Top Power Official Says Lessons Learned in Big Outage

Saturday, Sept. 28, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

"It was a wake-up call to the way we operate the system," said Dennis Eyre, executive director of the Western Systems Coordinating Council.

A preliminary report issued this week by the council, which oversees power distribution throughout the West, adds fuel to the call for creation of a single entity to run the complicated electricity transmission grid in the Northwest.

The report faults the Bonneville Power Administration for inadequate trimming of trees beneath power lines and a lack of communication with utilities as the situation worsened.

Another crucial factor was the failure of equipment at McNary Dam on the Columbia River to handle the demand for extra voltage, allowing the situation to cascade out of control. Because of the equipment's failure, 13 generators at McNary stopped producing power, the report said.

From there, the system collapsed like a row of dominos. Fifteen large thermal and nuclear generators in California were knocked off line.

The result was an outage that left 7.5 million customers without power from West Texas to western Canada. Some lost power for a few minutes, others for nearly six hours.

On the heels of a July 2 outage that affected 2.2 million customers in the West, it sent shock waves through an industry trying to reorganize through federally approved deregulation.

The BPA is taking steps to avoid a repeat.

"The BPA has been very cooperative," Eyre said. "I think they've been up front to take responsibility for those things in this scenario that were their responsibility. They are following up on every item that they feel is within their jurisdiction."

BPA spokesman Perry Gruber said the outage shows the need for a single entity to operate the complicated power grid.

"This is a perfect example of something that could have been dealt with much more efficiently if a single operator had been in the Northwest," Gruber said.

The outage should not be used as a reason to eliminate the BPA as the best candidate to become that operator, Gruber said. Currently, the federally owned BPA markets power produced by the big Snake and Columbia river dams and operates most of the Northwest's transmission lines.

A combination of factors left the West ripe for a big outage in early August. For various reasons, including outages caused by lines sagging onto tree limbs, several transmission lines already were out of service.

As temperatures reached record highs across the West, transmission lines expanded by the heat slipped across the upper limbs of a stand of filbert trees near The Dalles in northern Oregon, shorting out a 500-kilovolt line.

The trees had been allowed to grow too high by the new owner of the property, Gruber said, and the agency had not detected the problem.

Normally, the system should be able to handle such an outage. But, the report said, the BPA was counting on McNary Dam to serve as a backup. When McNary's system failed, there was nowhere else to turn for help because The Dalles Dam, downstream from McNary, was mostly off-line to allow water over spillways to help migrating salmon.

The BPA is beefing up its budget for tree trimming from $2.5 million last year to $3 million this year and $7.5 million by 1999. The situation was worse this year, Gruber said, because the heavy spring rains brought faster-than-normal tree growth.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is replacing the faulty equipment at McNary Dam.

The Western power grid is carrying much less electricity as a precaution while the report is studied and recommended changes are carried out.

But, as electricity competition increases across the West, the question of whether consumers can always count on the lights coming on remains a major issue.

"In this brave new world of restructured energy markets, reliability is going to be a significant concern," said Jeff Stier, legislative director for U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore.