By Teresa Hansen,
Editor-in-Chief, Electric Light & Power and POWERGRID International magazines
The past few months have been unkind to the electric utility industry. Disruptive weather events, especially Hurricane Sandy, and a blackout during the Super Bowl, have caused politicians, regulators, media and customers to questions U.S. utilities' ability to provide reliable service.
It's unfortunate that news about the 34-minute outage that occurred shortly after the second half began could become bigger than news about the Ravens' victory over the 49ers. One of the many headlines I saw after the story broke read, "Blackouts are on the rise across the United States."
The article didn't include statistics or sources to back up this headline, but at this point the facts are less important than the perception: That electric utilities are failing at their job of providing uninterrupted, reliable electricity. When more than 108 million people are watching a live event on television and the lights go out, headlines and stories such as this one should be expected.
Editor's Note: Since the time of this writing, Entergy New Orleans has traced the cause of the Super Bowl outages to an electrical relay device.
The outage's cause hasn't been determined. Entergy New Orleans, which provides power to the Superdome, is working with its management to determine what happened. Nondisclosure of their findings hasn't, however, kept the media from reporting on likely causes. A report from CBS Interactive Inc. (CBS online news source) said Philip Allison, a communications specialist at Entergy, said power had been flowing into the stadium before the lights failed and all the distribution and transmission feeds into the Superdome were operating "as expected." According to the CBS report, Allison said the outage appeared to have been caused by the failure of equipment maintained by stadium staff.
An Associated Press report said Superdome officials "warned just months before the Super Bowl that the venue's electrical system could suffer a power outage and rushed to replace some of the equipment ahead of the big game." It doesn't say who these officials warned, but who cares? Once again, perception trumps fact.
Even if Entergy and Superdome management discover the cause was simple and could be easily fixed to avoid similar events at the venue, most people won't care; the public relations damage has been done. The outage is at best a black eye for Entergy New Orleans, as well as reinforcement to a conclusion made by many Americans: U.S. electric utilities are unreliable.
Utilities in the Northeast have been criticized heavily since Hurricane Sandy caused major damage to grid infrastructure in New Jersey and New York. The hurricane knocked out power to almost all of Long Island Power Authority's 1.1. million customers and some were without power for more than three weeks. Mainstream media, government officials and customers relentlessly criticized the utilities, especially LIPA, as well as their management. The criticism led to the resignation of Michael Hervey, LIPA's chief operating officer, the formation of a commission to investigate LIPA's slow response and aged infrastructure, as well as a recommendation by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to replace the non-profit municipal utility with a privately owned power company. Never mind that the storm's winds and surge were much worse than experts predicted or imagined, the consensus is that electric utilities should have been better prepared and customers deserve better.
Maybe one good thing that has come from these recent disruptive events is that people from outside the industry are beginning to recognize that the current electricity deliver infrastructure needs attention and investment. Admitting that a problem exists is the first step to solving it. The next step, which is resolution, will be much more difficult.
Upgrading the current infrastructure won't be cheap or easy. It will require cooperation between utilities, utility shareholders, regulators, politicians, technology providers and customers. All of these parties want electricity at a reasonable cost, however their definition of reliable and reasonable can be vastly different. At least the first steps of a long infrastructure rehabilitation and modernization process have been taken.
Showing posts with label hurricanes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hurricanes. Show all posts
Friday, February 8, 2013
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
How smart grid helped New York weather Sandy
The sight of the island of Manhattan and its world-famous skyline going almost completely dark is a memory from 2012 that few will forget, but New York City did not lose power completely. Thanks to smart grid technology installed before Hurricane Sandy (2012's so-called "Frankenstorm"), there were buildings that did not darken the night the storm made landfall.
General Electric was in touch with at least a dozen utilities in Sandy's path and provided essential support before the hurricane came aground, said John McDonald, director of technical strategy and policy development with GE Digital Energy.
Because of the deployment of smart grid technology on site, GE's home base in New York City, the famous Rockefeller Center never lost power.
To keep the lights on at 30 Rock, power operators used technology similar to that used to channel continuous, uninterrupted power to data centers.
"It's similar to the technology that Google supplies to its very large data centers. It's a business called critical power. We look at the needs of the building. At 30 Rock we had an uninterruptable power supply and a series of batteries," McDonald said. "In a storm situation, the volts can bound around a lot in terms of power quality. But with this system, no mater what the volatility is, it is able to provide a steady stream of consistent voltage."
