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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Energy Summit On Outage Yields Little Officials Ponder Growing Demand In West, Failure Of Backup Systems

Los Angeles Times

Chastened energy officials convened here Monday to get to the bottom of the power outage that rippled across the Western United States this weekend, but their initial findings shed little new light on the blackout and yielded only one concrete recommendation: to do a better job of trimming trees around power lines.

The representatives from utility companies, governments and the U.S. Department of Energy remained circumspect about pinpointing a cause behind Saturday’s power failure, which cut off electricity to more than 4 million customers from Canada to Mexico.

A probe of the incident has cited a confluence of snafus, beginning with a group of power lines outside Portland that sagged into some trees and ending with an apparent mechanical failure in an Oregon power plant that triggered a cascade of shutdowns across the Western power grid.

And while all power has been restored, the impact of the shutdown spread to the salmon population in the Northwest, triggering an immediate environmental controversy.

The extreme heat and the automatic shutdown of the Diablo Canyon nuclear facility in California during the blackout prompted energy officials to step up hydroelectric production at a dam in Eastern Oregon to meet power needs at Pacific Gas & Electric while Diablo returns to full capacity. That required a waiver of the Endangered Species Act.

Saturday’s record blackout - the second widespread power failure across the West in six weeks - has prompted a wave of soul-searching in the energy industry, as officials question whether the infrastructure in the fast-growing Western states is keeping up with the demand for electricity and try to determine why backup systems didn’t work better.

Deputy Energy Secretary Charles Curtis called the outage “unacceptable.”

“It seems hard to accept that an outage of this character resulted from lines falling in trees,” Curtis said after the high-level Portland meeting. “This system should have held together.”

Monday’s post-mortem, also attended by representatives of major western utilities and the Western Systems Coordinating Council, an industry consortium that manages the region’s power grid, marked the start of what is expected to be an in-depth look at the outage’s causes - from the systemic to the mundane - and at the likelihood of it happening again.

The blackout underscored the vulnerability of the Western power grid to disruptions as the system becomes increasingly complex. The power industry is being transformed across the nation as it deregulates and opens itself to market forces that can sometimes pit the needs of customers against the need to contain costs.

More narrowly, officials said, it pointed up the need for more conscientious line maintenance: A similar large-scale outage on July 2 was also traced to a tree that came into contact with a power line - that one in Idaho - and numerous smaller outages have been blamed on poor maintenance in recent years.

Indeed, the maintenance issue is a key concern of those who are monitoring the deregulation issue. Tree-trimming costs money, especially in places such as the Pacific Northwest, and utility officials fear that increased competition will be a disincentive to maintain lines.

“If you increase the number of players in the marketplace, there is pressure to invest less,” said Brandy Hardy, chief executive of the Oregon-based Bonneville Power Administration, which operates the section of the power grid to which Saturday’s outage has been traced.

Meanwhile, an ongoing investigation into the cause of Saturday’s outage focused on a confluence of problems, rather than one precipitating event.

Officials said the immediate cause was heavy power demand from California combined with hot temperatures that led power lines to sag onto trees, causing the power lines in four separate locations to short.

Bonneville spokeswoman Darcy Mahar said that ordinarily, those lines would not have hit trees. But a wet spring this year caused such abundant foliage in Oregon that the utility - which is responsible for clearing vegetation from 15,000 high-voltage transmission lines - simply could not keep up with the growth.

Consequently, she said, when a heat wave hit Oregon and the temperatures caused power lines to expand, they came into nearby trees. The contact, known as a “flashover,” caused the lines to automatically shut themselves down, and when that happened, the power had to be rerouted onto other lines, which in turn caused oscillations on the grid, Mahar said.

Meanwhile, for reasons that are not yet clear, officials said a key generating facility at the McNary hydroelectric plant in Eastern Oregon automatically shut down. This pulled another 600 megawatts of electricity out of the grid and caused more instability, prompting the shutdown of the Pacific Intertie, a collection of four power arteries that link California to the Pacific Northwest.

In the past 36 hours, officials said, power companies have cut several thousand trees to clear the areas under power lines.

But while the immediate problems are clear, officials were uncertain why the various backup systems throughout the grid were incapable of preventing the widespread outage - and why the region has suffered two major power failures in as many months.