Power grid, workers passing heat tests

July 8, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

NEW YORK

Well before the brutal peak of this week’s East Coast heat wave, utility managers watched as overwhelmed circuits in New York shut down one by one. Hundreds of homes in Queens went dark.

The city turned to a wholesale power market upstate to buy extra energy, at peak prices, to keep the air conditioners humming. By the end of the day, all but about 25,000 of Consolidated Edison’s 9 million customers still had power.

The balancing act has played out up and down the East Coast during a vicious stretch of hot weather that has presented the electricity grid with one of its toughest tests since a massive blackout in 2003. For the most part, it has held up.

“I can’t sit here and say there’s never going to be another blackout,” said Gerry W. Cauley, president of the North American Electric Reliability Corp. “But we’re much better prepared.”

Utilities and regulators credit reforms and upgrades put in place after the 2003 outage, which left tens of millions of people without power in the Northeast and parts of Canada and caused as much as $10 billion in damage to the U.S. economy.

The corporation, authorized by the government three years ago to regulate the grid, enforces national guidelines for training utility managers, clearing vegetation from lines and using technology to keep blackouts from happening again.

It wields a big stick. Rules considered voluntary before the blackout are now backed by NERC fines that can add up to $1 million per day.

Regional power grids also have started talking to each other more. A U.S.-Canadian task force blamed the 2003 blackout in part on poor coordination between regional agencies that allowed power failures to spread.

The blackout in August 2003 wasn’t triggered by high temperatures or heavy demand. A task force later discovered that it began as overgrown trees damaged transmission lines in Ohio.

Since then, NERC policies have forced utilities to train staff to know how to use equipment and identify power failures. It’s handed down roughly 2,000 penalties for violating safety standards, and once NERC identifies a problem affecting power transmission in one region, it sends out alerts to grid operators in the rest of the country.

Midwestern utilities also benefit from a sort of air-traffic-control system for power, the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator. Since 2003, the operator has started selling energy to utilities to help them anticipate spikes in demand.

New York state has its own independent system operator, and when utilities needed more juice on Tuesday, as the temperature soared above 100 degrees in New York City, it pumped more onto the grid.

The operator, headquartered near Albany, sells spare electricity on its “real time” market to power companies throughout the day as needed.

The system operator for New York doesn’t disclose how much energy gets sold on its wholesale markets. But judging from the jump in prices, — from $33.12 per megawatt hour at 6 a.m. to $1,357 at 2:40 p.m. on Tuesday — it is clear utilities are digging in for a long, hot summer.