If power is interrupted completely, the batteries can kick in for the short term. If the battery energy storage system runs low on charge, then an on-site power generation system powered by diesel engines kicks in.
Using these systems, the building complex was able to compensate for dips in the grid with power from batteries and stayed lit until after gale-force winds calmed down. Thanks to the advent of this technology, 30 Rock stayed lit for the duration of the storm, he said.
Of course, a storm of Sandy's rarely-seen scale and power affected more than just New York City. During the storm's impact, GE was in touch with multiple utilities whose service areas were in the path of the storm.
Once the storm swept through, those in charge of the restoration had an easier time estimating the damage in areas that had deployed smart meters.
"Utilities like PPL had made recent investments in some key technologies. They had smart meters with two-way communications," he said.
The biggest advantage offered by smart meters in storm scenarios is that in the nanoseconds before a customer loses power, the smart meter contains a capacitor that stores enough energy for a "last gasp" communication to the grid operator telling them that power has just been cut off.
"That's key, because then the utility knows the exact time, the exact customer and how the customer is connected to the grid," he said. "Without that information, the utility would have to wait for the customer to call in, which could take many minutes, if they call at all."
GE also worked to increase production of new transformers that the company realized would be needed as part of the grid repair effort.
A geographical information system (GIS) that lists out all the assets owned by a utility (as well as their locations) also sped the power restoration process for utilities with large workforces to mobilize, he said.
"This GIS system is really the reference map for our outage management system. Its input, for many utilities, is from phone calls. The other source of input we have today is interfacing with the distribution management system," he said.
The distribution management system has an application called fault detection isolation restoration (FDIR). Once it isolates the disturbance, it enables all "healthy" parts of the grid to keep using power, he said.
Again, two-way communication is crucial for utilities dealing with a storm-battered grid and potentially angry or frightened customers. Functioning in such an environment was made easier after Sandy by the proliferation of Facebook and Twitter.
"Something we've been working on is bringing in social media. We can gather information from our customers from social media, particularly tweets," he said.
My thanks to John McDonald for his contributions to this post. McDonald provides strategic leadership and develops long-term plans to operate GE Digital Energy's position. He received his BSEE and MSEE (power engineering) degrees from Purdue University and an MBA in finance from the University of California at Berkeley. He is past president of IEEE PES and co-author of "Automating a Distribution Cooperative, From A to Z," published by the National Rural Electric Cooperative.
General Electric was in touch with at least a dozen utilities in Sandy's path and provided essential support before the hurricane came aground, said John McDonald, director of technical strategy and policy development with GE Digital Energy.
Because of the deployment of smart grid technology on site, GE's home base in New York City, the famous Rockefeller Center never lost power.
To keep the lights on at 30 Rock, power operators used technology similar to that used to channel continuous, uninterrupted power to data centers.
"It's similar to the technology that Google supplies to its very large data centers. It's a business called critical power. We look at the needs of the building. At 30 Rock we had an uninterruptable power supply and a series of batteries," McDonald said. "In a storm situation, the volts can bound around a lot in terms of power quality. But with this system, no mater what the volatility is, it is able to provide a steady stream of consistent voltage."
If power is interrupted completely, the batteries can kick in for the short term. If the battery energy storage system runs low on charge, then an on-site power generation system powered by diesel engines kicks in.
Using these systems, the building complex was able to compensate for dips in the grid with power from batteries and stayed lit until after gale-force winds calmed down. Thanks to the advent of this technology, 30 Rock stayed lit for the duration of the storm, he said.
Of course, a storm of Sandy's rarely-seen scale and power affected more than just New York City. During the storm's impact, GE was in touch with multiple utilities whose service areas were in the path of the storm.
Once the storm swept through, those in charge of the restoration had an easier time estimating the damage in areas that had deployed smart meters.
"Utilities like PPL had made recent investments in some key technologies. They had smart meters with two-way communications," he said.
The biggest advantage offered by smart meters in storm scenarios is that in the nanoseconds before a customer loses power, the smart meter contains a capacitor that stores enough energy for a "last gasp" communication to the grid operator telling them that power has just been cut off.
"That's key, because then the utility knows the exact time, the exact customer and how the customer is connected to the grid," he said. "Without that information, the utility would have to wait for the customer to call in, which could take many minutes, if they call at all."
GE also worked to increase production of new transformers that the company realized would be needed as part of the grid repair effort.
A geographical information system (GIS) that lists out all the assets owned by a utility (as well as their locations) also sped the power restoration process for utilities with large workforces to mobilize, he said.
