Blackout 101 Forum Educates Hill Staff

By Bill Williams

The IEEE Power Engineering Society (PES) and the IEEE-USA Energy Policy Committee sponsored a “Blackout 101” forum on Capitol Hill on 9 February to educate members of Congress and their staffs about North America’s electric power system. The forum featured several industry and academia experts, who explained how the power system works and what can go wrong. It also focused on a key problem facing the electric industry today: how to prevent or mitigate large-scale power blackouts like the 2003 blackout that left more than 50 million people in the Northeast and Midwest United States and parts of Canada without power last August.

Dr. Thomas R. Schneider, a former IEEE-USA Congressional Fellow and a PES member since 1973, said the IEEE could make significant contributions to energy policy debates by communicating its expertise to Congress. “Electrical engineers have not been as effective as some (of those in) other professions in articulating their positions in terms understandable by Congress,” Schneider said. “The IEEE and the Power Engineering Society need to redouble efforts in this area, not only to help Congress understand blackouts, but also to help legislators make the decisions that will shape the future of electric power over the next decade. The consequences of not making the necessary effort will be continued marginalization of electric power engineers in congressional debates and a further decline in the reliability of our electric power infrastructure.”

Although few legislators in Washington have a technical background — and none have power engineering expertise — congressional decisions can have a tremendous impact on the operation of the nation’s electric power industry. For example, in 1935, Congress passed the Public Utility Holding Company Act to address abuses by requiring federal control and regulation of interstate public utility holding companies. This move has altered the structure of America’s electric utility industry from then to now. In addition, the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 made millions of dollars' worth of loans available to organizations willing to provide electric power to sparsely populated rural areas. Today, more than 900 rural electric cooperatives serve millions of Americans in 46 states.

The panel, speaking to a largely non-technical audience, began with the basics: voltage, current and power; how the electric grid is interconnected; and the control mechanisms in use today. Then, they discussed various ways the system can fail, offering explanations of faults and shorts, loss of generation and transmission capability, and the mechanism for cascading failures. They capped the seminar with a thorough discussion of what blackouts are, how they occur, and what can and cannot be done to prevent or mitigate them.

“The Power Engineering Society took on a very difficult task by sponsoring this session on the basics of electric power blackouts,” Schneider said. “My own experience in Congress this past year has convinced me that the IEEE can make a significant contribution to the political debates on energy policy only if the power community makes a continuous effort to communicate to Congress. Yet the task is daunting, because the power community has not devoted the time necessary to provide the simplified language needed to describe the complexity of power systems and how they work accurately.”

The PES presenters included John D. McDonald, P.E., manager of Automation, Reliability and Asset Management for KEMA Inc.; Dr. B. Don Russell, regents professor of electric power engineering at Texas A&M University; Peter Sauer, P.E., site director at Power Systems Engineering Research Center; and Bruce F. Wollenberg, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Minnesota.

“We were pleased with the interest and quality of the questions, as well as the interaction from the participants,” Russell said. “The level of concern over the future possibility of blackouts is evident, and the participants want to be a part of creating long-term solutions.”

 

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Bill Williams is IEEE-USA’S legislative representative for Technology Policy Activities.