Chaos and the Blackout
A NETWIT special report
A year after the blackout of August 2003, the media pundits and the talking heads favoured by the media seem to have settled into a mantra. Intone:
It was preventable. Blame goes to First Energy, a mid-west US utility, and the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator (MISO). We need more transmission. Conservation culture. Omm. Omm Shanti.Take, for example, a recent Op-ed by Dave Goulding, head of Ontario's Independent Market Operator:"Poor vegetation management or tree-trimming practices, inadequate training of operators, limited monitoring capability and non-compliance with industry standards were among the principal causes of the largest blackout in North America's history. All of these are easily addressed." (Financial Post, Aug 14, 2004)Here's something strange. This isn't what the official report by the North American Electricity Reliability Council (NERC) on the blackout says. This report develops an Aristotelian categorization of causes which allows it to avoid actually identifying a "smoking gun". Like Mr. Goulding, it points to killer vegetation that wasn't trimmed by First Energy. It tut-tuts insufficient monitoring. Human error. Yet, as to the actual triggering event, there is silence.Let us decode this for you. What this means is that the technical experts were unable to simulate the blackout from the pre-existing conditions. The computer models that are used to control the various systems are unable to reproduce blackout as "output" given the "input" of the system conditions immediately prior to the blackout. Chapter 2 of the report indicates that 800 simulations were carried out but failed to reproduce the catastrophic "cascade".
But "we don't know" is not an acceptable conclusion for a populace assumed to be wanting reassurance. Hence, "these are easily addressed."
The NERC report talks about the failure of various major transmission circuits. This happens all of the time but does not create a "knock-on" or cascade effect. It talks about poor control of vegetation as a cause of circuit failure. Standards for control of vegetation are like any other engineering standards. They assume certain ceteris paribus conditions. Even the best standards for vegetation control, rigorously followed, will result in some circuit failures if winds are unusually high and/or temperatures unusually hot (the wires expand and blow about).
So what caused the cascade last August? The experts don't know. Why not?
Our answer is unsettling to those who are currently in charge of electrical policy and of electrical systems in North America. There was no determinable cause because the system has become chaotic. (For a similar view by respectable experts, see, for example, this report).
By "chaotic" we mean the concepts of Chaos Theory and Complex Systems theory. Which, in turn, means that large scale interconnected grid systems can no longer be understood by traditional methods that assume that the relationships among the key variables are linear or reducible to linear approximations. This may sound like geek talk. And perhaps it is. But it isn't that hard to follow.
This may seem hard to believe but all of the mathematics on which the modern world is based assumes that relationships are "linear", which means that a graph of the variables would be a straight line. What about curves? Calculus? Well, the way we treat curves is as a lot of very small straight lines joined together. The big problem isn't curvy lines; it's sudden jumps. When the line is going along horizontally then suddenly jumps to 45 degrees; then jumps to heading backwards. We don't know what do with these kinds of relationships. So we assume they don't exist.
The trouble is that evidence is piling up that this is actually the way the world works. The amazing thing is that linear approximations work for a lot of phenomena. Unfortunately, when we hit "complex systems" they don't. Take as Exhibit A a pile of sand. This may not seem terribly complex yet its behaviour reveals hidden complexity. If we plot the height of the pile as we add single grains, what we find is that the addition of one grain suddenly causes the entire pile to pass a stability threshold and collapse to a new configuration, thereby shifting the nice linear plot of height versus number of grains onto a completely different path. Yet we can never predict actually which grain will trigger this event, known as "bifurcation".
This is what happened to the electric grid on August 14, 2003. "Something" happened that caused the entire system to shift catastrophically into another configuration; alas, a configuration of total failure. What that was cannot be known and cannot be predicted. Ergo, it cannot be prevented.
This is what Mr Goulding and his peers do not want you to think.
Why then, did it happen? Here's another analogy.
Think of the Northeastern North American electricity system as a number of large lakes connected by canals. Across the surface of the water are waves, moving at the speed of light and oscillating at 60 cycles per second ("hertz"). The electrical energy is the waves. We know that this is not how electricity is normally depicted but for some phenomena it is more accurate than the familiar analogies to hydraulics, which are reasonable for simple Ohm's Law behaviour. It is important that the waves do not move far from 60 hertz lest they break over the banks. This would correspond to a local blackout. Or, worse still, if a sudden large wave were to sweep over all of the banks at once, like August 14, 2003.
When the system was designed the "canals" - the system interties - served the function of dampening perturbations in any one pool. The flow in the canals was always low. With the wave of restructuring, which began in earnest in 1998, the flows increased, making it far more likely that the canals/interties could perhaps add to rather than alleviate perturbations. This is what we believe has happened and as long as the vision of a megagrid is pursued, we run the very real risk of numerous repeats.
The problem is as simple as this: here we have a system designed for one purpose and being forced-fit to serve another. After the 1965 blackout the various systems got together and organized protocols and built interconnection facilities for the purpose of providing greater reliability by having the capability to lean on each other during times of duress. This worked well until 2003. Incidentally the 1965 blackout did have a determinable causal event, the failure of a single circuit from the Beck No. 2 generator at Niagara Falls. From 1965 to 2003 many trees were not properly trimmed, many monitoring systems were inadequate for a time and many circuits failed. But no blackout.
The seeds of the 2003 blackout were sown by orders issued by the US Federal Energy Regulation Commission (FERC) which had become commandeered by those who believe in free, open "markets" for electricity as if it were grain or fruit. FERC orders 888 and 2000, which require electricity systems to transmit their competitors' transfers of power, ushered in a new era of "open access" to transmission systems and to uses for which they were never designed. Those who pointed this out were shouted down.
The solution is just as simple: wind the systems back and abandon the worse than pointless experiment in turning electricity into a commodity. Whatever threshold was crossed in moving the system as a whole into a chaotic situation can be recrossed to restore stability. This would be greatly aided by a general move to downsizing the regional grids themselves through distributed generation and energy efficiency.
Yet this will not happen. Those in control of the policy and the systems have nailed the flags of their careers to the mast of restructuring and they will bull ahead. Paradoxically, the best news, therefore, would be another blackout soon. The sooner the current crop of policy leaders are revealed as the ideologues they are, the sooner we can move towards a more stable electricity future.
Chaos and the Blackout © Hector LaPaunche, 2004
Posted December 18, 2003