"This GIS system is really the reference map for our outage management system. Its input, for many utilities, is from phone calls. The other source of input we have today is interfacing with the distribution management system," he said.
The distribution management system has an application called fault detection isolation restoration (FDIR). Once it isolates the disturbance, it enables all "healthy" parts of the grid to keep using power, he said.
Again, two-way communication is crucial for utilities dealing with a storm-battered grid and potentially angry or frightened customers. Functioning in such an environment was made easier after Sandy by the proliferation of Facebook and Twitter.
"Something we've been working on is bringing in social media. We can gather information from our customers from social media, particularly tweets," he said.
My thanks to John McDonald for his contributions to this post. McDonald provides strategic leadership and develops long-term plans to operate GE Digital Energy's position. He received his BSEE and MSEE (power engineering) degrees from Purdue University and an MBA in finance from the University of California at Berkeley. He is past president of IEEE PES and co-author of "Automating a Distribution Cooperative, From A to Z," published by the National Rural Electric Cooperative.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Sandy was everything they said she would be
This morning while watching news footage of Hurricane Sandy's aftermath, for some reason I thought of "Jurassic Park."
On CNN, I could see just about every prediction meteorologists made the day before come true, one by one. It made me think of the chaos theory-obsessed mathematician Ian Malcolm who predicted Jurassic Park's dinosaurs would be impossible to contain.
Later on, with a full-grown tyrannosaurus broken loose and stomping around, Malcolm says regretfully, "Boy, do I hate being right all the time."
The day the storm made landfall, I called into a webinar hosted by Earth Networks, a weather forecasting firm that makes the WeatherBug iPhone app that I use myself just about every morning.
The company's meteorologist, Mark Hoekzema, predicted storm surges around Long Island, flooding in New York, heavy rains in Maryland and Virginia, wind gusts throughout New England and blizzards in Appalachia.
If you want to see how accurate those predictions turned out to be, I recommend reading the story I wrote yesterday and comparing them with today's headlines.
All we have to go on in times of severe weather are the predictions of scientists and the mass media's transcription of those predictions. Sometimes predictions fall short of coming true — call it chaos theory. Sometimes this leads to people getting a little blase about how severe the storm could be — even if they live in or near its predicted path.
Sometimes the media over-hypes what the scientists are trying to say. Many people felt the warnings about Hurricane Irene in 2011 were exaggerated, even though the storm was the fifth costliest storm in U.S. history.
One group who can never assume that the worst won't happen, however, is electric utilities. It's a scary thing to lose power in the middle of a disaster — especially with frightening news stories coming in and people tweeting some pretty awful pictures of storm damage. And if utilities aren't completely on point with their recovery efforts — or even if the public merely doesn't think the lights are coming back on fast enough — they have to face an angry public.
This particular storm was everything they said it would be. Some 7.5 million people were left without electricity, multiple billions will have to be spent on repairs, thousands are likely homeless, hundreds of thousands are cut off from transportation and almost 40 Americans are now dead. And that's just what we know about now. There will certainly be stories in the coming days and weeks of other kinds of damage. Whether you're in a utility, working for the media or just some a bystander hunkering down and hoping for the best, pays to be careful.
NOTE: The Red Cross is seeking donations, preferably money, blood or volunteer time. Click here for more information.
On CNN, I could see just about every prediction meteorologists made the day before come true, one by one. It made me think of the chaos theory-obsessed mathematician Ian Malcolm who predicted Jurassic Park's dinosaurs would be impossible to contain.
Later on, with a full-grown tyrannosaurus broken loose and stomping around, Malcolm says regretfully, "Boy, do I hate being right all the time."
The day the storm made landfall, I called into a webinar hosted by Earth Networks, a weather forecasting firm that makes the WeatherBug iPhone app that I use myself just about every morning.
The company's meteorologist, Mark Hoekzema, predicted storm surges around Long Island, flooding in New York, heavy rains in Maryland and Virginia, wind gusts throughout New England and blizzards in Appalachia.
If you want to see how accurate those predictions turned out to be, I recommend reading the story I wrote yesterday and comparing them with today's headlines.
All we have to go on in times of severe weather are the predictions of scientists and the mass media's transcription of those predictions. Sometimes predictions fall short of coming true — call it chaos theory. Sometimes this leads to people getting a little blase about how severe the storm could be — even if they live in or near its predicted path.
