develop the limits of operations, etc., such that we can withstand the loss of a single element anywhere, where the result does not cause uncontrolled outages. That is, if studies show that the loss of a single generator, or station, or transformer results in system instability during a hot summer day, we adjust the transmission/generation network at that point to not operate in such a condition.

Today, there are more transmission planning engineers and operations engineers than ever before, thanks to the duplicative nature of the California ISO which employs dozens and dozens and whose member utilities also have to employ dozens and dozens.

I believe that a single contingency caused the additional events, including the loss of San Onofre nuclear generation units. I do not believe that they occurred simultaneously -- that is, I do not believe that this was a multiple contingency condition that caused voltage collapse. It matters not how or why the original transmission line was lost (which according to news reports was some single guy in a substation who inadvertently tripped the 500kV line), only that the system should have been operated in such a manner as to be able to withstand its loss...which in my little opinion, it didn't.

And here comes my lynchpin opinion -- in much the same way credit default swaps and complex financial engineering led to more instability in Wall Street, the introduction of the CAISO and ever more complicated market schemes and mechanisms (including the smart grid) will only lead to more physical blackouts and system instabilities.

The loss of quality CAISO personnel may have been (and most certainly will be in the future) a contributing factor. Engineers who didn't correctly evaluate this single contingency, perhaps, or operators who failed to operate within procedures, perhaps. Just speculation, yes. But having worked at that fucking place for what I call my "lost decade" and knowing the low staff morale the day I left, and seeing my own utility bring in dozens of dozens of former ISO staff (including myself) and seeing other local utilities bring in dozens and dozens of former ISO staff, and the industry hiring generation dispatchers and transmission dispatchers who have never stepped foot into a power plant before becoming a grid operator, and developing market mechanisms for transmission congestion instead of developing personnel with hands-on transmission experience -- these simple things are lacking in today's dispatching practice, and in my little opinion, time will reveal how treating the electric grid like a casino (pull a lever, get a pellet) will ultimately result in more widespread outages.

We saw this in 2000, 2001, with the Enronization of the California electric grid. You can be assured that these same people are still out there, now a decade wiser, still trying to fuck you out of a little more of your ratepaying dollar, by creating complex virtual bidding schemes in forward markets, by endlessly vacuuming up all those loose electric nickels you left floating around thanks to all those NERC and FERC policies. The hiring of legions of lawyers to manage the litigation caused by these market policies is a "soft" cost, too. And if the end result is a grid operated under a patchwork quilt of myriad regulations that leads to widespread outages, well, those "costs" are also "soft," and unaccounted for by marketeers. Not to mention, I'd bet my next paycheck that the CAISO market was "suspended" during this calamitous event! See, even I'm getting into the casino-like spirit of electric marketing, by wagering my last two weeks' output!

I will never be made to believe that more complexity will lead to a safer, more reliable delivery of power. Never. It is an almost unimaginable stretch for me to make the claim here on my blog that complexity was a direct contributor to this particular San Diegan outage, considering I have no more information available to me that you do. But I do have a good sense of things, and I would most certainly welcome a counter viewpoint to argue that "firm transmission rights" and nodal pricing and market designers, and the hiring of thousands of IT personnel (not electrical engineers, mind you) to manage the nationwide smart grid will lead to the most efficient delivery of reliable power.

I close with a quote from the spokeslady from CAISO: "Someone who comes to conclusions quickly doesn’t know what he is talking about." That's me!