National Blueprint

East Coast Heat Wave Tests Grid Resilience
| 07.08.2010 | 08:26:54 | Views: 9320 | ID:

July 2010: As NPR has reported, a high-pressure system which settled over the East Coast over the week has brought triple-digit temperatures to the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states testing the region's electrical grid resiliency. The heat wave has prompted local government officials to take responsive measures to help keep power and water usage down while making sure sensitive groups like the very young and very old, stay cool.

CBS News reported, "power outages affected some areas of Northern New Jersey with about 17,000 people left without air conditioning or lights for a period of time," on Monday. "On Tuesday, for many New Yorkers," CBS continued, "the power system stress rekindled fears of what happened in 2003, when a massive failure left 45 million people in eight states without power."

National Geographic wrote that a single falling tree, which sparked the massive blackout on August 14, 2003, was a small event which pushed an already-stressed-out-grid over capacity. "In the case of the grid," NG wrote, "small events not under the control of the operators can quickly knock down the whole system."

"The day was hot; the air conditioners were humming," NG continued. "Shortly after 1 p.m. EDT, grid operators at First Energy, the regional utility, called power plants to plead for more volts. At 1:36 p.m. on the shore of Lake Erie, a power station whose operator had just promised 'to push it to my max' responded by crashing. Electricity surged into northern Ohio from elsewhere to take up the slack."

"At 3:05 a 345-kilovolt transmission line near the town of Walton Hills picked that moment to short out on a tree that hadn't been trimmed. That failure diverted electricity to other lines, overloading and overheating them. One by one, like firecrackers, those lines sagged, touched trees, and short-circuted."

Not lost on the grid's antiquated design and infrastructure, the Department of Homeland Security and the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security hosted a Workshop focusing on the power grid's resiliency and future design. Built and installed in the 1940s, the grid's role in America's infrastructure has fundamentally changed "With the advent of ubiquitous computing and the Internet, and soon the rise of electric-powered automobiles," the workshop's overview read. "The interconnected grid is losing its resiliency and as a result is highly vulnerable to small fluctuations that cascade into large system-wide failures."

The workshop's topics included smart-grid technologies like sensors, computer control and superconductor corridors, as well as distributed generation, cyber security, and social/economic issues. Richard Reed, Special Assistant to President Obama on Resilience Policy gave the Keynote address.

DHS' Science and Technology Directorate hosted a National Power Grid Simulator Workshop in 2008 and here is the Report.

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