Sometimes the media over-hypes what the scientists are trying to say. Many people felt the warnings about Hurricane Irene in 2011 were exaggerated, even though the storm was the fifth costliest storm in U.S. history.
One group who can never assume that the worst won't happen, however, is electric utilities. It's a scary thing to lose power in the middle of a disaster — especially with frightening news stories coming in and people tweeting some pretty awful pictures of storm damage. And if utilities aren't completely on point with their recovery efforts — or even if the public merely doesn't think the lights are coming back on fast enough — they have to face an angry public.
This particular storm was everything they said it would be. Some 7.5 million people were left without electricity, multiple billions will have to be spent on repairs, thousands are likely homeless, hundreds of thousands are cut off from transportation and almost 40 Americans are now dead. And that's just what we know about now. There will certainly be stories in the coming days and weeks of other kinds of damage. Whether you're in a utility, working for the media or just some a bystander hunkering down and hoping for the best, pays to be careful.
NOTE: The Red Cross is seeking donations, preferably money, blood or volunteer time. Click here for more information.
Friday, October 26, 2012
'Frankenstorm' threatens East Coast
When did storms start getting such creative names? The East Coast's blizzard of 2010 was dubbed "Snowmageddon." Runners-up for that storm's name were "Snowzilla" or even "SnOMG."
This most recent storm at least tells you what makes it so dangerous. According to the experts, the "Frankenstorm" could be a hybrid weather monster resulting from the collision of Hurricane Sandy sweeping in from east to west, and a wintry storm coming from west to east. Worse, a cold front is coming down from Canada.
At the time that I write this, they're not exactly certain where these storms could collide, if indeed they do, but forecasters are predicting the worst storm in 100 years for the American Northeast.
At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, forecasters are saying there may be no precedent for the kind of storm activity their models are suggesting.
NASA even has a video uplink showing what the storm looks like from space. Pretty scary.
Sandy has weakened somewhat since moving away from the Bahamas, and is now a Category 1 hurricane. It is predicted to run parallel to the coastline, near the outer banks of North Carolina. It could run aground anywhere between the Maryland-Delaware-Virginia peninsula to Southern New England. As with any hurricane track, however, this prediction could change.
I'm sure there will be plenty of people snarking at the media for overhyping Frankenstorm if it turns out to be milder than predicted, but with damage predictions ranging from at least $1 billion to as much as $5 billion, utilities will be glad not to have to clean up such a mess.
Like utilities do, however, companies large and small are preparing. The usual press releases about staying away from downed power lines are going out, severe weather centers are activating, call centers are bringing in their staffs and mutual assistance crews are organizing.
Pepco has held back some 400 contractors in their service area to address storm damage. Exelon's Baltimore Gas & Electric has warned its customers of power outages and flooding. Duke Energy is monitoring the storm and activating the initial phases of its storm plan. FirstEnergy utilities (which include Penelec, Potomac Edison, Jersey Central Power & Light, West Penn Power and Potomac Edison are mobilizing internal crews and support personnel to assist with the restoration effort.
This most recent storm at least tells you what makes it so dangerous. According to the experts, the "Frankenstorm" could be a hybrid weather monster resulting from the collision of Hurricane Sandy sweeping in from east to west, and a wintry storm coming from west to east. Worse, a cold front is coming down from Canada.
At the time that I write this, they're not exactly certain where these storms could collide, if indeed they do, but forecasters are predicting the worst storm in 100 years for the American Northeast.
At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, forecasters are saying there may be no precedent for the kind of storm activity their models are suggesting.
NASA even has a video uplink showing what the storm looks like from space. Pretty scary.
Sandy has weakened somewhat since moving away from the Bahamas, and is now a Category 1 hurricane. It is predicted to run parallel to the coastline, near the outer banks of North Carolina. It could run aground anywhere between the Maryland-Delaware-Virginia peninsula to Southern New England. As with any hurricane track, however, this prediction could change.
I'm sure there will be plenty of people snarking at the media for overhyping Frankenstorm if it turns out to be milder than predicted, but with damage predictions ranging from at least $1 billion to as much as $5 billion, utilities will be glad not to have to clean up such a mess.
Like utilities do, however, companies large and small are preparing. The usual press releases about staying away from downed power lines are going out, severe weather centers are activating, call centers are bringing in their staffs and mutual assistance crews are organizing.
Pepco has held back some 400 contractors in their service area to address storm damage. Exelon's Baltimore Gas & Electric has warned its customers of power outages and flooding. Duke Energy is monitoring the storm and activating the initial phases of its storm plan. FirstEnergy utilities (which include Penelec, Potomac Edison, Jersey Central Power & Light, West Penn Power and Potomac Edison are mobilizing internal crews and support personnel to assist with the restoration effort.
