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9 April 2004 - New computers, alarm systems and increased staffing are steps taken by the coordinator of the Midwestern power grid to prevent a blackout on the scale of Aug. 14, 2003, a report this week found.
The report analyzes steps taken by the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator, based in Carmel, Ind., since the nation's worst-ever blackout last summer. The Midwest group was taken to task in a report released Monday by the US-Canada task force investigating the outage.
In its own report Wednesday, the North American Electric Reliability Council says the Midwest group has a much better ability to view the transmission system it's responsible for than it did last summer.
The grid operator, which is responsible for reliability of the grid stretching from eastern Wisconsin and Illinois to western Pennsylvania, was found to have been unaware of problems in Ohio, where the blackout started, until just moments before the outage.
It had a poor ability to see the entire transmission grid in its region or to see problems developing in Ohio, and it failed to notify other regions of problems in the Midwest, a joint US-Canada task force said.
The blackout stretched from Michigan to the Northeast and left 50m people without power. The outage heightened attention to problems on the transmission system across the country and in Wisconsin, home of one of the most congested high-voltage lines in the nation.
The Midwest system operator is the same group that has come under fire from Wisconsin utilities, energy customer groups and regulators because of its plans to start a real-time energy pricing market that Wisconsin interests say could penalize the state because of its weak transmission system.
Changes within the Midwest coordinator's Carmel, Ind., control room since Aug. 14 include installation of a new computer system with screens able to visualize all major power lines on the Midwest grid. They also include advanced alarm filtering and an improved energy management system that the audit report said "greatly increased monitoring" of the Midwest group's footprint and other reliability areas.
But the report also recommends that the Midwest group beef up the training of its personnel and monitor its utility members to ensure that local utilities are prepared to take abrupt action to intentionally shut off power in local areas to prevent a problem from cascading to a blackout of the scope of Aug. 14.
The utility industry needs mandatory reliability standards to be passed by Congress, with penalties for utilities that violate standards by allowing more electricity to pass along their lines than their transmission lines can handle, Delgado said.
The US-Canada task force, echoing findings of a task force created after a blackout in the far West in the late 1990s, recommended that reliability standards be made mandatory. The standards are included in an energy bill now stalled in Congress.
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