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Utilities helping utilities
Following Hurricane Isaac life is getting back to normal for most residents all along the Gulf Coast. As with other major storm recovery efforts of years past, power utilities are looking out for each other through mutual assistance practices.
Isaac, which came aground in the U.S. as a Category 2 hurricane, arrived in time for the 7-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the worst hurricane in American history in terms of dollars spent on damage recovery.
Some of these crew members worked 16-hour days to help families without power. To do that, they had to take open-ended commitments of their time and leave their hometowns for days or weeks at a time.
Eric Silagy, president of Florida Power & Light company told NBC's Today Show that these storm recovery crews are like an army on the move. Looking at some of the video, it's easy to see the truth in that comparison.
WLOX.com - The News for South Mississippi
Cleco Corp. managed a 2,400-member storm team to restore power to 95,000 customers. The utility secured workers from Oklahoma, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Kentucky, Texas, Tennessee, Arkansas, Georgia, Virginia and Maryland.
Alabama Power sent crews into Mississippi to help with recover efforts there. See video of that deployment here.
AEP's Southwestern Electric Power Co. served in Shreveport, Louisiana, booking hotel rooms for crews to sleep in, organized fleet vehicle fuel stops and planned out other logistics. The utility received help from AEP operating companies from Ohio, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky and Virginia, as well as outside contractors.
Dominion Virginia Power sent 130 workers and contractors, plus bucket trucks. Dominion workers were returning a favor in a way, as crews from Louisiana came to Dominion's Virginia service area to assist with the June 2012 derecho.
Oklahoma Gas & Electric sent 71 employees to southern Louisiana. OG&E, a member of the Southeast Electric Exchange, served in the same area following Hurricane Gustav.
TECO Energy and Progress Energy Florida sent teams from Florida to help storm victims — about 290 workers total. Progress Energy's parent company, Duke Energy, sent 1,000 contractors total to help restore power.
These are just a few examples and this blog post is not meant to be comprehensive. Utilities maintain extensive networks of work crews, and some are participants of multiple assistance programs.
Mutual assistance is pretty cool to watch at work. When there's a big job to do, it's hard to imagine storm recovery going as smoothly any other way. It's especially cool when you hear about a utility returning the favor by assisting crews that once helped them.
Isaac, which came aground in the U.S. as a Category 2 hurricane, arrived in time for the 7-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the worst hurricane in American history in terms of dollars spent on damage recovery.
Some of these crew members worked 16-hour days to help families without power. To do that, they had to take open-ended commitments of their time and leave their hometowns for days or weeks at a time.
Eric Silagy, president of Florida Power & Light company told NBC's Today Show that these storm recovery crews are like an army on the move. Looking at some of the video, it's easy to see the truth in that comparison.
WLOX.com - The News for South Mississippi
Cleco Corp. managed a 2,400-member storm team to restore power to 95,000 customers. The utility secured workers from Oklahoma, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Kentucky, Texas, Tennessee, Arkansas, Georgia, Virginia and Maryland.
Alabama Power sent crews into Mississippi to help with recover efforts there. See video of that deployment here.
AEP's Southwestern Electric Power Co. served in Shreveport, Louisiana, booking hotel rooms for crews to sleep in, organized fleet vehicle fuel stops and planned out other logistics. The utility received help from AEP operating companies from Ohio, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky and Virginia, as well as outside contractors.
Dominion Virginia Power sent 130 workers and contractors, plus bucket trucks. Dominion workers were returning a favor in a way, as crews from Louisiana came to Dominion's Virginia service area to assist with the June 2012 derecho.
Oklahoma Gas & Electric sent 71 employees to southern Louisiana. OG&E, a member of the Southeast Electric Exchange, served in the same area following Hurricane Gustav.
TECO Energy and Progress Energy Florida sent teams from Florida to help storm victims — about 290 workers total. Progress Energy's parent company, Duke Energy, sent 1,000 contractors total to help restore power.
These are just a few examples and this blog post is not meant to be comprehensive. Utilities maintain extensive networks of work crews, and some are participants of multiple assistance programs.
Mutual assistance is pretty cool to watch at work. When there's a big job to do, it's hard to imagine storm recovery going as smoothly any other way. It's especially cool when you hear about a utility returning the favor by assisting crews that once helped them.
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